Drop in Core KUSC Listeners Led to Fiscal Woes, Study Says

Looking to see why KUSC-FM (91.5) was $500,000 in the red for fiscal 1996, a USC task force has concluded that the public radio station was losing its core audience of classical music listeners.

“The fundamental thing was that our audience was basically falling away from us . . . and we weren’t attracting a new and different audience,” Jane Pisano, the university’s vice president of external relations and a member of the task force, said Tuesday.

In apparent anticipation of this conclusion, the station, under acting General Manager Stephen Lama, returned to a virtually all-classical program lineup Oct. 7. The changeover came after the sudden resignation on Sept. 27 of Wallace A. Smith, USC’s longtime president and general manager, who had spearheaded the controversial move to an eclectic mix of classical, jazz, folk and world music.

USC’s 15-page report about KUSC, encompassing an audience analysis and a detailed fiscal evaluation, was issued last Friday, but the university is providing only Pisano’s oral summary to the public.

Pisano disclosed that over the past three years, the station had lost 8,000 subscribers--from 26,500 to 18,500. That direct loss in donations, coupled with a loss in underwriting support, produced the $500,000 loss on KUSC’s $4.8-million budget for the year that ended June 30, she said.

In recent years, KUSC had run “smaller deficits [though] not every year,” she said.

Pisano dismissed suggestions by those close to the previous management that the university itself, as KUSC’s licensee, might have contributed to the problem by charging the station for internal costs such as rent, electricity and legal services--while providing only a small in-kind subsidy in return. Calling that information an “internal matter,” she declined to disclose what those net costs were but called the rent issue a “red herring.”

Tom Thomas, a consultant to Station Resource Group, a think tank for the nation’s public radio system, said that of the 30 or so public stations nationally that are operated by private universities, KUSC “receives among the least from the licensee and has among the greatest of obligations.”

Asked about this, Pisano said: “The university holds KUSC to the same standard that it holds all academic and auxiliary revenue units. Sound financial management is needed in order to hold the line on increasing tuition costs.”

To bring its budget in balance, Pisano noted, KUSC in mid-October shed 11 employees from the engineering, development and accounting departments. She added that the station will “contract out some [off-air] fund-raising services. The point is, the radio station is back to the basics with a whole lot less expenses than it had before.”

As for Lama, who is also KUSC’s music director, Pisano said that “there are no plans at the moment to change [his] general manager status. We are not going to do a search until we stabilize the station.” She suggested that that would happen in about six months. In response to a question, she indicated Lama would be a candidate for the top post.

Between now and the end of June, further adjustments will be made, Pisano said. Meanwhile, the station will hold a major subscriber fund-raiser between Dec. 13 and 20.