At Haddonfield Rotary Club’s most recent meeting on Sept. 24, the group hosted Bill Marrazzo, president and chief executive officer of WHYY, Inc. at the Tavistock Country Club.
Marrazzo attended to host a talk titled “WHYY and the Future of Public Broadcasting,” giving the club insights into where the organization is headed in the near future, as well as audience analytics.
Despite recent changes in how public media is funded – with the federal government eliminating and rescinding funds for public media for the next two years – WHYY is “thriving” with the support of the communities they serve. Some 42% of the WHYY audience is located in South Jersey.
“There is a big upswing in the numbers of persons who are electing in the face of this new federal policy to support public media,” said Marrazzo.
“It’s an important part of our operation,” he said of the support. ” … despite all the disruptions in the media marketplace, WHYY, because of the community support we enjoy, is thriving.”
In addition to the support from the public, Marrazzo also credits several of the organization’s strategies for handling such disruptions to the organization’s finances.
“We are now absorbing that hit,” he said, “and we’re blessed that we’ve been able to figure out strategies for doing so, without shutting down programs, without shutting down services, without laying people off.”
The speaking engagement was set up through Adrienne Rhodes of the Preserving Black Haddonfield History Project, a Rotary member who has worked on projects with WHYY and was able to connect Marrazzo with the club.
Kathryn Zschech is the president of the Rotary Club.
“Rotary is a non-political entity, and so every week we have speakers… that are teaching us about our community and being involved in our community and looking for other ways to get involved in the community,” Zschech explained. ” … So having somebody like Bill Marrazzo, who’s leading the information you know in our area, that’s a perfect connection for our folks.”
WHYY is a public media organization that holds dual licenses for both radio and television, which is not common for most broadcasting companies. They have an app and website for additional news coverage.
“Most companies, commercial or non commercial have one or the other,” said Marrazzo.
WHYY covers news in the Philadelphia region – Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania – with their 60-person newsroom and also runs multimedia educational instruction in studios and 54 local schools.
The organization is affiliated with both PBS and NPR, allowing them to run nationally recognized programming from both of their affiliated media partners.
Marrazzo started his discussion by asking those in attendance if they ever watch or listen to the organization’s TV or radio stations, before mentioning his personal love of the Rotary Club’s four rules that are posted prominently at the front of the room for every meeting.
The four rules ask that members consider if the things they think and say are true, fair to all involved, will build goodwill and better friendships and will be beneficial to all concerned.
“The last two rules are a bit nontraditional for media companies,” Marrazzo noted, “we don’t feel we’re in the business to congregate eyeballs around the television experience or ears around the radio experience, but we try to create and produce programming experiences that encourage you to go off air and offline to learn about those topics from one another.”
He went on to discuss the nearly 7 million people throughout the tri-state area that the organization serves through its various platforms.
He also discussed the fact that there is very little overlap between the audiences of each platform, with only 59,000 utilizing both TV and radio, 132,000 using both online and television, 29,000 using all three platforms and 46,000 for both radio and online.
The television station has the largest audience, with over 1 million people watching the channel, followed by the website and app used by 369,000 people, then radio with 353,000 listeners.
“So, particularly post COVID, when hybrid work entered into the free market economy, our radio business in particular, has been severely challenged,” Marrazzo pointed out. “Fewer people drive in the morning, drive home in the evening. Those two tent poles… made up the lion’s share of the radio business.”
Other challenges include the younger population of Millennials and Gen Z adults, who are less likely to listen to radio than previous generations.
