NPR cancelled the Bryant Park Project after only nine months of existence. The announcement was made last week and the last show will be aired tomorrow morning. The BPP was launched as an attempt to draw a younger audience. Its tone is light and conversational and its news stories deal with various subjects such as politics, culture and sports. It also relies on a strong web presence: its website features a blog, sound clips, videos and articles. The show also makes an original use of social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter.
The BPP was actually picked by very few NPR member stations. Most users listen to the show online or through podcasting, but that was enough to draw an audience of about one million unique listeners in April and May, according to the New York Times. In spite of this success, NPR decided to cancel the show because of its cost (it had a first-year budget of $2 millions.)
The show’s cancellation drew reactions from hundreds of angry listeners on its website as well as elsewhere in the web community. Many feel that it could be continued as an entirely web-based program, and that opinion is shared by the BPP’s staff. In my opinion, this is how it should have been created in the first place. Most NPR member stations and listeners were obviously not ready to give up on the Morning Edition, NPR’s traditional morning program. Traditional news media seem so scared to explore the possibilities that the web has to offer, they seem unable to give up on their usual format and to realize that there is an audience out there that is receptive to new ideas and concepts. It is a scary and difficult task to accomplish, I know, but as long as they don’t understand that the way they’ve been working for decades is not suitable for new technologies, the only online news sources that will be successful will be blogs and social networking services (and I want something better than that.)
