NAEB Newsletter (September 15, 1939)

Record Details:

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NAEB News Letter*•.*S©pt e 15, 1939 Page 1? to see as a producer* I consider it one of the main tasks of our research fellows to organize suoh panels for you, using the expertone© we have had during the last two years* Sera is the place for me to mention one task which radio research will have to tackle on© day, hut on which we have not yet much experience as far as my office concerned* You want to know more than whether the listener likes a program* You want to know whether it has a good effect upon him, increasing his insight or his perspective, But her© is where radio is so different from school* In school the teacher has a pupil before him and so his main concern is whether the people change* In radio education it is suoh a tremendous task to got people even to listen to anything els© than entertainment programs that we have not yet gotten beyond the stages of studying how people made" to listen to programs which by and large serve one of the three goals mentioned* ”(3) And in this connection the third item mentioned above, the general conditions of audience building, comes in® ?^h@ther you reach people by your broadcasts doesn’t depend only upon your program* It depends upon the time at which you broadcast, the competing programs which are on the air, the listening habits which a specific area might have, and many similar factors* W© consider it our task to furnish you through our fellows as much suoh information as possible, and, frankly speaking, we gain much of it by staying in constant touch with commercial broadcasters for whom the collection of such material is of vital importance* I knew of a. university station which broadcast© only a few hours a day, and on© of the hours is from three to four in the afternoon, because no on© at this station knew that this is one of the worst hours to get an audience, a fact which is wall established by commercial research* And another example is an organization which recently asked me hov/ to spend a budget of several thousand dollars for improving their program* I asked them whether they had don® anything to build up their audience by the right kind of publicity and they had not* Bo with the help of the data at our office I could convince them they had better spend this money on experiments with audience building, advertising in the right kind of magazines or building up a mailing list, or sending people around to conventions, because it is a widespread illusion among educational broadcasters that a program can get audience on its own merit alone* Therefor© our research fellows have the task of studying the p eople who don y t l isten to your stations at least a© carefully as your listeners* fhey make little studies to find out who knows and who doesn’t know about your programs* They take the letters which com© to your station, but then they don’t go to the lettor-wrlter, but to his neighbor who lives under similar conditions but may not b® listening to your program* Why doesn’t h©? We try to got the mailing list of people who wrote in to your station two years ago and then look thorn, up and find out, if such is the ©aae, why they stopped listening* It is from such an approach that w© learn about conditions unfavorable to your work which you might be able to overcome if you just know them® "( 4 ) The final point to be mad® is the coordinating efforts which our office pursues through the different fellows* Station WQX g for instance, which is our host today, has a unique feature in its novel¬ reading program* We have studied it quite carefully and we are