Where did NPR's burger money go?
Last week I was listening to Christopher Lydon 's ``Open Source " radio show when former National Public Radio ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin came on the air. Dvorkin reminded us of the huge $225 million gift that NPR received in 2003 from Joan Kroc , the widow of the founder of
I thought to myself: This is a big NPR town, with two stations, WBUR-FM and WGBH-FM, vying for audience share. I'm a consumer; I listen to this stuff. So how come I'm not hearing any of that money?
Put another way: Pre-2003, like any serious media concern, public radio was the usual exasperating mix of gold and dross. Androgynous-sounding anchorpeople merchandised inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom with a center-left tilt. The foreign reporting was always good, sometimes superb. Local reporting was and is good here. NPR features were generally strong, and the bourgeois/boomer-friendly culture watch kept you more or less apace of books, movies, and music.
So what has changed? Two hundred twenty-five million dollars later, public radio certainly hasn't gotten worse. But I don't hear that it has gotten any better.
You need to get your hearing tested, says NPR executive vice president Ken Stern . He says the Kroc money ``allowed us to invest in what this country needs -- serious, in-depth reporting." Overall, NPR has added 85 new staffers and 10 new beats and has opened five new foreign bureaus at a time when almost all other media are shuttering them.
Also, the burger swag has funded more investigative reporting, and brought people such as Robert Krulwich and Ted Koppel into the public radio fold, a return visit in Krulwich's case. Two new shows have come on the air post-Kroc, ``Day to Day " and ``News & Notes ," which isn't broadcast here.
OK. I'm still underwhelmed. What I cited as strengths above remain strong. With the disappearance of ``The Connection ," we actually have less public radio in Boston post-Kroc, not more. (Disclosure: I auditioned for the ``Connection" job, pre-Kroc.) ``Day to Day" sounds a lot like typical NPR fare and is certainly no better than Robin Young 's WBUR show ``Here and Now," which precedes it. And it's not like good new material is supplanting NPR's shopworn offerings.
Koppel isn't adding much. Just the other day he said that ``senior mullahs" in Iran had assured him of their country's peaceful intentions. That put me at ease. The once-incisive Daniel Schorr , now 90, triggers a Pavlovian station-changing reflex. One of NPR's top talk show hosts is the ancient, politically connected, unlistenable Diane Rehm , who has been suffering from a speech disorder for years. (She's on in New Hampshire.) It's the retirement community of the air!
So, if you pumped $225 million into the public radio system -- the Kroc endowment spins off about $10 million a year -- listenership would go up, right? Um, no. At a big NPR confab in Philadelphia last week, programmers learned that ``the public radio audience is starting to decline after long, steady growth," according to Lydon's blog. NPR executive Stern prefers to characterize the decline as ``drift, flatness or maybe a plateau after a period of unstoppable growth . . . We're facing the same challenges everyone is," he explains, primarily from the Internet.
Here is the problem. What was once an insurgent radio movement now sounds like Chet Huntley reading the evening news. Call it NPR Classic. But NPR management won't put the old warhorses like Cokie and Linda out to pasture for fear of alienating the loyal listeners who answer the bell during pledge drives.
The solution? NPR Remix. Chicago Public Radio is setting up an alternative public radio station, which NPR itself once was, to rope in younger, hipper listeners. ``It's going to be focused heavily on the region, with plenty of user-generated content," a spokeswoman explains. Plus they have a sense of humor; check out their website, www.secretradioproject.com . It won't be a secret for long.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
