KUAF’s 2020 Year in Review
Editor’s Note: Like so many of us, KUAF 91.3, the local National Public Radio affiliate for Northwest and Western Arkansas and licensee of the University of Arkansas, has had quite an eventful 2020. Check out this Year in Review recap from the station’s General Manager, Leigh Wood, for all the details.
What a year it has been. In every aspect of what this public radio station is – a news outlet, a community resource, a nonprofit arts and culture organization – the events of 2020 year have stretched us in ways we could not have imagined.
But, in this year of unprecedented events, our journalists and staff quickly realized covering these events, communicating to our audience information they need to know, and bringing the community together is exactly what our mission is – this is what we are here to do.
The Good News
Beginning with the impeachment trial in January, KUAF has aired more live radio this year than ever before. Daily and weekly briefings from the Governor and the President, updates on policy changes for businesses, schools, sporting events and more – live radio allowed KUAF to give up-to-the-minute and vitally important information to thousands in our area.
Through our locally produced news segments in our morning newscasts, The Community Spotlight and in Ozarks at Large, we have produced hundreds of reports on the pandemic’s effect on our education system, our local businesses and nonprofits, our healthcare system, our arts organizations and more.
More importantly, our local reporters have told the stories of the people who have been affected – people facing unemployment, eviction, or hunger; people in populations dying at disproportionate rates; doctors and nurses working on the frontlines; the parents, teachers and children who have all had to adjust to a new and changing education system.
It is the personal stories of our neighbors who are suffering and our neighbors who are working to relieve suffering, that we are compelled to report. Our mission is to broadcast the highest-quality regional journalism, and in 2020, we have proven that we are equipped with the skills, the compassion and the facility to do so.
We, of course, did not do this work alone. Our partnerships have grown stronger this year – with The Fayetteville Roots Fest, who kept live music performances on our airwaves; with The Pryor Center for Oral and Visual History, who gave us context through other historic moments; with Dr. Lia Uribe and The U of A’s Department of Music, who expanded our audience’s musical boundaries with Sound Perimeter.
We created new partnerships as well with The Walton Family Foundation, whose funding made our education reporting project, The New Classroom, possible; and with The Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, who funded our second podcast project of the year, The Movement That Never Was: A People’s Guide to Anti-Racism in the South and Arkansas.
The Hard News
When social distancing began in mid-March, public radio stations across the country started to experience dramatic changes in their listenership.
After the initial spike in listening, as news was breaking, listenership shifted from the stalwart “tent poles” of the morning and afternoon drive times that have been the peak listening hours for public radio for decades. Car driving and radio listening have been so closely linked for so long, that the change in our commutes had a dramatic affect on audience numbers.
The good news is that the numbers slowly came back up, particularly around the election in November, with a record-breaking $6.8 million people tuning in nationwide during the week of the election. But FM listening numbers for KUAF have not yet returned to their pre-pandemic levels.
What stations are seeing now is that a move from terrestrial radio listening to digital listening has truly taken hold during this year. KUAF’s digital audience has grown 120% over this time last year and downloads of Ozarks at Large stories, morning newscasts and our podcasts series have reached 4,700 downloads a week.
This is not just a shift from FM listening to online and smart speaker listening, but also growth of a completely new group of KUAF listeners.
Membership revenue for KUAF has reflected this growth as well. KUAF ended fiscal year 2020 with more donations from individual members than ever before in our 35-year history. Our listeners have truly seen our public radio station through this difficult year.
While there is much to be proud of during this time, the financial realities of the next 12 to 24 months will be humbling. As local businesses and nonprofits continue to close or significantly cut their hours and services, projected losses in underwriting and the increasing financial stress on our listeners will be our obstacles in the year to come.
Looking Ahead
With more unprecedented events continuing to unfold – election results in dispute, vaccines being approved and distributed and the inauguration coming – KUAF will continue to bring the highest-quality news programming to thousands in our area.
We look forward to the day when we can engage with our community again in person – at Crystal Bridges for Artosphere’s Mozart in the Museum concert, at the Fayetteville Public Library for a live Roots Festival edition of Ozarks at Large, on the Fayetteville square for First Thursdays and on-campus events.
What makes public radio unique is our interaction with the community outside of the airwaves and we cannot wait to see you again, in person.
Until then we will continue to engage, inform, challenge and entertain with news, music, and personal stories as we have done for 35 years. 2020 has reminded us, as never before, how important our service is to the community and how we could simply not do this work without the support of our community.
Thank you for listening and for trusting your public radio station in 2020. Here’s to brighter days ahead.
About KUAF 91.3FM: Owned by the University of Arkansas, KUAF provides a 14-county area of west and northwest Arkansas, parts of eastern Oklahoma and southern Missouri with the only source of national and international news from NPR as well as a daily local news magazine “Ozarks at Large.” Serving a potential audience of over 600,000 people, KUAF also offers classical music during the nighttime hours and a variety of public radio programs on the weekends. Located across the street from the Fayetteville Public Library, at 9 S. School Avenue, KUAF is at the center of the intellectual and artistic hub of northwest Arkansas.