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Sox Shuffle Continues
Is Vocalo bleeding WBEZ dry? That's how it looks from this week's Hot Type.
Three weeks ago [President and general manager of Chicago Public Radio Torey Malatia] held a staff meeting and announced some bad news: there wasn’t enough money. This meant that WBEZ’s top project, Right Now, a daily afternoon news show with a producer Malatia had hired away from NPR's Talk of the Nation, was being shelved. The Sunday arts program Hello Beautiful was leaving the air. And the firewall was rubble. Some Vocalo funding hadn’t come through and WBEZ would be making up the shortfall....
[Malatia] says they’d expected Vocalo to finish the year $300,000 in the red; it was more like $600,000. And instead of breaking even, WBEZ was $887,000 in the hole. A couple other Chicago Public Radio ventures with separate budgets, its Third Coast International Audio Festival and Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis's rock talk show Sound Opinions, also ran deficits. Even This American Life just broke even after making half a million dollars for Chicago Public Radio the year before. "The good news is that we have net assets that take care of this," says Malatia. "But this year we’ll have to be very careful."
Everytime we've ever listened to Vocalo, we've regretted it. But that's all part of Malatia's master plan! [Reader]
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What the hell is Vocalo?
It's the radio station run by WBEZ with listener generated content.
oh, vocalo. there have been times when i thought i should put some energy into creating some 'listener content' for them. and then i think to myself ... why?
it has a lot of potential. but i think it's being terribly wasted.
So does that mean that all the WBEZ fund drives are going not only to keep BEZ running, but also to stop the hemorrhaging at Vocalo? Seems shady to keep that aspect hidden when asking for money.
Since Vocalo debuted I have heard zero mentions of it ANYWHERE ... until reading this post. If no one knows it exists, how can it possibly take off? I certainly haven't even heard any mentions of it on 'BEZ.
@ Rob Christopher...I don't have a take either way on this, but do you regularly listen to WBEZ?
while the information is on huge billboards across the city, if you listen to WBEZ regularly then you know about Vocalo.
Do you listen to WBEZ regularly, Rob?
Rob, the fact that you haven't heard of it via WBEZ is part of Malatia's plan. He thinks that WBEZ isn't serving a certain audience because of fundamental flaws with public radio, so he's intentionally kept Vocalo separate from WBEZ (except for funding, it turns out). They don't mention it on the air that I know of, it rarely shows up on the WBEZ web site, and they don't use WBEZ content on Vocalo, only back-end resources (they might have used some Third Coast material, IIRC).
But, yeah, it doesn't get written about much. Deanna Isaacs at the Reader's written about it once or twice a year or two ago, and it's shown up in some Indiana newspapers and in radio industry publications.
while the information is on huge billboards across the city, if you listen to WBEZ regularly then you know about Vocalo.
I listen daily, I work in media and I would love to be involved in something like this.
I've only heard about it maybe once or twice before and here. And I still had no idea what it was.
The average listener is going to go "huh?"
WBEZ should focus on expanding local coverage as it's been doing. Considering how much local TV news is devoted to national stories, sports and just plain CRAP, and local radio is a corporate wasteland having a station focused on COVERING CHICAGO would be great.
A large percent of my waking life is spent with WBEZ being piped into my ears and the mention of "Volcalo" had me drawing a blank.
Better use some of that money for promotions Torey.
Just don't take away Sound Opinions, OK.
dopplerd, you're part of the "core." Torey Malatia doesn't want you to know about Vocalo. That has a lot to do with why it's screwed up.
I listen to WBEZ every day and they never talk about it at all. I knew about it because I used to be a pledger (am still angry about Blues Before Sunrise) but I'd forgotten about it completely.
The Reader article gets it right--the station is garbage.
It basically sounds like a high school radio station. Unlike a college station, like WNUR, there is no non-commercial music.
The on-air banter is both unpolished and inane. This may be better than commercial radio's polish and inanity, but its inane nevertheless.
I listen to National Public Radio through satellite radio and WBEZ at home and I've NEVER heard of Vocalo.
In fact, after reading this, I still don't know what it is.
Sorry to be obsessive about my point, but the fact that all the WBEZ listeners here have never heard of Vocalo is part of the plan. Malatia actually explains why in the Reader article. It's not a mistake, or at least not an unintentional one.
yes, it's fine to be all indie and underground, but you still have to have people who know what they're doing. call this one sour grape, but i was one of i'm sure hundreds of people who sent in a demo tape to them when they were looking for people.
i thought i'd be exactly what they were looking for ... never worked in professional radio; however, worked at my college radio station that was designed to send people out to 'real' radio stations. have a decent idea of how to be on the air and do radio. listen to a lot of music, blog, into a lot of new media, etc. i went to some of their "secret radio project" events, etc. i was fired up about all that this could be. it could be you tube meets blogger meets wluw all with the backing of wbez. how effin' great.
i didn't get the job, which wasn't surprising, given that there were a LOT of people trying. that wasn't what chapped me. what did bug me was when i heard the station and heard it sounding like crap. when i heard people saying things to the effect of that it was really hard to keep it together trying to do an on-air shift ... picking music and doing this and that all while being expected to talk now and then. REALLY!? what on earth did you *think* you were getting into?!
i think this concept could be really captivating -- but just because you put a bunch of people with a variety of backgrounds and diverse demographics on the air, doesn't mean it's going to be good. you have to have quality before anything else. THEN, you can go from there. a good radio show doesn't just make itself.
Everytime we've ever listened to Vocalo, we've regretted it.
Exactly. Don't fret if you haven't heard or heard of it. Consider yourself lucky. It's excruciating. So much so that I've questioned what I always thought was a high tolerance/appreciation for experimental radio.
Bring back Odyssey, dammit!
Odyssey? That show was brutally boring. I would be happy to if they made Jerome McDonnell's World View go the way of Odyssey as well. Snoozefest. And Jerome is awful at interviewing people.
Add me to the chorus of faithful "BEZ-ers who never hears any mention of Vocolo over the course of a day.
I remember reading about it when it was first being created, and I recall a mention or two when it was launched, but if you were to ask me "What does it have as far as programming?" "What frequency is it on?" or even "Is it still on the air?" I'd have to give you a big fat "I don't know" in response.
Reading through the comments, apparently, as a regular BEZ listener, I shouldn't know what Vocalo is.
And I should be happy for that.
It sounds like it's public access TV, on the radio. Which is bad.
They need to kill this thing and concentrate on improving TAL, Wait, Wait, and Sound Opinions.
If they're wondering why TAL is losing money, maybe it has to do with all the reruns. Seems like a new episode is a rarity. And Wait, Wait seems to be constantly on doing retrospective shows. Grr.
The market on user created audio content is cornered. It's called a podcast. BEZ makes a few of them, so they should be aware of its existence.
@I h8, The only reason there are TAL reruns is a staff stretched thin by having to split time between their Showtime show and their NPR show. If they had more funds to begin with, they'd be able to up the staff and have less reruns. Not that I mind the reruns, really. It's kinda like having old friends come back to visit.