WAMU is turning its mics toward its listeners.
The 55-year-old public radio station, an affiliate of National Public Radio and based in northwest Washington, began a new stationality initiative last month. Stationality, a portmanteau of station and personality, is a common term in the radio world for the gestalt of a particular station. WAMU recently worked with Atlantic Media Strategies and conducted an internal audit to assess both the station’s current style as well as how it could better meet listener needs.
About half of WAMU’s listeners are under 45, and 46 percent live in Northern Virginia, according to recent station data. The station is funded through an amalgam of sources: 44 percent from members and 37 percent from corporate underwriters, including Northern Virginia Magazine. WAMU received two Edward R. Murrow Awards and a Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize in 2016 and counts 1A, The Big Listen and The Kojo Nnamdi Show among its programs.
We recently spoke with Andi McDaniel, WAMU’s senior director of content and news, to learn more about its new stationality push:
What was the impetus for the stationality program?
We wanted to do an audit of how we’re sounding right now and all of the methods that we’re using, everything our hosts are saying, how we’re talking about the weather, how we’re talking about music, how we’re leading into news reports. We wanted to do an audit of that to get a sense of how it’s evolved on its own and then to just codify that into what we think are really the best practices.
That’s kind of the general idea, but the real philosophy behind it is that we recognize that people have a lot of different options for consuming news, and we want them to listen to our station and recognize that the thing that makes us distinctive is that we can sound like Washington in a particular way that other media can’t. We know that people can listen to the This American Life podcast, so what’s going to make it special when they tune in specifically to WAMU to listen to This American Life? And that’s all the stuff that surrounds the content: It’s our hosts and their presence; it’s the music that weaves it all together. It’s the stuff that we’re doing that reminds people that we’re part of this community and helps them feel a sense of connection to their neighbors.
Tell us more about the Capital Soundtrack program, which you started last summer and recently brought back with this stationality initiative.
Public radio stations generally already have a license to use a wide variety of music for breaks, just as part of our contract with NPR. But we felt that limiting and setting some boundaries around the kind of music that we use gave us a chance to carve out a more specific identity, one that allows us to have a stronger relationship with our audience and in this case to reinforce something that’s really important to us, which is, “Hey, we live here. We’re part of this place, and we care about this place and its artists.”
So by limiting our [choices] to local musicians, we can both use ones that are already in our inventory that we know are local, but also we can open it up to submissions, which has been great. We’ve gotten a great response in terms of people who have submitted tracks for us to use on air. And then we of course list the name of the tracks and the artists on our website for anyone who listens and is dying to know what they were just hearing.
We want local music to be a permanent part of our sound, and we’ve gotten so much positive feedback about the program. It’s a chance to highlight local artists as part of our everyday work. And it also gives us a fresher, more contemporary vibe, which is in line with what we’re really trying to project. So it’s a great fit.
Why do you think your audience has grown a bit younger recently?
We have a number of initiatives that are focused on attracting a younger audience; that’s not their singular goal, but they are initiatives that are appealing to a younger audience. I would even say that about 1A. We did not design that show specifically to appear to younger audiences, but I think it does. And that’s because it’s got a very native approach to digital, the sound on the air is very current. [Joshua Johnson] speaks authoritatively about being on Twitter and making a podcast because he’s done those things. I think there’s a lot that is happening that is subtle like that. It’s also true that younger audiences are overwhelmingly the age group that’s consuming podcasts, and podcasts are inextricably linked to public radio because many of them are radio shows. So I think that’s one great entryway that people are finding into public radio.
Is there a component of the stationality program that’s an effort to engender greater diversity?
Yes there is an effort, absolutely. We’re doing a number of things to diversify our staff, and that’s connected to diversifying our audience. And we’re also working to have greater ethnic and gender and all sorts of other kinds of diversity represented on the air because we recognize that there’s a connection between what people hear on the air and whether people think a station sounds like their station. We’ve been doing a lot to just get a greater variety of sounds on our air.
We’re in the initial stages of launching sonic IDs. Sonic IDs are like tiny audio postcards that sort of showcase a little day in the life or a little moment in the life of someone around the region. And this is a product where we’re capturing audio that’s happening—maybe it’s in a butcher shop, maybe it’s at the U.S. Capitol, maybe it’s a traffic cop—but just kind of a moment that gives you a sound of Washington. And I think the reason to do that is just because they’re fun little pieces of content and they give you a sense of place, but also because it gives us a chance to emphasize sounds and voices not just from northwest Washington, which is where we’re based, but explicitly going out to parts of our listening area that maybe you don’t hear from as much.