It’s the best of times and the worst of times for public media and audio journalism.
On the one hand, the tools of production and distribution have become more affordable, more powerful and easier to use. This explains why there’s a seemingly endless flow of high-quality, narrative-driven podcasts.
At the same time, the industry is contracting with wave after wave of layoffs both in public media and at production companies. And, more recently, funding for public media and the humanities has been under attack from the federal government—not to mention the continued assault on free speech.
Historically, KALW has been both under the radar and under-resourced. We’ve made do with less and found creative ways to fund and produce shows and content that meet our mission to serve, inform and delight the public. We’ve remained ambitious and nimble and been an incubator for shows like 99 Percent Invisible, Radio Ambulante, Ear Hustle and The Stoop among many others, while also training a new generation of audio makers.
But if I’m being honest, I know our impact has been blunted by funding constraints. The content we produce cannot reach as broad an audience as it should due to a tiny marketing budget and limited staff bandwidth. And while we have a list of promising shows that we’d like to develop, it costs a minimum of $200K — and upwards of $500K — to develop and launch a weekly show. And we simply don’t have those funds. But innovation is in KALW’s dna. And over the last few years, we have developed some new approaches to programming that, as it turns out, align with the current state of public media.
In 2023, I became the station’s Director of Audio Programming. My job has been to help figure out what we put on the air, what new initiatives we support, where we direct our limited resources.
In that time, I have helped develop three shows and a new podcast-in-residence program that leverages the almost infinite world of podcasting and archival audio. The results could serve as a model for the industry and for other stations looking to maximize the impact of every dollar spent on programming.
Queer Power Hour
For two decades, Out in the Bay had been produced largely on a volunteer-basis by Eric Jansen. As time went by, this became harder and harder to sustain on a weekly basis. Eric still wanted to produce new shows and interviews, but without a staff the weekly grind became untenable. He was up for producing one new show a month, but that meant airing three shows from an incredible archive that had already been working hard.
KALW believed in the importance of featuring stories about the queer life, even if we didn’t have resources to launch a new show. So we asked, what if we could create a more flexible container for Out in the Bay: an hour long show that could feature stories from that show’s archive alongside queer programming from other podcasts and public radio stations?
I reached out to Eric Marcus at one of my favorite podcasts, Making Gay History, which has millions of downloads. Turns out, full episodes of his show hadn’t been featured on any public radio stations. With very little cajoling, he agreed to give KALW free access to an archive of more than a hundred episodes. Since he and his team didn’t have the bandwidth to package the episodes for public broadcast, we offered to handle all of the necessary editing and we would pair it with episodes of Out in the Bay and shorts from StoryCorps. These new pairings also breathed new life into all of the content. We could now pair up a MGH piece about Ellen DeGeneres with a story about a local comedian from Out in the Bay, or stories about a female impersonator from the 1950s and a drag queen performing now.
Since we launched in January of 2023, the Queer Power Hour has produced more than 100 episodes. We’ve expanded our list of collaborators to include Stereotypes, TransLash Media, Slow Burn, Civic 101, Gender Reveal, LGBTQ+A, Embedded and the GLBT Historical Society. We have brought a curatorial lens to help listeners discover the best of the vast and overwhelming world of queer audio storytelling and to help producers find new audiences for their work.
Bay Made / KALW Podcast in Residence
We thought we were pretty clever back in 2022 when we decided to repackage the San Francisco Chronicle’s daily podcast Fifth & Mission as a show on KALW. But we didn’t anticipate Fifth & Mission being cancelled as the holidays approached in 2023. The newspaper laid off their entire audio department, because they didn’t think audio could be profitable; we then had a weekend to figure out how to fill four half-hour slots each and every week.
The easy solution would have been to just start the BBC feed 30 minutes earlier. But that would mean listeners would experience a hodgepodge of shows with no connection to the Bay Area. We stalled for a couple of weeks and decided we would try to develop a new morning show, knowing that would take months.
In the meantime, we featured local podcasts in the slot. I started reaching out to local producers and past collaborators who unanimously agreed to allow us to feature their work. It was rocky at first trying to feed the insatiable radio beast: once one time slot was programmed, there was another and another waiting to be filled. This, it turned out, also wasn’t sustainable.
But what if we could program one show for an entire week? It would practically cut our work down by 75%. And what if these shows were part of a rotation and we featured each one every few months? I named it Bay Made — because all of the shows were made by local producers and/or about the region — and just started to fill the calendar with producer, engineer and co-conspirator David Kwan.
Soon we realized how perfectly this aligned with our mission to help the Bay Area shape its own narrative, to amplify a range of less frequently heard voices, and to help incubate the next generation of audio talent - so it became our new show to fill the slow. Over the past 18 months, we have collaborated with Muni Diaries, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and J-School, Making Contact, The Nocturnists, California Sun, Storied SF, San Francisco Public Press and curated a month-long Kitchen Sisters Audio Festival. And now, we often pair a week of Bay Made broadcasts with a live event at our community space at 220 Montgomery.
Earlier this year, we also began KALW’s first Podcast in Residence program featuring Not Born Yesterday, a show about the joys and challenges of aging that was originally featured on Bay Made. We have been working with the show's two octogenarian hosts for several months to improve the sound quality, upgrade their website and develop a series of 12 one-hour shows that will be the basis of a syndication plan. We will be airing the episodes Mondays at 7pm on KALW beginning June 16th, but the hope is to bring their voices to public radio listeners across the country.
Song Exploder Remix
KALW had been looking for ways to bridge our more newsy daytime programming with our music-centric evenings. We searched around for existing public radio shows that might fit the bill, but didn’t find anything that felt right.
We thought about Hrishikesh Hirway’s wildly popular behind-the-music podcast Song Exploder. Produced by Radiotopia and distributed by PRX, Song Exploder has been part of the public radio universe for a decade and we assumed there was already a public radio version of the show. There was not because, like most podcasts, the show has not been produced to fit the somewhat rigid public radio clock, which typically includes a one-minute tease, a 3 or 5 minute news slot and two one-minute promo slots. Part of the reason producers like to make podcasts is that episodes don’t have to be a specific length and the format is more flexible in general.
Still, we noticed that while they varied in length, many of the 200+ episodes in the Song Exploder archive were around 25 minutes long. Inspired by the success of the Queer Power Hour, we imagined creating a one-hour container that would be flexible enough to allow for different length episodes and to connect different episodes to a common theme. Sometimes there would be room for a newscast and promos; sometimes there wouldn’t be.
We contacted the producers to discuss the possibility and they liked the idea. And with the success of NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts, the moment seemed ripe. So, we created a prototype for what became Song Exploder Remix; KALW put its own stamp on the show by having it hosted and produced by our very own Tshego Letsoalo, who selects the theme for each episode and pairs it with of a song of her choosing that resonates with the week’s theme. Song Exploder remix now airs on Fridays at 7pm.
The key ingredients.
As other stations consider the way forward, these are the ingredients that have made this model possible for KALW:
- An organization-wide ethos to take risks
- A commitment to locally produced content
- A curatorial lens that rethinks the public radio clock and how shows are constructed
And lastly, we have David Kwan. He is the engineer on all of these shows. He works smart and fast with a keen editorial eye and an ability to see the big picture and sweat the details. Not every station has a David Kwan, but as craft is increasingly replaced by algorithms, we must not lose sight of the importance of the human touch.
The future of public media feels uncertain. Instead of giving into fear and retreating, I say we use it as a chance to innovate and be bold.
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This piece was brought to you by KALW Speaks, a monthly series of essays from KALW staff and contributors, exploring the ideas that drive our work. Each of these essays reflect our commitment to innovation and invites you into a deeper conversation about the future of public media.
Learn more: From A Whisper To A Roar.
