That string has, one hopes, been played out about as far as it can go
before it enters deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic category. It's hard, indeed,
to imagine much of a long-term future for commercial music radio in large
markets, with so many younger potential listeners now firmly glued to
other ways (not just iPods, but services such as Pandora) to find new
music.

Back to that "fundamentals" argument, though - there are still things that
radio can do, structurally, that "new media" ought to be fighting to catch
up with. Take the election campaign that just wound down after, what, two
years? It drew millions of new participants, many of them precisely the
young demographic radio should seek to reach, into the political
conversation for the first time, and converse they did, everywhere from
Free Republic to Daily Kos to the comments page of newspaper websites
to...well, just about everywhere except radio, where the talk
establishment sounded, for the most part, no different than it did in
1996, resulting in solid ratings among the format's core listeners - and
no measurable growth in the younger demographics that radio needs to
attract to survive.

Replacing two hours of Bill O'Reilly in middays with three hours of Fred
Thompson won't fix that problem (and the lackluster presentation of so
much "progressive" talk radio won't do it either; it's not by chance that
Rachel Maddow became a breakout star in 2008 not by virtue of her
relatively obscure radio show, but thanks instead to the spotlight of
MSNBC on TV.)

No, it will take a concerted effort by radio owners and programmers to
seek out new voices and to train them to do good radio. Small-market
stations can do their part by rebuilding the farm system that all but
vanished as automation took over from the minimum-wage jocks, newspeople
and board ops who had their chances to make mistakes in Dunkirk and Du
Bois and Dover before striking out for the big time - but there have to be
opportunities up the food chain, too, in order to make a career in radio
something worth dreaming about again. As medium-market stations become
less expensive to buy, and thus less risky to experiment with, their
owners need to be prepared to invest once again in content - or run the
risk of entering the same death spiral that has newspapers in its grip.

In the long run, we may still be on the downward part of the slope, at
least for big-time terrestrial radio as we've known it for almost nine
decades. The days when any one station, or DJ, could pull a 40 share (or
even, in a big market, a 4 share) won't likely return in today's fractured
media landscape. The means of delivery may yet change, if the
long-promised dream of universal wireless broadband ever materializes (and
it should be noted that it was "right around the corner" even back in
1999.) Some signals will (and probably should) go silent, and some jobs
will never come back. The old ways of doing business may need to give way
to some creative destruction, too; radio has been far too slow to move
past the idea of the :60 spot as the universal advertising medium, and
that, too, will have to change.

What doesn't change, though, is the fundamental idea of mass
communications. In a world where everyone's a content creator, this radio
true believer thinks there's still a place for that trusted voice sitting
behind a microphone, giving his or her community the information - or the
entertainment - they need and still want.

The big publicly-traded companies and the venture capitalists damaged that
trust over the last few years, not out of malice but simply by doing what
they were designed to do - squeezing out short-term profits to the
exclusion of all else. An overabundance of new regulation could yet damage
radio's fragile future, too, if the new FCC isn't careful. (We'll explore
that sticky set of issues later this year, once we have a better sense of
the Commission's new leadership and direction.)

But hope for the future of radio, in some form, is not gone. It is not
beyond salvaging. There is still magic to be had in these old airwaves,
for those with the patience and vision to see beyond the short-term gloom.

---

quote:

As medium-market stations become
less expensive to buy, and thus less risky to experiment with, their
owners need to be prepared to invest once again in content - or run the
risk of entering the same death spiral that has newspapers in its grip.

---

Interesting reading on this weekends NERW that he posts. Concerning the many changes, evidently more than here, on New England Radio, particularly the CBS Radio changes there.

http://www.fybush.com/nerw.html?125,89

Check it out, the link above is excellent radio reading!

Here's my favorite quote from it:

"Who's to blame? Nobody - and everybody. For this is just another sign, really, of the utter breakdown of the compact that broadcasters once made with the public: they'd get stewardship of a scarce, precious resource - in this case, the mighty 50,000-watt signal that blankets New England and the northeast at night - in exchange for the responsibility of using that voice in the public interest. If they slipped in that responsibility - say, by abandoning any pretense of covering the news after 8 at night - there were consequences, in the form of license-renewal hassles. And for taking on that responsibility, they were rewarded in the form of healthy profits, year after year.

Now that system is in shambles."

That is correct. The public no longer views radio as a reliable source for information in an emergency. They can go on line, but that's useless without power. If they're driving, they're out of luck unless they have phone texting. The younger demos are good at that and that's what they do. Radio, especially talk radio continues to be good entertainment for old, grouchy white men since most of the syndicated stuff is made for that demo.

Plenty of younger people listen to talk radio, BTW.

Given sufficient attention is paid to relevancy that is important to them, the format is going no where soon.

There is lots of basic human drama present on talk radio programs. People find this entertaining on many levels. Where that is true, they will listen, leaving it only a matter of how many stations are viable in any given market, not if the stations themselves are viable.

Yes young people listen to talk radio. How many songs do you hear with Howard Stern during his show. Or loveline or Tom Leykis...

> The younger demos are good at that [using text messaging] and that's what they do.

On the subject of emergencies and disasters, one trend that I find very dangerous is that people are shifting from communications techniques that require very little infrastructure (broadcast radio, CB radio, etc.) to more sophisticated techniques that require a great deal of infrastructure (Internet, mobile phones, text messaging, etc.). If disaster occurs that is serious enough to knock out key parts of the cellular network (i.e. fiber optic cables get cut, cell towers get destroyed, etc.), then those young people are going to be s*it out of luck when the text messaging doesn't work.

Somewhat of a specious argument.

If disaster occurs serious enough to knock out key parts of the cellular network -- what would make radio towers, radio news gathering equipment, or local radio buildings and employees immune to same disaster?

A lot of creativity and ingenuity is used to stay on the air and get the information out over the air when disaster strikes.

The real problem is that almost everyone who has such experience has already been fired due to budget concerns...

Seriously!

There is one thing about radio that differentiates it from cells and networks in general. Let's say it gets bad. Really bad, as in the network is down, towers are down, and they are gonna stay down kind of bad.

With a small transmitter, and a simple long wire, people can be informed almost no matter what. Could be a coupla guys with a generator getting it done. And so what, if a few little rules get broken. It's a rough time. Stuff gets done, and the people who can get that stuff done are important. (that's both Radio Professionals and Amateurs alike)

That expectation used to be in play. For those who grok radio, it still is. For most people, it rapidly isn't, and that's just wrong.

When there are just millions of perfectly servicable AM radios just laying around, and when we drop the same out of airplanes to get the word out to people in other nations, the idea that we can somehow just forget that simple bit is just astounding to me.

It's cheap. It's extremely robust. And it's mature.

WTF??

During this last snow storm, I scanned the dial once. KXL was boasting they were the only live signal on right now. (was some morning) Think about that...

It's not pretty.

As I posted in a somewhat unpopular thread, it's ugly enough to make a solid case for regulation. Even brutal regulation. Less radio over all, but radio that exhibits the valuable attributes of radio, is way better for us than this thing we have now, which acts kind of like a content delivery system wannabe. All of the costs and risks, with none of the joy...

I think of all the quality people, who love this stuff, out of work, unable to do what they do, and it just sucks.

Fybush has another great post this weekend, continuing the subject a week later on the WBZ fiasco and how it relates to other things and the state of radio today.

Check it out.

Here's a link!

http://fybush.com/nerw.html

great writing on a sad subject!