A New Voice for America in Europe

International Herald Tribune – February 13, 2006

Doreen Carvajal

Hurtling down the autobahn, his radio blasting German headlines, David Knutson yearns for something absent from his life and the airwaves of his adopted city of Berlin. "I miss 'Car Talk,"' said Knutson, an opera singer who grew up with National Public Radio and its top-rated show in the United States. "I think those guys are absolutely insane."

But soon, Knutson will be able to savor raging debates about horn-honking etiquette, the lousiest cars of the year and the automotive perils of a man's midlife and Mercedes crisis. National Public Radio, based in Washington, is poised to bring "Car Talk" and "Fresh Air" to the first station under its control in its 35-year history, in one of Europe's major capitals and biggest radio markets - Berlin.

That step is part of a broader effort by the broadcaster to shape NPR into a respected global voice, aided by new technology and the retreat of Voice of America from the international market for news delivered in English.

In the spring, NPR will replace Voice of America in Berlin, where that U.S.-financed broadcaster made its debut in 1945 on the American Forces Network. Through six decades, the VOA offered jazz from Benny Goodman, delivered late-night headlines to homesick American soldiers and chronicled the crumbling of the Berlin Wall.

But its Berlin license is expiring in April, and with the fall of communism in Europe, its presence there no longer seems essential. Last week, the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors proposed a $671 million budget for publicly financed broadcasting services that could eliminate the VOA's News Now broadcast, reflecting a shift from English-language programming to projects in local languages in the Middle East.

"Our primary focus is on providing programming in places where people have a limited ability to get a variety of news sources," said Larry Hart, a spokesman for the broadcasting board, who noted that many European countries had plenty of English alternatives via cable and satellite services. Still, he said, the board is "quite disappointed" at the ending of "a 60-year legacy of U.S.-funded broadcasting having access to the people of Berlin."

But the Voice of America's broader strategic shifts present a fresh opportunity for NPR.

Ken Stern, executive vice president of NPR, said the development "raises some questions for us about how NPR can fill or extend our services at a time of transition." He added: "This is a period of broadening our thinking. Technology really provides a marketable opportunity for us to reach people in a way that we couldn't before. We've learned a lot about the international audience and what they need."

To extend its reach beyond U.S. borders to almost 150 countries, NPR is already using a combination of platforms: its Web site and podcasts, as well as cable and satellites like the Hotbird in and around Europe, which reaches audiences from Iceland to Yemen.

The Web site www.npr.org, is now attracting six million unique visitors monthly, more than a quarter of them from outside the United States, Stern said. This month, podcast downloads for programming like daily newscasts exceeded 13 million, also with about a quarter of them retrieved by non-U.S. listeners.

Still, Stern said, NPR could not estimate the scope of its international audience, although it knows that its audience of 25 million listeners weekly in the United States is growing. So with its domestic audience as its primary mission, it is moving cautiously abroad to make sure that its international effort is self-supporting through program fees and sponsorships.

The export of NPR is vital, executives said, to building name recognition and visibility.

But popularity and support do not necessarily translate into "pledge drives," one of the more time-honored public radio rituals for raising money.

Initially, NPR executives said that to finance the new Berlin station they hoped to raise the modest amount of E20,000, or $24,000, through underwriting from German-American businesses and foundations. There are "no plans for on-air fund drives," said Jeff Rosenberg, who heads NPR's international operation. "That would probably not go over well."

The Berlin station is a new tool for NPR, which does not license or operate radio stations in the United States. Instead, it sells programming to member radio stations that are part of a loosely organized public radio network, which in 2004 contributed half of NPR's $153 million in revenue through program fees and dues.

To keep the German station a low-budget one, NPR will use the same American programming and will benefit from getting a license at minimal cost from the German authorities, who grant similar licenses for broadcasters like Radio France International and the BBC World Service.

For the past year and a half, American expatriates have been lobbying German officials to grant a license to NPR in particular after the expiration of the VOA license in April. With the departure of the American Forces Network station from Berlin in the early 1990s, they complained that it was difficult to tune in to an American voice, with the VOA programming largely relegated to late-night slots.

"When the wall came down in Berlin, the British had the BBC, and the American station was basically inaudible; there was a rock 'n' roll station, but they could have done so much more," said Gary Smith, executive director of the American Academy in Berlin, which will be working with NPR to create some local programming based on lectures, conferences and events at Berlin's cultural center.

Some supporters longed so much for a radio station with an American accent that they organized parties to collect signatures pressing German authorities to grant a license for NPR.

"We feel like we've been thirsty for 10 years," said David Knutson, who held a Fourth of July party last summer for the effort.

In reality, however, Germans are the biggest audience for English-language broadcasts.

BBC World, which last conducted a survey of its listeners in Berlin in 2002, said its 2.3 million listeners were mostly Germans who spoke English or who were trying to master the language.

Typically, international radio programming tends to be a niche news source, which has difficulty attracting advertising or sponsorships, said Christoph Lanz, managing director of Deutsche Welle, the German government-funded news service. But he praised the arrival of NPR in Berlin.

"We think that NPR is a public broadcast, and what we want is a public broadcaster and not government propaganda," he said. "NPR has a good reputation and provides good public-service journalism. And the VOA, as we all know, is the state opinion media of the United States."

Letters and e-mail messages from foreign listeners, Rosenberg of NPR said, indicate that the audience shares that view. They prefer programming with "no artifice, no hidden sales pitch and no slanting to sell a point of view," he said.

They also enjoy the opportunity to eavesdrop on America's frank conversations with itself, he added.

After all, no one but the "Car Talk" hosts, Tom and Ray Magliozzi (aka Click and Clack), could tell a Berliner about the latest cup-holder design competition, the evils of the internal combustion engine and which make of automobile nuns favor.

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