How Could It End Like This? NPR Cancels The BPP

Photo: by Miss Loisy, CC License

Sadly it's true. NPR gave my favorite show The Bryant Park Project the boot! News leaked yesterday in the NYT and was "officially" broken to the fourteen staffers of BPP this morning.

The BPP's Producer Tricia McKinney left this message on their website today:

We are still absorbing the news of our untimely demise. We will still produce new shows for the next two weeks, and we'll keep on blogging and twittering. We may also dip into the Best of the BPP, stuff we're really proud of.

Though the number of listeners were small, especially compared to the traditional NPR standbys, the BPP website did accrue millions of page views monthly. Anemic station carriage and a flagging economy likely conspired to doom the show and it's not surprising that NPR claims they spent $2 million over nine months with nothing to show for it. But was nine months really long enough? Given another year, I suspect that the BPP would have brought more non-NPR listeners into the fold; it’s too bad we won’t get to see that happen.

Various postmortems in the blogosphere also cite internal politics, staff turnover and flawed execution. I enjoyed the show. I loved their goofs. Such as the time they tried to cue a soundbite and ended up playing their entire library of Sound FX. It was endearing. They blogged, they twittered, they broadcast themselves just being goofy. It was different. It was fun, It was interesting and I became "friends" with the people on the show and even behind the scenes. Those who listened generally felt the same, judging from the comment thread.

As of this afternoon, there were 343 comments posted, 99% are positive and sharing their shock and disbelief with the cancellation of the BPP. Here is my comment on the thread:

I don't have much I can add that the others have not already said. Sad. Silly. Awful. Regretful.

What can I say? It's a mistake. NPR's wonderful, I've listened daily since the day of the Stock Market Crash in 1987 and The BPP was the future.

Radio as we know it is dying. You can stream stations on your iPhone!! With the BPP's informal (though substantive style) use of micro-blogging (twitter), blogging and ear to the NET Generation, it could have been the launch pad for NPR's revival.

I'm afraid that this "expensive experiment" canceled before it was given a chance, is the radio version of NPR's jumping the shark. Not the BPP itself, but the act of canceling it and not allowing it to grow or gain an audience and mature.

Sorry BPP gang, you were all great! I'll especially miss Laura's Tweets.

Sent by David M. | 12:41 PM ET | 07-14-2008

• If you want to leave a comment here's the thread.
  
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• If you want to contact the NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard and her staff to leave your two cents, the address is here.
  
• Listen to host Mike Pesca verbally flipping off NPR in the opening of today's first hour. (Click 'Listen Now' and it will open in a Media Player pop-up window) Food Grain Collection & Monitoring Committees FTW!
  
• Read my past post (say that fast!) about my love of this show here.

The Bryant Park Project, One Of The Best Radio Shows Your Probably NOT Listening To

National Public Radio's, The Bryant Park Project, is one of the best radio shows that your probably not listening to.

Admittedly, I probably skew the demographic of this program. I'm a Forty-Something, frequent NPR listener who gets most of my news from Print, NPR, PBS, then the Internet.

What is the Bryant Park Project (BPP)? The BPP, which takes its title from new studios overlooking the park, is the latest NPR News series debuting as a two-hour live weekday show Oct. 1, 2007. As they describe themselves on their blog, they are a; "blog, radio show, podcast and ongoing discussion of the news".

From an October article at Current.org:

The producers of Bryant Park want to discover how to engage Gen-X listeners and others whose cultural reference points and news diets differ from those of core listeners to NPR’s flagship Morning Edition.

“We want this show to be about our lives,” said 31-year-old co-host Luke Burbank.

BPP, as co-hosted mixes big doses of levity with a news sensibility favoring alternate takes on the day’s top stories. The show is meant to appeal to a younger, less-traditional NPR audience. Reoccurring segments include a Monday morning sports wrap-up featuring Bill Wolff, a Tuesday section on new music releases, and frequent interviews with various musicians and performers including Tegan and Sara, Peter Bjorn and John, Jill Sobule, and Death Cab For Cutie. “The Most” lists the top e-mailed articles on the Web.

The show features an occasional segment called "Make Me Care" in which guests have 60 seconds to argue why a subject should matter to listeners. On Thursday's "Make Me Care" Alexis Madrigal of Wired.com, attempted to describe why we should care about NASA's recent discovery of an object in our Galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years.

The tone is often informal compared to the more conventional content found in other NPR news magazines. This is what makes it truly unique. It's web site features the typical NPR story-by-story rundown, but it also has a frequently updated blog (which today featured the BBQ and beer lunch they had ordered)

I've added RSS podcast feed for it's podcasts into my netvibes page. The podcasts can also be subscribed to for free at iTunes. I've also added BPP to my Twitter list. They typically send breezy, chatty, gossipy twitters that are fun to read. The other day they were complaining how bad the sound was on the Death Cab For Cutie in-studio performance.

It's not your father's NPR (i.e. mine) but it's fun, often informative and I believe, a glimpse into the way most main-stream radio, TV or magazines will broadcast themselves. Utilizing the full range of WEB 2.0 technology and spreading their RSS seed blog to blog, social network to social network.

It's only on a very few NPR stations and Sirius Satellite Radio. It's blog is here. Their podcast is here. Their radio show is here. You can read and follow their Twitter feed here. Feel free, while on Twitter to add my feed if you like. I'm here.