Our local public radio station is at the end of the second week of it's quarterly fund-drive and with the extra week the donations are still more than $80,000 short. I gave up quite a while ago on the station because it doesn't serve us at all well. The only brief encounters I have are the clock-radio in the morning where I haven't setup a good podcast alternative yet. Apparently KNPR is aware that we listeners will turn to podcasting but there still seems to be a disconnect when it comes to how poor their services are for listeners in Southern Nevada. With that in mind here are some suggestions that might bring listeners back and get our donations to flow to them instead of the stations producing great programming:

• Reduce State of Nevada to a half-hour show. Many stations we heard on our recent trip many great local interest shows. None of them were two hours long and none were aired twice a day.
• Get a new host for State of Nevada. To be a good local interest show it is necessary to have someone with good interviewing skills. When I've endured the show the multiple questions barrages that allow the person being interviewed to cherry-pick which questions to answer are ineffective. A little research goes a long way too. The times where the host has missed the big question because the background was lacking are appalling.
• Take a look at the schedule from a listener's perspective. There are a lot of good shows on KNPR that are produced elsewhere but listeners are subjected to four hours a day of State of Nevada and must go to podcasts and elsewhere to get the shows they'd like to hear at reasonable times. Of course once they go to get the podcasts they realize just what they've been missing and don't come back.
• Get a real traffic reporter. Or at the least change services. KNPR's traffic reports (and the other stations that use the same service) are horrible. Anybody wanting good traffic information is forced to switch stations to get it
• When a tornado warning is posted in your listening area by the National Weather Service then it should be broadcast. Now that listeners in the rural areas know you'll skip them we need to turn to stations that will air them instead.
• Have competent engineers running the station. Repeatedly the errors of running music and intros on top of the program make shows unlistenable. It would be one thing if this happened once. When it happens week after week and the excuses are weak it just makes one turn to podcasts which the producers don't seem to screw up nearly so frequently.

So those are a few ideas which will likely fall on deaf ears. This is, after all, a station that seems more interested in being "on the edge" than being good. Who, after-all asked for our NPR station to send us a glossy magazine? Maybe the mnagement should download the Living on Earth podcast and learn about the waste they are creating.