A Tale for One City

A city-oriented radio service could leap the literacy gap.

by Bruce Schimmel

The Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy came into town recently to pose a very tough question. As daily papers continue to collapse, how will Philadelphians get the news they need?

It was a bit like a child returning to the scene of its parent's crime.

The commission's sponsor, the Knight Foundation, was born of the same family who also bled dry Knight-Ridder's chain of newspapers — including the Inquirer and Daily News.

Sold to Brian Tierney et al, our dailies continue to fail. So, the commission spent a long day asking reporters, editors and alternative oddballs (like me) what Philadelphians need to know, and how to get it to them (knightcomm.org). Last year, the Knight Foundation gave out more than $500,000 for Philadelphia projects ranging from strengthening school newspapers to making documentaries about taxi drivers.

To be fair, Knight-Ridder's incompetence is only partly to blame for their papers' demise. Because that young, cheap and easy beast called the Internet is threatening almost all dailies.

The dailies' demise could be devastating, because papers still provide the widest and deepest news coverage. As flat screens replace broadsheets, newspaper Web sites can't generate the revenue to fund quality reporting. So, the Internet has put the very foundation of journalism at risk. And with that, some fear, our democracy.

Worse, as I told the commission, Philadelphia's needs are even more dire (schimmel.com/knighttestimony.doc). Even if papers grew on trees, many Philadelphians would still be left on the dark side of our Tale of Two Cities.

White vs. black, rich vs. poor, and recently, online vs. off — these are all walls that divide us. But in trying to ferry people across the digital divide, Wireless Philadelphia discovered that the mother schism from which all others spring is illiteracy.

Illiteracy in Philly is pandemic. The Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board recently reported that some 550,000 adults are functionally illiterate — meaning they can't fill out an employment form. It's an insane number, until you consider that Philadelphia's dropout rate is some 45 percent.

But the good news, as I told Knight, is that we already have an excellent way to leap the literacy divide. We still have radio. Radio reaches all walks of life, and compared to TV, it's cheap and deep.

The bad news is that Philly's public radio has largely forsaken the city in search of greener suburban pastures.

WXPN once served Philly with tons of local news. (City Paper started as a WXPN project.) Today 'XPN broadcasts its music widely and produces no news at all.

Still, even as local radio in Philly has reached a new low, there are signs of an audio rebirth:

• A West Philly community station, WPEB 88.1 FM, has recently been revitalized by Scribe, a nonprofit media producer. Its studio on 52nd Street has just been completed and they're expanding programming.

• Commercial radio is becoming more accessible to everyday folks. As radio met the Internet, the value of broadcast time declined. That's bad for media conglomerates like Clear Channel, but good for ordinary people who can now afford to buy a half-hour with a city-oriented station like WURD 900 AM.

• And finally there are podcasts. The Internet has spawned an audio alternative that's attractive to corporations and museums, and accessible to schoolchildren.

The resurrection of local radio would be wonderful news for Philadelphia, and if I ran the Knight Foundation, that's where I'd invest. Because a city-oriented radio service could leap the literacy gap, offer cheap and easy access, and help provide the quality, local news that's necessary for a vital democracy.

(bruce@schimmel.com)