We Are The Champion…

… Of the Arts!

So says the Arts and Education Council in announcing the 2013 St. Louis Arts Awards.

Presented since 1992, the St. Louis Arts Awards is the preeminent award ceremony honoring individuals who achieve a legacy of artistic excellence, and organizations and businesses that enrich St. Louis’ arts and cultural community.

Joining St. Louis Public Radio as honorees in 2013 are:

• Chuck Berry, Lifetime Achievement in the Arts;
• PNC Bank, Corporate Support of the Arts;
• Judy and Jerry Kent, Excellence in Philanthropy;
• Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Excellence in the Arts;
• Michael Uthoff, Excellence in the Arts; and
• Duane Martin Foster, Art Educator of the Year.

In making the announcement, Cynthia A. Prost, president of the Arts and Education Council, said:

“These honorees represent the breadth of the arts community and the exceptional creative work happening across the St. Louis region. We are honored to recognize their achievements and welcome the community to join us in celebrating their contributions to St. Louis and the world.”

The recognition as Champion of the Arts is a perfect fit for us given our commitment to celebrating the arts and culture in the St. Louis region. Each Friday Cityscape showcases the region’s arts happenings at 11 a.m., with the rebroadcast at 10 p.m., and we’re regularly covering the arts with our regional news efforts.

St. Louis Public Radio also serves as the broadcast home for the St. Louis Symphony’s Saturday night concerts as well as our 24-hour, 7-day-a-week classical music service on Classical 90.7 KWMU-3. Plus, we have a long history of collaborations, partnerships, and sponsorships with arts organizations throughout the region; we hope to expand this even more with our upcoming move to our new home in Grand Center.

The 2013 St. Louis Arts Awards will be held Monday, January 21, 2013 at the Chase Park Plaza beginning with a cocktail reception at 6 p.m., followed by dinner and the awards program at 7 p.m. The awards ceremony kicks off the Arts and Education Council’s 50^th anniversary year and will be chaired by Ken and Nancy Kranzberg. Presenting sponsor of the event is Emerson. Proceeds from the event benefit the Arts and Education Council’s annual campaign, which funds nearly 70 arts and arts-education organizations throughout the 16-county bi-state region.

The Arts and Education Council is a collaboration of businesses, individuals, and community partners who work to raise funds and enhance the quality and variety of arts experiences throughout the 16-county, bi-state St. Louis region.

Philanthropy and The Firewall

Last week we were thrilled to share the news of a gift of $1 million from Monsanto Company in support of our future home in the Grand Center Arts & Entertainment District in midtown St. Louis.

The Monsanto Community Education Center will be located on the first floor of the new UMSL at Grand Center building, 3651 Olive Street in St. Louis. The building will also serve as the new home for the studios and offices of St. Louis Public Radio | 90.7 KWMU.

With this exciting gift from Monsanto Company, the $12 million campaign for a new home for the station is now just $2.6 million from completion.

As exciting and important as this announcement is for us at the station, it also resulted in some questions from a few  listeners worried that a gift of this size from a company that we frequently report on might adversely influence our editorial decision-making.

We have always maintained a strict policy that separates our funders (individuals, corporations, and foundations) from the editorial content that you hear on the station.  We model this firewall from similar policies that NPR has in place to protect its editorial integrity.

Like NPR, the journalists at St. Louis Public Radio – including senior news and programming managers – have full and final authority over all journalistic decisions. We work with all other departments at the station toward the goal of supporting and protecting our journalism. This means we communicate with our sponsorship and development departments to identify areas where we hope to expand our reporting. It also means we may take part in promotional activities or events such as coordinated fund drives, listener support spots, and public radio audience-building initiatives.

St. Louis Public Radio greatly appreciates the financial support it receives from individuals, from foundations and from corporations. Their support is essential. At the same time, it is the staff of St. Louis Public Radio who make their own decisions about what stories to cover and how to report them. Neither the people and the organizations who support NPR financially, the sources we come in contact with, our competitors, nor any others outside our newsroom dictate our thinking.

But we observe a clear boundary line: St. Louis Public Radio journalists interact with funders only to further our editorial goals, not to serve the agendas of those who support us.

In the specific case of Monsanto, this is certainly the largest gift we have received from this St. Louis-based company, however they have been a supporter of St. Louis Public Radio for several years and, like our other funders, understand and honor the firewall that exists between our funders and our editorial content.

If you are interested in more information on who provides funding to St. Louis Public Radio, I encourage you to review our annual report.

Julie Bierach Recognized with PASS Award

We’re happy to recognize our own Julie Bierach today as the recipient of a PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) award from the National Council On Crime And Delinquency (NCCD).  The PASS Awards is the only national recognition of print and broadcast journalists, TV news and feature reporters, producers, writers, and those in film and literature who focus America’s attention on our criminal justice, juvenile justice, child welfare, and adult protection systems in a thoughtful and considerate manner.

She won for her Officer Down series, which explored the dangers police officers face today. In the series, she spoke with people living in higher crime neighborhoods about how they feel about the police. She also explored what St. Louis-area police do to stay safe on the streets and how they’re trying to build better relationships with the people they serve.

The list of winners include NPR, WGBH, National Geographic, HBO and the San Francisco Chronicle.

PASSWinners2011

Notes From the Spring Membership Campaign

Our Spring 2012 Membership Campaign ended on Friday with more 3,250 pledges from listeners supporting the programming on the station.

The Spring Campaign will mark the final on-air drive from our current studios in Lucas Hall on the University of Missouri – St. Louis campus.  We’re moving this summer to a new facility that we will share with UMSL in the Grand Center arts & entertainment district in midtown St. Louis.

We’ve looked through our records over the nearly 40 years of broadcasting from this location to estimate that this most recent campaign was the 97th pledge drive from this facility and that we have raised more than $12.5 million in pledges from those drives over the years.

We were also the recipient of a “love letter” (so to speak) during the membership campaign from our friends at the Riverfront Times last week.

The RFT ‘s Kristie McClanahan penned an ode to the campaign titled Drinking With St. Louis Public Radio’s Pledge Drive  offering a valuable public service to help its readers achieve the most enjoyment possible from our on-air fundraising campaigns.

And if that’s not enough, just as our campaign was ending, a guy by the name of Greg Studley released a video using a parady of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” using the names of NPR and public radio reporters and personalities.

Check out the NPR Name song below … and thanks to everyone for their support!

I Heart St. Louis Public Radio and NPR!

One of the great joys of working in public radio is the appreciation that our friends and fans have for the service we provide for them on a daily basis.  And recently, NPR, and now St. Louis Public Radio, have taken this idea viral with a campaign where our fans show their appreciation.

In the coming months you’ll be seeing recognizable faces showing their love for public radio on Twitter and Facebook, as well as on our website.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of The Splendid Table

Our first “I Heart St. Louis Public Radio” photo opportunity came last week with the visit to St. Louis from Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of The Splendid Table.

User-centered approach yields big growth in online audience

In the past year, audience growth on St. Louis Public Radio’s digital platforms has been tremendous. Comparing this January to last, our number of unique visitors to the site has increased by 90 percent. Additionally, the number of people listening to our online streams has more than doubled. For all of our streams combined during January 2012, we had a cumulative audience of 29,892 unique listeners. In January 2011 we had 11,855 unique listeners, a 152 percent increase.

We attribute the launch of our mobile apps to some of that increase. The apps are currently available for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, with plans for Kindle and possibly Nook. To date, across all platforms the mobile apps have received 5,287 downloads.

Social media drives traffic to the site as well, though not as often as one might think. The number of referrals from Facebook and Twitter together during January was 4,852, with individuals visiting multiple times counted for each visit.

So with 39,859 more unique visitors to our site this January compared to last, we have to attribute much of our success to our increased focus on frequent online news updates. The current website was launched in December of 2010, with a dramatic shift in strategy. The newer design puts our visitors’ needs first in that its main function is to deliver content—not content promoting the station, but our award-winning regional news coverage and programming. Since the change to the website, for the first time we saw our news stories among the top-ten most-viewed pages on the site. As a news organization with a mission to be a trusted source of information, this is right where they should be.

Our “Listen Live” page has been our most popular page probably since the earliest days of kwmu.org. There’s no doubt that the introduction of Classical KWMU-3 and the ability to listen to classical music on our site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week has attracted many more listeners, accounting for much of our year-over-year increase in traffic. The Saturday live broadcasts of the St. Louis Symphony are also popular, attracting listeners from around the globe.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be seeking feedback about the site via an online survey. Using this data, we will continue to evolve the site to meet listener needs. Please participate when you get the chance so that we may be of better service. Thanks for being a fan of www.stlpublicradio.org!

Madalyn Painter
Digital Media Manager

Public Service and Saving Lives

On Wednesday, the idea of delivering public service from St. Louis Public Radio took a different twist with our semi-annual Blood Drive sponsored by the station with the American Red Cross.

For the thirteenth-consecutive year St. Louis Public Radio is stepping in to help save lives at a time when blood donations are typically very slow and the need is great.  At ourJanuary 2012 blood drive, which took place Wednesday afternoon at The Heights in Richmond Heights, more than 90 listeners and friends of St. Louis Public Radio donated 82 units of blood to support the Red Cross.

We normally measure the public service we deliver by evaluating the impact we have in the community through audience estimates or visits to our web site.  However, by using the power we have with the megaphone of a broadcast signal and reach of a web site we are able to leverage the interest of our listeners to give back to the community to encourage them to give blood to support those in need.

We take seriously our role in the community to inform, educate and entertain our listeners.  Our public service mission also means that we are there for you with calm and reasoned information when it comes to weather emergencies such as tornado warnings and other  information that may help save lives in the region.

We also take seriously the importance of being an institution that can make our region stronger.  Our involvement with the Red Cross to help save lives aligns with our mission perfectly and we are proud to join with them in this important endeavor.

Special thanks to all of the folks at the Red Cross and the 92 listeners for making this Blood Drive a great success.  We’ll be back at it in July to ask our listeners to save more lives by giving blood at our next drive–July 26th.

A New Way is Coming to Experience Those Driveway Moments

Twenty years ago in your car you had a radio and probably either a cassette or CD player.

Fast forward to 2012 and say hello to the connected car.  And there’s a very good chance that your next new car will probably include some or all of features that are being discussed this week at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

What is a connected car?

A Ford dashboard as it would look when connected to the NPR News app.

A connected car can provide emergency services, security features, traffic and weather, navigation, information, Google and Bing search results, Internet radio and much more through mobile devices, embedded telematics and broadcast services.

The best news for public radio listeners is that the Public Radio industry is among the leaders in bringing this technology to consumers.

On Monday, NPR announced an exciting collaboration with Ford Motor Company that will give public radio a prominent place in the next generation of Ford’s Internet-connected cars.  A new version of the NPR News app will enable drivers of cars equipped with Ford SYNC to listen to their favorite public radio programs and stations on their own schedule – just as they do on their mobile devices now.

The video below offers a sampling of how the app will work.

NPR is the first major news organization to integrate its content into an emerging fleet of Internet-connected cars.

This is the first step that will lead to making it significantly easier for listeners to tune into all of the great St. Louis Public Radio programs on-demand but also to listen to all three of our services (our news service, The Gateway, and Classical | 90.7 KWMU) without the need of a HD Radio.

Lupe gives a shout out to Public Radio

This will probably be the only time that Lupe Fiasco is mentioned in this blog, but we can’t ignore the great shout out (about :45 into the video) for NPR, Diane Rehm, and Kai Ryssdal in the tune SNDCLSH in Vegas.

Check out the video below:

Okay, now we’ll return to more pressing issues like the election, the budget, etc.

A Humorous New Year’s Eve Treat

Burn some holiday calories by laughing along with the Capitol Steps in their year-in-review awards ceremony, Politics Takes a Holiday! Listen Saturday, December 31, 2011, from 1 to 2 p.m.

The Capitol Steps Politics Takes a Holiday special will feature awards including:

• Biggest Clueless Middle Eastern Dictator Who Thought ‘Arab Spring’ Was Just a Trending Fashion
• Best Not Just Any Committee But a SUPER Committee
• Most GOP Debates Ever Held Ever
• Worst Place to Hide Your Mistress While Serving as Governor of California

If there is anything Congress can agree on, it is that the Capitol Steps’ will have you laughing harder than Rick Perry’s debate opponent!

So laugh away 2011 with the Capitol Steps’ Politics Takes a Holiday, Saturday, December 31, 2011, at 1 p.m. on St. Louis Public Radio – 90.7 KWMU-FM.