NPR costs
One of my local NPR stations is having a pledge drive, as you might have inferred from a previous post. Good grief, the hosts are annoying in pleading for money. They try every trick, every guilt trip, every manipulation in existence to compel you to give money. I want them to stay on the air as much as anyone, but it gets ridiculous.
One interesting departure, however, was when they delved into the realm of fact. They cited a statistic, presumably calculated by dividing the annual operating budget by the number of minutes in a year, that it costs $18 per minute to run the station. They were proferring this as if it demonstrated the high cost of the radio station. Does it seem to anyone else that this is really cheap? $18 per minute is thirty cents per second; you can drop quarters into a coffee can with a slot cut in the top faster than that. If I can count out an amount of money, in broadcasing, with coins, in real time, I don’t think it can qualify as expensive. I’m not complaining: paying NPR, PRI, and BBC subscription costs, as well as maintaining multiple offices and many hosts and on-site reporters for so little money is admirable. I just don’t think it’s expensive.
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