We’re adding The State We’re In on Sunday mornings 6 a.m. The program features first-person stories from around the world about how we treat each other. Then, after On Being at 7 a.m., enjoy an additional hour of Weekend Edition Sunday from 8-11 a.m., followed by A Prairie Home Companion from 11 a.m. - 1 p.m.
At 1 p.m., enjoy a rebroadcast of Saturday morning favorite Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me, followed at 2 p.m. by This American Life. At 3 p.m., you’ll hear Fresh Air Weekend, a collection of the best recent arts and culture interviews, and then On The Media at 4 p.m., All Things Considered at 5 p.m., and Says You at 6 p.m.
Robert Resnik’s All The Traditions folk music program will move to evenings from 7-10 p.m. And at 10 p.m., round out the evening with the second hour of To The Best of Our Knowledge (the first hour airs on Saturdays at 2 p.m.)
We’re also making one addition to our Saturday schedule: you can now hear A Way With Words Saturday mornings at 6 a.m.
We hope you’ll check out the new sound of Sundays on VPR and let us know what you think!
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Update for 1/10/12:Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback about VPR’s new Sunday program lineup. Hearing your comments reminds us how important a responsibility we have to our listeners and supporters. It’s a responsibility we take very seriously, and while we know that we’ll never be able to get it exactly right for everyone, we carefully consider any change in programming and these adjustments were made after much deliberation.
We wanted to update this post to answer a few of the questions we’ve been asked over the last week.
Why move All The Traditions to evenings?
Our goal with this change was to provide listeners with a consistent experience seven days a week, with news and information during the day, music in the evening and overnight news with the BBC. All The Traditions is a Sunday fixture on VPR, and we felt that moving the program to evenings would coincide with the time of day when listeners can unwind and enjoy music, while reinforcing our commitment to locally-hosted music by making it available every night of the week. While not everyone has embraced the new time of day yet, a few listener comments from yesterday included:
"I am so thrilled to have the program with me n Sunday evening! The only
problem is that I had to forfeit Masterpiece Theater on Public television, as I was enjoying your program too much to turn on the tele(vision)."
"Congratulations on your evening program. It started out with a bang...Dylan rocks! Please bring back the blues. We were dancing in the kitchen and enjoying a look back to "the good 'ole days" as you said. We appreciate your program and will be listening to every program."
Why are Living On Earth, Selected Shorts, and Studio 360 no longer part of VPR’s Sunday schedule?
These programs were a part of the VPR News schedule for many years, but unfortunately, they didn’t gain a lot of traction with listeners. At the same time, environmental and arts reporting, as well as storytelling, has become widely available in other programs that we carry. As a result, we decided to try something new by providing music programming on Sunday evenings as we do Monday through Saturday.
You can listen to or download these shows online:
Why are you rebroadcasting programs like Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me and Fresh Air?
These programs are some of the most popular programs on VPR, and we wanted to provide an additional opportunity for people to access them.
How does VPR make programming decisions?
As a statewide public radio network, it’s a challenge to provide the right programming lineup for every listeners - impossible, in fact. However, we are constantly monitoring our programs and our public radio colleagues around the country to make sure we are serving our audience as a whole in the best possible way.
We make programming decisions based on a number of factors: listener feedback, our Community Forum, audience data, and the experiences of other public radio stations.
While VPR has one of the highest rates of listening, per capita, in the country, Sunday listening to VPR has always been relatively low compared to stations of similar size. In our research of those stations, we discovered that all of them reserved the weekend evening hours for music, but maintained a daytime schedule of news, information, humor and lifestyle programming. That is the primary factor that led us to decide to try this new lineup.
While the transition to the new schedule may jolt some of our listeners, we truly believe that over time, the new programming line-up will attract more listeners and prove to be a satisfying mix for a majority of those who tune in. Again, we realize that we'll never get it just right for everyone, but I want to assure you that we're doing everything we can to make sure we're serving as many listeners as possible, in the best possible way.
We hope you will stay tuned and thank you for your support and loyalty.
