KCRW goes for connection over scale

After more than a decade at NPR, where he helped direct political coverage through three presidential cycles, Arnie Seipel came to KCRW as its chief content officer looking for a different kind of challenge. At the Los Angeles public radio station, his work spans far beyond traditional news: community events, podcasts, social media, culture and new ways of reaching audiences who may never think of themselves as public radio listeners. Newsjunkie Managing Editor Peter Landau spoke with Seipel about what makes KCRW distinct, how journalism can rebuild trust and why the future of public media may depend less on scale than on deeper connections with the communities it serves.

You spent more than a decade at NPR, much of it directing political coverage in Washington. What drew you from national politics to a Los Angeles public radio station with such a broad cultural identity?

There were a few things. I spent over a decade at NPR. I loved the work and the people, and I felt like we were doing really important, impactful work. But I was ready for a change of pace. I had covered three presidential cycles at NPR, and this opportunity at KCRW, in some ways, just fell into my lap.

My partner, now fiancé, found the job posting and showed it to me. He knew I loved the station because KCRW has always been this gem in public radio—a station that does great news programming, with the compelling and reliable storytelling public radio is known for, but also has this cutting-edge, tastemaking music side.

It’s a really special blend. He jokingly said to me, “Hey, I’m gonna go be the news director at KCRW.” And I said, “Wait a second, I actually want that job.” It was the dream job I would have come up with if I were imagining my next chapter.

I felt proud of the work I did at NPR, and this was a good opportunity to take a different course and go to a place I felt aligned with, doing the kind of work I could be proud of.

KCRW combines local news, national affairs, music, food and culture in a way few media organizations do. What holds those different forms of programming together as a coherent public service mission?

I think there’s a depth of curiosity and an appreciation for creativity that goes across all of those things.

A lot of media outlets stick to one lane. KCRW, as a local station rooted in the community, feels an obligation to treat people as holistic individuals who have a lot of different interests. We speak to an audience that’s open to new ideas and new ways of approaching things. That speaks to the creativity of what KCRW does and attracts an audience that really appreciates the human spirit behind it.

Especially in a world increasingly defined by algorithms and taken over by technology, I think that enduring quality—something coming from a human heart and a human mind—has a special place. People are looking for ways to get out of the generic flow of content they may get from an algorithm.

What does it mean for KCRW to be a genuinely local institution in a region as large, fragmented and culturally varied as Southern California?

It means we’re busy. We do dozens and dozens of events throughout the year, in addition to all the programming we’re doing, because we know actually showing up in different neighborhoods is the best way for us to make meaningful connections with people.

The variety of our programming lets us do that in different ways. On the news side, of course, we cover important issues and go hyperlocal with storytelling in individual neighborhoods. But with a program like Good Food, we’re also featuring local businesses, bakers and restaurants—things people know because they’re right down the street—and building meaningful relationships with those folks.

We may talk to a local baker about the secret to a great pie crust or their cake-decorating tips, but also about the challenges they face trying to stay open and market to audiences on social media in ways they didn’t have to before.

Then we have a giant pie contest every spring that draws 10,000 people. We’ll feature their pies at Pie Fest and connect them with potential new customers. It’s really that hands-on relationship that travels from radio to social media to the in-person events we do.

How do you decide which communities or subjects require deeper coverage when you’re dealing with such a large region?

A lot of that happens because we hold ourselves accountable. We map out which communities we’re doing events in and which communities we’ve told stories in, and we look for our own blind spots.

In a region as big and diverse as L.A., it actually takes that kind of data collection to stay on top of it because there are so many places to go. We also look at areas where we know there are particular challenges.

In L.A., that has meant focusing a lot on Altadena, where the fire swept through and really took out a whole community, including a lot of musicians who were based there. We focused on playing their music on our station, but also on amplifying drives to help people get studio space and instrument rentals.

We’ve also looked at places where ICE raids have hit particularly hard and highlighted food businesses in those areas that were really affected. We look for where the need is greatest and follow that.

What about people who never think of themselves as traditional public radio listeners? How do you find them—or are they finding you?

We find a lot of them through events and newsletters, and through non-audio channels where we can reach people. We also deliberately work to increase our visibility on social media by collaborating with creators who may have audiences different from our own.

The newer collaboration features on Instagram and YouTube have been pretty great for that. We feature music artists on YouTube and collaborate with them, so our performances and content reach their whole audience, not just the people who already follow KCRW.

We’ve also made major advances with our podcasts over the last couple of years, with two shows in particular that have been big investments for us. One is The Sam Sanders Show, a weekly pop culture show. Sam is somebody I worked with at NPR for a long time.

The other is the investigative podcast Question Everything, which digs into disinformation and how truth can win out in today’s world. Both come from talent steeped in public media. Sam’s whole career was basically at NPR. Brian Reed, who hosts Question Everything, came out of This American Life and Serial.

As those podcasts have grown, surveys have shown that about 75% of their audiences don’t otherwise interact with KCRW. So these are people who are likely new to public media. We’re putting out what we think is compelling content and finding audiences for it outside the traditional public radio space on these different platforms.

Public radio has been criticized for serving an audience that is older, wealthier and less diverse than the public at large. What can KCRW change, editorially or institutionally, to serve a broader Los Angeles?

I think a lot of those changes happen off the radio. We know the long-term trajectory of the audience is not toward growth on linear platforms like radio and television. It’s about visibility on social media, and it’s often about events where we’re showing up in communities that don’t align with the traditional socioeconomic and demographic profile of public media.

We partner with local community organizations that have followings outside our audience. They bring people to our events and introduce people to KCRW. We also collaborate with those kinds of organizations on social media.

We’ve had great success because I think people see that we actually walk the walk of wanting to be a community organization and not just a radio station. That has built a lot of trust with organizations that reach people we traditionally have not reached on the radio.

What have you learned about developing a new show in an environment where listeners already have nearly unlimited choices?

I think what we’ve learned is that you have to be highly, highly specific about the audience you’re going after. And that’s not so much demographically as psychographically. What interests does a segment of the audience have that are being underserved, and how are we going to do this differently from everyone else?

Question Everything speaks to that. There are plenty of podcasts about the information ecosystem, technology and the press. A lot of them are great roundtable conversations. We’re taking a different approach—a real investigative and richly narrative approach to these stories. That was something that really didn’t exist.

It’s been around for a year and a half, and it’s really in the last six months that it has grown by leaps and bounds.

The Sam Sanders Show was another case where Sam had several iterations of this kind of show. At NPR, he built It’s Been a Minute, and then he went to Vulture and developed another show.

After the Vulture show ended, Sam was looking for a home with a trusted brand and people he knew. He’s an Angeleno and knew KCRW, so he knew this was a place that would really support his vision.

Sam’s show is where we’ve taken our most aggressive multi-platform approach because it was the first show we produced not just as a radio show or podcast, but as a full video show on YouTube.

What we’ve learned is that it is very, very difficult to grow a show on YouTube. It requires a lot of patience, time and money. But we’ve also seen the exceptional value of having core organic video assets from that show that can go other places.

People are calling it the “clipping economy” that’s happening with a lot of podcasts. We’re prolific about putting clips on Instagram. There’s always a risk that people will consume the content on Instagram and not actually listen to the podcast.

But the flip side is that they may never have been aware of your podcast if that content wasn’t out there. So it’s a little bit of the cost of doing business, but we’ve found that it gives us great visibility—not just for Sam’s show, but for KCRW in general.

One key part of the social strategy is that we’re sharing videos from KCRW, but Sam is also sharing them from his individual account, rather than from an account created for his show. He has a direct connection with the audience through his personal account.

Drawing on your years editing political coverage, what do you think political journalism still gets wrong about the public it’s trying to serve? What are people still hungry for?

I think people are really hungry for more basic explainers. Political journalism often gets too far into the weeds on process or assumes too much knowledge on the part of the public about policy. It needs to slow down, bring people along and recognize that people are very busy.

You cannot fault voters for being too busy to keep up with the nuances of policy or everything a politician says or does. Some of the most successful political journalism in terms of consumption is things like voter guides, 101-style explainers of an issue and simple biographies of candidates.

Journalists miss opportunities to engage audiences at their speed. Too often, there’s also a competition among reporters in Washington that can pull coverage in another direction.

How should journalism respond when neutrality produces a misleading picture of reality? Showing both sides can be admirable, but sometimes it can distort the real picture.

I think balance is not necessarily the right approach; it’s fairness.

You do want to represent multiple points of view in the course of a story, but you have to be very careful to provide context, especially if one point of view is not based in reality.

I think we saw this challenge most recently with the reflecting pool case, where we’ve now seen the DOJ withdraw false charges against a former Olympian.

The coverage in that case was careful to show that what the DOJ was saying about this person—that he vandalized the pool—and what Trump was saying about vandalism were false, and those claims were directly rebutted.

There’s still the challenge that even while you’re fact-checking something, you’re also amplifying it. It gets out into the ether, and people may only see the headline without seeing all the context.

That’s where I go back to the other piece of this: making sure basic explanations of a story and basic explanations of the facts are really accessible to people leading busy lives who aren’t following every twist and turn. Make sure those things are front and center.

You’ve seen the rise of a newsletter like Tangle, which we’ve covered extensively at KCRW. I think they’re doing that really well. I follow the news closely, and I still find it helpful to look at their primers, where they’re fact-checking and showing you the arguments on either side with context. Then they give their own take on where the balance shifts in a given story.

That leads to the question of trust in journalism. It’s often discussed as something that can be repaired through better messaging. What does a newsroom actually have to do in its reporting to earn that trust?

That’s a tricky question. It’s really hard because it’s not just about what the news organization does. So much of it is about attacks on the press, primarily from the president.

The attacks on the press are coming primarily from one side, though not exclusively. There are certainly attacks on the press from some on the left, but it is overwhelmingly coming from the president and his supporters.

At the same time, you can’t expect everybody in journalism to be perfect. Journalism is a human endeavor. There are going to be mistakes.

When there are mistakes, you have to be full-throated in owning them, walking through them and giving the public as full a picture as you can of what went wrong. Being honest and truthful about your mistakes is probably the best way to earn trust.

But I don’t know that it’s sufficient in an era when views of the press are so polarized and a lot of that is being driven from the bully pulpit in the White House.

Public media is under pressure from changing listening habits and competition for attention. Is the traditional membership model strong enough for the next generation, or are you looking at other funding sources?

I think the membership model is actually the core of our future because it’s about building and sustaining a trusting relationship.

We’ve found success doing that in a lot of different spaces beyond the radio. Radio is still our primary source, but we can give people real value in a city as vast and complicated as L.A.—helping them navigate it, giving them tools to figure out what cultural experiences they can have with their families, what new restaurants they should try and how to understand critical local issues.

We can do that in different formats and get people’s support for it. Creatively, I think it’s a healthy model because, as I tell my folks, we want to grow as large an audience as possible. But if there’s a trade-off between the depth of the connection and simply going for scale, we’re going to choose depth.

Converting one person into a monthly member who donates $20 to KCRW is more valuable than getting 100 passive clicks on a story online.

As a community organization, and through all the ways we’ve found to connect people digitally and in person, we have mechanisms to build those relationships and keep giving people things that are valuable to them and make their daily lives easier without being based solely on the radio.

I think we’re also following the move toward subscription content that individual creators have adopted, and some of them have been quite successful doing that with individual shows. Of course, the core content we create will always be free because we’re public media.

But there may be bonus content. There may be early access to episodes. There may be meetups or Zoom meetings with our talent for subscribers. It gives people who support us a little something extra as a thank-you.

I believe community engagement could be what saves public news, even though news is only part of what KCRW does. What does a sustainable KCRW look like five years from now—not only financially, but editorially and culturally?

Editorially, there’s a lot of focus for us right now on our app, and much of that is about following the audience where they are, which is on their phones.

Let’s face it: We all get those screen-time reports at the end of the week. We know we can take a lot of the great audio work we’re doing and create a great experience on the phone.

But we can also extend those cultural connections—to local institutions and local communities. We’ve been developing experiences in the app where we can curate all sorts of things for people, whether that means going to the newest restaurants or finding new museums that are kid-friendly.

Those are useful things that help knit the community together, in addition to delivering the great music and journalism we do in audio.

I always say the news has an audience problem as much as anything else. In a way, it’s similar to declining voting rates: We have a civic engagement problem that crosses both things.

So much of the work we do involves connecting people with things in their neighborhoods that aren’t political—things that are cultural and enjoyable. That helps people become more invested in their communities in a deeper way, and I think those are building blocks toward greater civic engagement.