BOB GARFIELD:
This week, in reaction to the sale and format change of Washington, DC's only commercial classical music station, NPR affiliate WETA dropped much of its news and information programming and re-embraced the largely classical format it had gradually cut back on and finally ditched two years ago. This isn't exactly a trend. For a decade around the country, public radio stations have been dumping classical, blues, bluegrass and jazz in favor of news, which generates bigger audiences and bigger revenues.

But raising more money has also raised the hackles of music devotees and raised a sort of public radio conundrum. Does serving the public mean giving the majority of listeners what they want or does it mean serving the underserved?
Thus the question in Chicago, where to greet 2007, WBEZ dropped its last jazz music program. Jazz writer John McDonough reports.

[JAZZ MUSIC]

JOHN McDONOUGH:
This is Coleman Hawkins' famous Body and Soul, but it's possible on the radio that few of Coleman Hawkins' listeners would linger very long over Ornette Coleman and the abstract onslaughts of his endangered species.

[JAZZ MUSIC]

It's all jazz, in different languages for different audiences. Diversity, people like to call it, but diversity is often more easily celebrated in principle than it is coped with in reality, as any radio station manager understands who has faced the prickly temperament of the jazz fan.

When Chicago Public Radio broke the news last spring that it would be dropping music from its programming, it seemed to fall like a body blow on many jazz fans, and certainly on the Chicago jazz establishment. The Chicago jazz establishment believes the music will lose an important place at the media table and in the city's cultural life without a strong radio voice. Its loss, they say, would leave a gap in the profile jazz has enjoyed in the city going back to Dave Garroway and Daddy-O Dailey in the 1950s.

But here's the embarrassing little irony. I've been a jazz fan since I was 11, yet I've almost never listened to jazz on the radio. And I'm not the only one. If you're impolite enough to ask members of the jazz establishment whether they listen to it, you might be surprised by what you hear.

LAUREN DEUTSCH:
I don't listen to the radio much.

JOHN McDONOUGH:
Lauren Deutsch, executive director of the Jazz Institute.

LAUREN DEUTSCH:
Why would you even bother if you had an enormous CD collection or record collection, like I'm sure you do and most of us do?

JOHN McDONOUGH:
I asked my friend then, Downbeat editor Jason Koransky.

JASON KORANSKY:
No, I don't listen to jazz on WBEZ. I mean, sometimes I will in the car, actually. Primarily listen to talk radio or CDs. I have a CD player and I have a six-CD changer, and I bring stuff to and from the office.

JOHN McDONOUGH:
And former Jazz Institute president, Penny Tyler.

PENNY TYLER:
Now, I gave up on BEZ before we moved, four years ago, to the South. And the reason I gave up is because I thought their programming was horrible.

JOHN McDONOUGH:
Why would so many of those who protest the loss of jazz the most not listen to it when it's on the air? They say the programming – and that's a good reason, but maybe not the only reason. Some suspect that a bit of a turf contest may also be at work - on the one side, the entitlement of Chicago Public Radio to program independently – on the other, the cultural prestige and expertise of the Chicago jazz establishment and the Jazz Institute in particular.

Howard Reich, who has covered the Chicago music scene for many years, sees two themes at work.

HOWARD REICH:
One is the jazz establishment, such as it is, does grieve for what's happening at WBEZ. At the same time, they have been complaining for a long time to me and to others that they find that programming inferior. And it's implicit in that point of view that they feel they could do it better.

See, the other thing you can't separate, or as my view is, that you can't separate from all this – is self-interest. They want to control as much of the agenda of what people hear as possible, whether presenting music, broadcasting or whatever. All these people care about the music and care about themselves and their power as well. You know, there's an old saying – a competition is fierce when the stakes are low.

JOHN McDONOUGH:
And the stakes in all this may be lower than anybody has imagined. This is because it's not the politics of culture that's driving events. It's the technology. Jazz and blues fans typically have their own digital music collections. Like millions, they have been empowered by the memory chip, the Internet and the satellite to program their own listening.

The issue isn't jazz on the radio. The issue is radio's long-term future as an alternative music platform of any kind.

To get an authoritative view of this matter, I assembled a truly expert panel – my 17-year-old son and several randomly-selected friends. Brant [sp?], where does radio fit into your life these days?

BRANT:
It doesn't fit in it anywhere, because when you're listening to the radio you don't really get to choose what music you listen to.

YOUNG MAN #1:
Well, I get a lot of my music from Brant – lending me CDs, and my iPod.

YOUNG MAN #2:
Yeah, I really don't listen to radio at all. And I listen to my music from the Internet.

JOHN McDONOUGH:
This may not exactly be a scientific survey, but it should make us step back a bit and see all this in a little wider context. Controversies over music formats are nothing new to public radio, but these shifts were not driven by Philistine station managers and music was not replaced by ideological wrestlers like Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity. They were driven, stations say, by listeners.

And the replacements were largely the kind of news and information programs that listeners could not provide for themselves and that have brought NPR both awards and a growing listener base. That was the conclusion of David Giovannoni. He is the former head of Audience Research Analysis, which has provided the numbers that have helped move many public radio stations away from institutional support and toward a, quote, "listener-supported" model.

Giovannoni declines interviews these days, but two years ago on this show, he explained the sequence of events that lay behind this trend.

DAVID GIOVANNONI:
The threat of diminished federal funding has, in the past, motivated public radio stations to become more financially self-sufficient. It means that they're going to take a hard look at their program schedules and they're going to determine whether a program is really serving the public, really serving the missions that they have set out for it.

JOHN McDONOUGH:
By most measures, Chicago Public Radio has done both through a kind of dual format – news and information by day, music by night. If listener-supported public radio is defined by the network's two "tent poles," as NPR likes to call them, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, the numbers suggest that supporting those listeners means building on that base. It doesn't mean formulas, either. If there is a formula behind Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, This American Life and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, I don't see it. A common sensibility, maybe, not a formula.

So what of public radio's duty to serve the underserved? Again, David Giovannoni.

DAVID GIOVANNONI:
There is a vast underserved audience in America for intelligent, high-quality, civil, civically responsible news and information programming. I guess every station has to ask itself what constitutes a more valued and valuable public service, providing a listener something he or she cannot get anywhere else or something he or she can get somewhere else?

JOHN McDONOUGH:
If such niche-friendly technologies as the iPod and satellite radio are replacing traditional radio as the dominant mass music platform, then no audience will be underserved. Meanwhile, it would seem that jazz and blues are not doing all that badly in Chicago these days. Joe Siegel's Jazz Showcase is celebrating 60 years of more or less continuous operation and is now in the capable hands of his son.

The House of Blues has become a nationwide franchise; Both Symphony Center and Ravinia offer regular jazz programs. The city has two world-class repertory jazz orchestras up and running. And the Jazz Institute is constantly busy planning special events such as the recent 28th Annual Chicago Jazz Festival. As for the young, jazz is deeply rooted in the academic music programs of New Trier and other high schools across Chicago and northern Indiana. Who is underserved by radio? In a complicated world, recorded music is cheap and available. Smart and civil discourse on public policy and culture is what's rare.

BOB GARFIELD:
John McDonough is a jazz writer. He produced this piece for WBEZ's own Eight Forty Eight.