Reality-Based Engineering: WBUR Broke 'The Connection', This Time For Good

Saturday, August 06, 2005

WBUR Broke 'The Connection', This Time For Good

[click the title above for the link]

The link above is to an article from the Boston Phoenix, who interviewed Dick Gordon, host of WBUR's 'The Connection' after his firing and mothballing of the entire show on August 5th. Something sounds a little funny here, but I did tend to agree with the general sentiment that they had too many of the same style of show (Connection, Here And Now, On Point). My vote, of course, would have been to keep The Commection. The management of the station has stated that ratings were an issue, but for the numbers that are available:

Because public radio stations are not commercial enterprises, ratings information tends to be held close to the vest. But Gordon says he has seen recent data measuring a so-called loyalty factor, which he says "measures the attraction of a program and the audience desire to return to the program." Gordon reports that among core listeners, The Connection had a high loyalty rating in the area of 70 and 80 percent, "which is extremely good compared to public radio."
One other clue to The Connection’s ratings — albeit one that is not up to date — is a "performance snapshot" compiled by the station from the spring of 2001 to the spring of 2003. That chart shows the program’s total audience rising from 520,800 in the spring of 2001 to 666,400 in the fall of 2001 (when 9/11 occurred). It dropped to 527,200 in the spring of 2002, rose to 582,400 in the fall of 2002, and then jumped to 643,500 in the spring of 2003. The number of stations carrying The Connection also rose from 47 in the spring of 2001 to the current number of 66.

Of course, there is possibly one big factor in all this:

One theory is that The Connection was elbowed out of the way by On Point, hosted by Tom Ashbrook, and that the station was eager to move On Point out of its 7 pm slot, perhaps because Chris Lydon has recently returned to the airwaves with a show on rival WGBH-FM in that same time period [ Open Source Radio, 7pm].

And this don't help:

According to BU and WBUR officials, the station had racked up a $13 million operating deficit for fiscal years 2001 through 2004.

Personally, this screws Gordon because he's a Canadian citizen who was looking for permanent resident status:

WBUR may wish to keep its own counsel while negotiating the terms of the break-up. But Gordon’s attorney, Elizabeth Rodgers, suggests that her client may be unhappy with the circumstances of his departure, particularly in light of an April 2004 letter to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services signed by then-WBUR general manager Jane Christo.

"By this letter, I wish to offer Mr. Gordon a permanent position at WBUR, National Public Radio, and to support his application for permanent residence as an alien of extraordinary ability in the field of journalism," Christo wrote.

"Dick Gordon relied on a promise of permanent employment and brought his family to Boston and brought the world to the kitchen table of 640,000 listeners," says Rodgers. "And that promise to be permanent host has been broken."

Wrong decision, man. If they're worried about going head-to-head with Lydon on WGBH radio, they're going about it in the wrong way. And sadly, Gordon was not the only one to get the axe: