Well, per Alan Pergament's column in today's News(which I cannot link to, because....paywall), Tom Bauerle will soon be moving to Florida and doing his PM drive talk show from there. It should be added that David Bellavia also does his show remotely. So I don't think THAT's happening.
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Buffalo Cumulus sells AM to Buddy Shula
- Thread starter exdjted
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Buffalo seems to have had many Radio hosts who left town and did their shows from other cities. So much for the LOCAL part of "Live & Local" as some on this forum have championed. The average listener would never know the difference anyway...
I think it's a little different when a life-long resident of a community decides to work remotely. They still have the background and contacts to call on to get updated on local issues and events. That's far different than an out-of-town voice-tracker taking over a time slot.
I'm aware of Janet Snyder doing her half of Kiss' morning show from Boston, MA(where I believe she now calls home).
So the next time Buffalo has a blizzard, Bauerle can give updates from Florida while he sits outside in 80 degree weather. Of course, a hurricane could make him unavailable this Summer.
Voice Tracking is common in Radio. It makes little difference where the person is located. Bauerle's relocation has been made public. Whether it matters ratings wise is TBD...
I don't think it will affect the ratings. Janet Snyder has been remote from Boston for years now. "Live and Local" sounds good, but in reality people just want good radio. They don't care if the studio is 20 miles away or 200 or 2000 miles away. They just want good radio.
The TV networks and their affiliates figured that out in the 50's. The Tonight Show... Steve Allen, Johnny Carson... worked better wherever they were than trying to do a local talk show. Radio took longer to figure that out, and some of the impediments were the costs of delivery... but viewers or listeners just look for the most fun, interesting or entertaining show. It does not matter where the studio is.
My guess is that next time Buffalo has a blizzard, a local voice will man the phones IF WBEN continues to provide the kind of coverage that they have in the past.
The reality is that it's not so much the location as it is the focus of the content. If the content is locally relatable, it matters less where the talent is located. If the talent has decades of familiarity with the place and the people who inhabit it, where they are at a particular moment is less important. Imagine Ryan Seacrest trying to relate to a blizzard in Buffalo. It just ain't happening.
He wouldn't need to "relate" to it, just get the details (especially names and locations of towns and streets) right and let his training as a radio professional do the rest. Radio is show business. DJs are actors. Plenty of them don't like/can't relate to the music they're playing or the celebrities they're interviewing, but their job is to convince the listeners they do, and the great ones always can.
You have mentioned this often and it's a valid point. But the talk show hosts you mentioned, along will essentially all who have followed, were all national TV celebrities who didn't pretend to be localized in each market where the show was carried.
While this is also true of some national radio hosts, mainly in the syndicated news-talk format, there are plenty of "national" and voice-tracked radio hosts in the U.S. pretending to be somewhere they're not in order to try to sound local, especially in music formats. It's usually pretty obvious that someone like Seacrest, for example, is in Los Angeles, not in your market, and to me the localization attempt always sounds deceptive. I would rather hear a host who embraces talking to listeners across the country, like the TV hosts you used in your example, than someone pretending to be next door in your little town when he's obviously not.
In the case of voice-tracked jocks, most of the breaks usually sound generic and often consist of shallow content that was trending on social media over the past few days. A lot of the audience likely already saw that stuff on their phones before the prerecorded breaks made it to air, so what's the point? In so many of these cases, the voice-tracked talking just ends up being pointless clutter where a straight music sweep would have been preferable.
The situation with a formerly local host like Bauerle now doing the show remotely doesn't really fit either of these scenarios. In my opinion a show like that being tailored to the market by someone who grew up there can still sound local and work pretty well, even from a distance.
I don't think it's people pretending to be somewhere they're not anymore than someone not local doing a commercial for a local business is. People generally have some expectation of tuning into the radio and knowing what's happening in the area. Where the person talking about it is doesn't really matter. Strong local talent will generally beat a voicetracked liner jock, but strong local talent isn't always easy to find.
When voicetracking is done well, it's the exact opposite of that. I will, however, agree with you that you'll hear a lot of that. That tends to happen when you have either one feed for your stations and/or one jock voicetracking for tons of stations. When you need someone who can do five hour shifts in 20 minutes, you tend to get generic and watered down content.
Let's also be realistic. How often do you hear live and local talent doing generic and boring breaks and shows with no real content? I notice it plenty. I had that debate with a PD and owner almost 20 years ago. I was telling them we should have a real website and not just the generic one that ABC/SMN provided for us. Since we were live and local half the day, we should be blogging and actively trying to drive people to our website. I was basically told that wasn't necessary and, since the jocks would be blogging while they were on-air, would take away from the overall product. Plenty of my takes haven't aged well, but I was ahead of my time with that one.
As someone very familiar with this (Larry Norton did the exact same thing with much clunkier tech at the time), I'd tend to agree. This is provided the producer and the on air talent are in lock step. I got screamed at everyday for 4.5 years via Skype to ensure NO ONE listening could tell Larry wasn't in the studio with us. That was the edict from managment.
The gripe I'd have with this in the aggregate is (yet again) the industry eating itself to supplant the grizzled veterans who are literally already out the door.
There ARE talented, eager, qualified people in the Buffalo market under say 45 that could do an incredible job in Baurle's chair, if given the chance.
But what do the suits do?
Stick with what sells. I get it. Sell ads. Make $.
But at some point, there won't be anyone left to run the ads if the suits don't supplant younger production and on-air talent.
How many talented, hard-working producers have come and gone from the local stations? WGR gets a new full time 20 something every 2 years.
Generational displacment may never happen at this point, with AI rising and budgets shrinking.
That could be said about giving time, temp, and traffic. Local news. It's all available on demand, if you look for it. Radio does the work of collating the information and delivers it to you verbally.
It really depends on the format and the interest of the listener. There are lots of options for local hosts in Buffalo, if that's what you want.
Sure, but it needs to be timely and relevant. I'm talking about the jock who rehashes the story about a viral social media topic that has been going around for days, that much of the audience has already seen pop up multiple times *without* actively looking for it.
This isn't just banging the drum for local hosts. The question is, what is the point of jock breaks on the radio today? Does the type of break described above, which I hear *all the time*, really offer anything of value to the listening experience, or is it just talk for talk's sake?
Last time I checked, people will typically say they don't like hearing talk on their favorite music stations, but I think they really do like hearing content that's truly interesting and entertaining. I just don't think the verbal rehashing of a story that's been going around social media for days, to the point of having already become ubiquitous, rises to that level. It's just lazy, pointless clutter.
I don't know that being disingenuous and able to fake it is a mark of greatness. Not speaking specifically to Seacrest, but while a capable pro may be able to do a passable job of such things, the best are authentic. John Peel lived his love for music. Limbaugh had a sense of theatrics, but he wasn't some liberal comedian pretending to be a conservative (that was the Colbert Report.) Stern played to the absurdity and shock value of his show and cast, but the first time I heard him he was talking about how he as a father insisted his daughters send Robin thank you notes for gifts she'd given them.
Can a professional talent do the basics and have empathy if something bad happens in Buffalo, even if they live in Boston? Sure. But without that lived experience or local connection, it simply isn't the same. Yes, it's an "intangible." But it's not a non-factor. And just as many people in the age of self-selected media reject the generic and "show business" trappings as are into it. The question for radio is when and where are those people also a viable market segment that allows them to turn a profit. Respectable pros on this board will tell you in most cases, they're not. I take their points and in many cases agree.
But if you can find your people, and there's enough of them, you can still do it right. KEXP figured it out on a non-comm level. That's a global station but it's also "Seattle" to its partisans. Buddy does it for an older demographic and mainstream formats in Buffalo. What powers all of this social media and influencer culture? Authenticity. Or at least the illusion thereof. It may be "enough" if you're acting. But real is the ideal.
I worked a lot of small time gigs in communities I wasn't from, and didn't understand. And until I formed actual human connections, got out in the community and understood and found a connection to what they valued, I was not the best broadcaster. I'd get compliments on my voice, my trivia about the music and artists. I'd read the local news. But until I had a connection to it, I never really sparked with the audience. There's plenty of people out there with great BS detectors. Authenticity builds trust and trust builds loyalty, and that brings results for clients. Yes, national stuff works, Seacrest and Bones and all have their place. But if you're in the local business, you better walk your talk.
If that's all it is, the station has no reason to pay for it. It's incumbent on talent to demonstrate their value. If they have none, then don't be surprised when they show you the door. There is no law that requires stations to hire local talent. If management says "keep it short," then make the most of it. Be creative with whatever time you have. That's what the legends did. A lot of them operated under strict :10 rules to keep talk to a minimum. They figured it out. If you call yourself talent, then act like it. Otherwise, don't apply for the job. If management isn't happy, then they can run jockless. Lots of stations doing it. We all know that WBUF got better ratings when they were jockless than now. If people want local talent, they can hear them every day at WYRK and 97 Rock.
The radio business clings to the past in so much of what it does. The most egregious example of that is morning shows leaning on the age-old crutch of prank phone call bits, a stunt that makes no sense in a generation of everyone owning phones with caller ID and call screening capabilities -- especially when the actual act of prank calling someone and putting them on the air without prior disclosure has been illegal under FCC rules for nearly 50 years.
But I view the type of breaks we're talking about during the rest of the day a holdover to the past, too. It goes back to the pre-internet, pre-iPhone era when the audience relied on DJs for time, temp and funny stories. These types of breaks haven't been relevant for at least 20 years now, and probably longer.
So why is there so much of it still being done now? Probably because that's the old radio stereotype still used today as the template by a lot of programmers and talent alike.
Because it works. People go to McDonalds and order the same thing, even when given options of salad or McRib.
Why not hire new talent? Because heritage works. Look at how popular the classic hits format is. What's driving that? People have other choices and they choose to hear 40 year old songs. It's not forced on them. They like familiar. That's why they stay married. Most people don't want new and different. They want to turn on the tap and have water come out. They don't want surprises.
Commercial radio is a business, not an art. You want art? Go to non-commercial radio. But if you tune in a commercial radio station, you should expect to hear hits done in a scientific way that's designed to get certain results or achieve certain goals. It's a business, not a hobby.
On the other hand, someone like Hubbard in Seattle sticks their neck out with a commercial AAA format, spends millions of dollars hiring local talent, giving them the freedom to pick music, and doing it all the right way, and after a year, it gets a 1 share. How does that encourage anyone else to take chances? I can give you many more examples, but that's the one that immediately comes to mind.
The audience HAS to take some responsibility for why radio sounds like it does. People aren't paying money for Spotify because of all the live & local talent they have. The audience makes that choice for a reason. It's not always because of the generic "radio industry." Sometimes people just want to hear what they want to hear.
A bit abstract for this board but statistically being married doesn't mean they don't seek novelty. Consider what one of the biggest revenue generators on the Internet is. Plenty of those people are married, but what's familiar to them isn't all they're after. Maybe not all the time, but why does McDonalds offer the McRib? It brings people in and they bring it back consistently because it's an event that scratches a novelty itch or craving among enough people to make money. I'll concur that radio has less pull in that arena than it used to, but it doesn't mean it's never valuable.
I like a lot of different types of music. I don't "hate" something because it's popular. But there's overload. I need a guide. I log into Spotify and I have a million options, but no clear direction of what's worth my time. So I'll play "Rumors." Does that mean I wouldn't want to hear something else if I knew what it was?
There are some stations I trust enough to balance that familiarity with curation, or a station that plays familiar stuff but rotates it in a way where I can get something pleasantly surprising within that boundary. Steve Jobs said once that people don't know what they want until you show it to them. I don't think that's everyone, but that's a large number of people that used to trust radio with that role. Some of them still miss it. Is that enough to make a business out of? Depends. Maybe not for "most" stations but maybe more than people think. Therein lies the constant programming debates on this board.
Hubbard got the music wrong at launch even with that money spent on consultants. They were hardly visible in the community, and the station they attempted to emulate was highly promotionally active. KPNW's promotional presence seemed to be an agreement with photographers to put up their concert photos on social media, the station never so much as had their own promotions director or street team to my knowledge. When you're in that kind of a market, you need to be doing that. Marco Collins developed a great segment on Fridays that management yanked about four weeks in. They spent tons on consulting, I don't know how much they spent to the talent. I'd bet good money the ratings wouldn't have been any worse if Fisher or Collins had done the music themselves. Perhaps better. That station should have done at least a 2 share. Now they're getting that. Could they have done it with Triple A? Absolutely.
Not possible to undo but it's not like in some cases "the industry" didn't drive them to it or fail to stake their own claim in those spaces when it could have made a difference. Hindsight is always 20/20. That being said, there were also factors that made the transition to digital worse - the streaming royalty issues, for one. Radio in other countries had a different regulatory climate. The irony is, people will bash that regulation but it also smoothed out some of the turbulence for broadcasters who'd put in a lot of work and investment in what they built. Why is it in Australia there's huge contests, big personalities and multiple DAB variants of formats? Because they didn't oversaturate the dial or overcharge "traditional" broadcasters to move onto the new platforms. Yes, there's also been financial pain, consolidation, etc. But it still thrives. We oversaturated one market segment (terrestrial signals) and hindered the transition to new media.
Nor can you blame an audience for the economics, which are a reality. I worked in a market where a great station had plenty of listeners, warmly embraced and engaged with it. But the advertising dollar wasn't there because they didn't feel they needed to, because "everyone knew they were there" in a fairly protected small market and the national money wasn't because it was too small. Great signal, great format, great audience. And not a single one of those who streamed it when they went back home from vacation or listened all day on their boat or at their lake cabin, could save it. You can give people what they want all day long but if they're not paying for it directly, it could go away overnight. And often does, just like KPNW.
To follow up my post from earlier, the WBEN matter with Bauerle DID get a thread of its own...and you'd be surprised at the discussion they're having about it.
On The Southern Ontario/WNY Radio-TV Forum » SOWNY look for the "Should a host doing a local talk show have to be in the same city?" thread.
On The Southern Ontario/WNY Radio-TV Forum » SOWNY look for the "Should a host doing a local talk show have to be in the same city?" thread.