On Point’s listeners love to let us know what they think. Maybe it’s because our origins include taking live listener phone calls. The fact that On Point’s listeners know that we don’t do that anymore — and that their calls go straight to voicemail today — doesn’t stop them from calling in. Those voicemails are automatically transcribed and sent to an internal Slack channel so it’s easy to see how the audience is responding to a show in real time. And we’re paying attention!

In recent months one show stands out for the number of listeners who called and emailed (many to Meghna directly). It was an episode from late July looking into the Reuters Institute study that revealed that 40% of Americans actively avoid the news. Quite a few listeners called us to say that they too were actively avoiding the news (though seemingly still listening to On Point) because, to quote Sam who called us from Oregon, it’s “because it’s most depressing.” He told us that he “actually feels better” the less he follows the news. Others, like Joe in Massachusetts told us that in these times, he “cannot be an ostrich who buries his head in the sand or a child who feels that if he closes his eyes that the bad man will disappear.” Sylvia in Florida craved solutions. Marty in Maine enigmatically pondered, “What is news?”

I share this with you not just to demonstrate how engaged On Point’s listeners are but also because I think about listeners like these all the time. How can we best serve and engage them and, indeed, how should we be thinking about how we define news for a show (this one) that is committed to making sense of the world, and all that could mean? Given that we have an hour to explore each topic we take on, we have an opportunity to be highly selective about our approach. We’re intentional about the broad mix of topics we cover across a week, ensuring that we are mindful of but not handcuffed to the headlines, and most importantly, relevant to our listener’s lives.

I’m hoping that this newsletter can be the starting point of conversations that we would love to have with you in person in New Orleans! Meghna and I will beat this year’s Public Radio Content Conference to talk about how On Point is offering public radio listeners what they need in these times.

So, as a conversation starter, here are some of the questions I ask as I think of what makes a signature edition of On Point and example episodes that demonstrate it:

• Is it looking at something currently in “the news” with a different or original framing?
• Is it shining a light on a new or under reported story or highlighting an emerging story that our listeners should be paying attention to?
• Is it a story with layers (like an onion, peel one layer away, there’s another one there) that need the time we have in our hour to thoroughly explore? We gravitate to complexity and nuance.
• Is there an essential or universal truth to the story or topic, a thing to know?

Some thoughts to get us started….and I look forward to picking up the conversation in New Orleans!

See you there!

Jonathan Dyer
Executive Producer, On Point