I'd like to think no one here is that juvenile, but I'm guessing that you've experienced this and know better.DavidEduardo said:
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Radio is in BIG trouble
- Thread starter wpiv926
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I participated in yesterday's "Infinite Dial 2009" webinar by Edison Resarch & Arbitron--something I've been doing for the past few years. It's a great way to keep things in proper perspective regarding traditional/terrestrial radio (AM/FM) and the various emerging digital media we either co-opt or compete with.
The report says radio's reach/usage (cume rating) is now at 92 percent, so we've lost one percent over the past couple of years. But, as I've said before on this board-and-thread, that's still enormous.
Online radio/audio/streaming is up to 17 percent, a gain of 31 percent just in the past year--but still relatively tiny.
Think FM in say, 1970. And think of terrestrial radio as AM in 1970. But whether we follow a similar script from here on out, only time will tell...
BTW, you can find the "Infinite Dial 2009" study on either www.edisonresearch.com or www.arbitron.com.
The report says radio's reach/usage (cume rating) is now at 92 percent, so we've lost one percent over the past couple of years. But, as I've said before on this board-and-thread, that's still enormous.
Online radio/audio/streaming is up to 17 percent, a gain of 31 percent just in the past year--but still relatively tiny.
Think FM in say, 1970. And think of terrestrial radio as AM in 1970. But whether we follow a similar script from here on out, only time will tell...
BTW, you can find the "Infinite Dial 2009" study on either www.edisonresearch.com or www.arbitron.com.
It all goes back to the most basic question: What business are we in? Radio? If so, that's a limitation. Content? If so, then we need to concentrate more on that. Advertising? If so, we need to expand our product base quickly. Communication? Some of us could use a refresher course. Broadcasting? That's not a growing business. See what I mean? All are good answers to the basic question. It points out that we all approach what we do from a different perspective, so there is no one single, simple answer. It all points back to one's interpretation of what we do. I can tell you that the answer to the most basic question is different even within a single company or station. Those who are in the programming department will have a different answer from those in the sales department. Doesn't make either answer more right than the other. They're just different POVs
But if we're comparing radio and the internet the way we once compared AM & FM (and that's a good analogy), the next step we take depends on the answer to the most basic question. And if the answer is that we're in the broadcasting business, I can understand why some might be hesitant to put a lot of money and resources into the internet. Because the internet is a very different beast from a radio station.
But if we're comparing radio and the internet the way we once compared AM & FM (and that's a good analogy), the next step we take depends on the answer to the most basic question. And if the answer is that we're in the broadcasting business, I can understand why some might be hesitant to put a lot of money and resources into the internet. Because the internet is a very different beast from a radio station.
WFMU is a good example of a station that IS getting it right.
I hate to say that getting rid of the "office people" is the answer, but radio WAS a lot more interesting and fun when DJs had
freedom. College radio is the last place where heavy handed control hasn't yet stifled the DJ.
I know WFMU is no longer a college staition, but they still have the spark......
I hate to say that getting rid of the "office people" is the answer, but radio WAS a lot more interesting and fun when DJs had
freedom. College radio is the last place where heavy handed control hasn't yet stifled the DJ.
I know WFMU is no longer a college staition, but they still have the spark......
TheBigA said:
They don't even show in the ratings. Even recognizing that the signal does not cover the full metro, even then there are plenty of equvalent stations that do show, and well.
Just because Mc Donald's "shows well in the ratings", and is available everywhere won't get me to eat there.
I patronize many businesses that aren't "successful" by modern business metrics.
Great artists seldom have someone standing right next to them feeding them constant input on "how they're doing".
If they were that insecure, they probably wouldn't be artists.
Business, on the other hand, is very insecure, and often tries to measure whatever they can, hoping it will reflect on the immeasurable and intangible aspects where the true value resides. I've watched my last employer waste money on silly "best business practices", and
actually listened to them propose they should start defining how long certain problems/malfunctions take to rectify.
As if all problems and malfunctions were created equal. As an engineer, I know such an idea is pure foolishness, but business
is about "keeping busy", those with real work waiting for them have no problem staying busy.
Last night I enjoyed 2-3 hours of WSM driving from Chicago to Indiana and back, and while WSCR's iboc was off, it was strong and clear as a local, with no fades. I know that's not helping WSM from any modern "business" standard of measurement, but it helped ME, and served my interest, necessity, etc. I also know that others DO listen outside the Nashville metro area.
Don't lose track of the concept that radio was made for the listeners, not the listeners for the radio.
I'm not criticizing, just pointing out the different perspective of listeners vs those in the business.
I patronize many businesses that aren't "successful" by modern business metrics.
Great artists seldom have someone standing right next to them feeding them constant input on "how they're doing".
If they were that insecure, they probably wouldn't be artists.
Business, on the other hand, is very insecure, and often tries to measure whatever they can, hoping it will reflect on the immeasurable and intangible aspects where the true value resides. I've watched my last employer waste money on silly "best business practices", and
actually listened to them propose they should start defining how long certain problems/malfunctions take to rectify.
As if all problems and malfunctions were created equal. As an engineer, I know such an idea is pure foolishness, but business
is about "keeping busy", those with real work waiting for them have no problem staying busy.
Last night I enjoyed 2-3 hours of WSM driving from Chicago to Indiana and back, and while WSCR's iboc was off, it was strong and clear as a local, with no fades. I know that's not helping WSM from any modern "business" standard of measurement, but it helped ME, and served my interest, necessity, etc. I also know that others DO listen outside the Nashville metro area.
Don't lose track of the concept that radio was made for the listeners, not the listeners for the radio.
I'm not criticizing, just pointing out the different perspective of listeners vs those in the business.
TheBigA said:
There are some elements of fact, truth and wisdom in what both of you posted.
If RADIO is a "mass medium" then we could say the RESTAURANTS are a "mass eat-ium". ;D
If too many people begin avoiding McDonalds, they will be missed. That is not happening. Yet.
Very few if any individual radio stations, or in keeping with the McDonald's image, very few if any CHAINS of commonly owned radio stations are a MASS MEDIUM within themselves.
All of us who come to the discussion table with fond memories of radio as we once knew it.... back in the day as we sometimes say.... like to think that there was a time that every individual radio station was "bustin it's butt" to be something special. And we know that they were often less than great, but they tried, and we liked what some of them did. (Sometimes even those who in hindsight were something of a failure gave us listening pleasure because we were not experts on good radio vs. busted radio.)
As long as McDonolds sells enough burgers to be profitable, we will not call them a failure, even if their food sucks and we choose not to eat there. There have been other food chains that sold food I loved but they went bust.
Our problem in discussing radio is our inability sometimes to separate (1) what I like. (2) what is good business. (3) what is audience attracting programming. (4) What is a valid contributor to civilization.
If only our discussions were disrupted by this inability, that would be no problem. However it appears that station owners, advertisers, government regulators and the public at large all suffer from the inability to separate.
Our other distuption in discussion comes when some people talk about "what is" while others talk about "trending toward this in the future".
Such is life.
Goat Rodeo Cowboy said:
I agree. The radio station that seeks to program to "what I like" is destined to have an audience of one. You can't stay in business that way. As for contributing to civilization, that's a matter of opinion. Susan Boyle is proving you don't have to be young or pretty to be a star. She's attracting huge audiences on YouTube, and radio should be playing her. That business model works for radio, and people in radio NEED to be linked in to what people are talking about.
My little part of the world experienced an event this past Monday that has caused me to think over all the logic, pro and con, about a media's relationship to a civilization, and what if any responsibility do they have to be "of service".
Last Friday night we had serious storms and tornado sightings. The big heady-duty station in Gainesville, GA was doing what we dream of radio being able to do when the rain let up enough for us to dash from the restaurant to our car. They brought in one of their top morning personalities and they cleared the boards, including a minor-league baseball game and they were taking calls from the public, from police departments, making calls to public agencies and giving us a play-by-play from their weather radar. Mucho Atta-boy's to WDUN.
Monday morning I slept in, got up sometime after 8 and gathered in the newspaper. Dreary. Cloudy. Nothing spectacular that I could see. An hour later might lights blinked. and again. and again. And then about 9:30 they went out. They came back on at 6:30 P.M. for an hour, and then went out for another two hours.
Picture this: I am sitting in a dark house. No TV. No Internet. I go to the radio. The big boys in Gainesville are running their morning Talk Show. At Noon they are running Rush followed by Hannity.
No weather, No news about power.
I switch to the Atlanta's heavy-duty WSB, 50KW, 750 on the dial. We're running talk, talk, talk, talk. I don't care how many helicopters, newsmobiles or whatever, no news about power being out.
My sister calls from Alabama wanting to know how bad the storm is. What storm. There is no storm here. My power is out is my only problem. She says: NO, I'm looking at your lake on The Weather Channel. Docks breaking loose. Overturned. You are having a storm and I can see it on TV.
And I tell here they must be showing scenes from Friday night because I "don't got no stinkin storm!"
Turns out within 10 miles of my house there were apparently "straight winds" of 50 to 70 mph. Docks are breaking loose and blowing away. Boats are overturn. Trees are down on power lines.
I live in a county of 160,000 people and I don't have a radio station that can quit nursing from the Talk Satellite long enough to tell me why my power is out, and what hope I have that it will return in this lifetime.
Mr. Boortz, the big talker on WSB in Atlanta who is syndicated across the country like to make the point that broadcasting has changed. The broadcasters have paid a fee to the government and now the BROADCASTER owns the channel, it no longer belongs to the PUBLIC. Broadcasters no longer are trustees and caretakers of a publicly owned bandwidth as we used to express it.
So. When floods come to Fargo, When blizzards come to southwestern Kansas, when tornadoes come to North Georgia, does civilization have any claim that the radio broadcast frequencies require some kind of stewardship by the occupants of that frequency? Is the station a licensee or is the station an OWNER, free to make maximum economic use of the frequency with no consideration due to the people living in the shadow of that tower?
Things that make you go..... hmmmmmmm.
Holland Cooke has a thread going where he is to some extent suggesting that what is needed now is for a third tier of talkers to arise so that in every metro market there can be a station carrying the front line like Rush and Hannity, another station will have the secondary talkers who are currently doing exactly that, and then a third station will have access to yet another level of national talkers.
After three talk stations milk a market for advertising revenue, but sit back and say: "Oh, we can't interrupt the national feed and deprive our loyal listeners." will there be enough revenue left for a fourth and fifth station to fund a news department that might be able to track a tornado, or a blizzard, or a power outage covering 4 counties.
P.S. I have a weather radio and it never beeped during this entire ordeal! So much for the idea that maybe we should have a government operated station to take care of emergency information. After all, we wouldn't want to inconvenience the talk addicts. ;D
Last Friday night we had serious storms and tornado sightings. The big heady-duty station in Gainesville, GA was doing what we dream of radio being able to do when the rain let up enough for us to dash from the restaurant to our car. They brought in one of their top morning personalities and they cleared the boards, including a minor-league baseball game and they were taking calls from the public, from police departments, making calls to public agencies and giving us a play-by-play from their weather radar. Mucho Atta-boy's to WDUN.
Monday morning I slept in, got up sometime after 8 and gathered in the newspaper. Dreary. Cloudy. Nothing spectacular that I could see. An hour later might lights blinked. and again. and again. And then about 9:30 they went out. They came back on at 6:30 P.M. for an hour, and then went out for another two hours.
Picture this: I am sitting in a dark house. No TV. No Internet. I go to the radio. The big boys in Gainesville are running their morning Talk Show. At Noon they are running Rush followed by Hannity.
No weather, No news about power.
I switch to the Atlanta's heavy-duty WSB, 50KW, 750 on the dial. We're running talk, talk, talk, talk. I don't care how many helicopters, newsmobiles or whatever, no news about power being out.
My sister calls from Alabama wanting to know how bad the storm is. What storm. There is no storm here. My power is out is my only problem. She says: NO, I'm looking at your lake on The Weather Channel. Docks breaking loose. Overturned. You are having a storm and I can see it on TV.
And I tell here they must be showing scenes from Friday night because I "don't got no stinkin storm!"
Turns out within 10 miles of my house there were apparently "straight winds" of 50 to 70 mph. Docks are breaking loose and blowing away. Boats are overturn. Trees are down on power lines.
I live in a county of 160,000 people and I don't have a radio station that can quit nursing from the Talk Satellite long enough to tell me why my power is out, and what hope I have that it will return in this lifetime.
Mr. Boortz, the big talker on WSB in Atlanta who is syndicated across the country like to make the point that broadcasting has changed. The broadcasters have paid a fee to the government and now the BROADCASTER owns the channel, it no longer belongs to the PUBLIC. Broadcasters no longer are trustees and caretakers of a publicly owned bandwidth as we used to express it.
So. When floods come to Fargo, When blizzards come to southwestern Kansas, when tornadoes come to North Georgia, does civilization have any claim that the radio broadcast frequencies require some kind of stewardship by the occupants of that frequency? Is the station a licensee or is the station an OWNER, free to make maximum economic use of the frequency with no consideration due to the people living in the shadow of that tower?
Things that make you go..... hmmmmmmm.
Holland Cooke has a thread going where he is to some extent suggesting that what is needed now is for a third tier of talkers to arise so that in every metro market there can be a station carrying the front line like Rush and Hannity, another station will have the secondary talkers who are currently doing exactly that, and then a third station will have access to yet another level of national talkers.
After three talk stations milk a market for advertising revenue, but sit back and say: "Oh, we can't interrupt the national feed and deprive our loyal listeners." will there be enough revenue left for a fourth and fifth station to fund a news department that might be able to track a tornado, or a blizzard, or a power outage covering 4 counties.
P.S. I have a weather radio and it never beeped during this entire ordeal! So much for the idea that maybe we should have a government operated station to take care of emergency information. After all, we wouldn't want to inconvenience the talk addicts. ;D
Goat Rodeo Cowboy said:
Practically speaking, the answer is the latter. That may shock a lot of people who still pull out some tired 1920s language about public service. But it no longer applies. The owner of a car is licensed to drive that car. In the absence of police, he might exceed the speed limit or make an illegal turn. So practically speaking, there is no consequence. That is what happened to broadcasting starting in the early 1980s. An entire generation has lived this way. So one can assume it's the way it is.
Regarding your weather and power situation, it's just one of those things. The fact that the weather radio didn't cover the storm tells me that even if a radio station wasn't nursing the talk shows, they would not have reported your storm, because we get our weather information from the same source.
I'm sure the PD of Now 93 in New York will be spinning her 200 times next week.
Not a valid analogy. Anyone can own a car. Only licensed drivers can drive a car, regardless of ownership.
Regarding GRC's story: it seems extremely odd to cover an event wall-to-wall and then act as though it never happened the next day. But this seems to happen a lot as far as weather events are concerned. Not just in radio, but in all news media.
Practically speaking, the answer is the latter. That may shock a lot of people who still pull out some tired 1920s language about public service. But it no longer applies. The owner of a car is licensed to drive that car. In the absence of police, he might exceed the speed limit or make an illegal turn. So practically speaking, there is no consequence. That is what happened to broadcasting starting in the early 1980s. An entire generation has lived this way. So one can assume it's the way it is.
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You think of it as 1920's language. It was also 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s language. In our society we have become at lot less structured and regimented about a lot of things. Witness the freedom the financial services industries grabbed in the last 15 years and where it has put us. Stand by for the backlash.
We have figured it out that the IRS is not looking over our shoulder quite as relentlessly as we once thought, but when to DO get caught, stand by for the backlash.
Where I live we enacted this damnable free-market natural gas vending concept. We have found that some of the competing marketers take the attitude: We are free to screw whomever we can and wish to. A couple of more years of this and stand by for the backlash.
I have no prediction for the broadcasting business. Will stronger regulation return? will regulation basically go away? If regulation does not return, there will eventually be some resulting situations that will leave broadcasters scratching their heads and saying: How did we get in this mess? One is the zoning of broadcast towers. As long as a community has an attitude that broadcasting belongs to the people and licensees have some obligations to their communities, your lawyer can put the arm on local zoning to see that zoning a tower is giving a benefit to the owners of the frequency, the people. Once the zoning people accept the fact that the broadcaster is just one more business looking for the best bargain they can get, broadcast towers will rank right there with garbage transfer stations, cremation facilities, junkyards, and jails for sympathy votes from zoning regulators. (Some would say we are already there, and we can thank our cell-phone tower friends for the harshness at city hall.)
It looks like the current administration is going to give Greenhouse Gases a new prominence in Federal thinking. I think it is safe to say banking is going to face a whole new attitude from regulators. Thanks to the peanut scare our friends who process foods for a living are waking up to a newly formatted dawn. I will agree with most of your view on WHERE broadcasting is TODAY on regulation. Tomorrow? I making no bets, taking no bets.
I don't how many of you watch Bill Moyers Journal. If you did not see last night's program with David Simon who developed the five year run of "The Wire" on HBO, it would be worth the hour it takes to watch it on-line on the PBS website.
I watched the first half last night. After writing the previous message here, I watched the second half of the program. If you are conservative, watching this program will be painful.... no, MORE painful. Take your blood pressure medicine first. Anyone who does not find this program painful.... check with your mortician who may be leaning over you by now.
The first 10 minutes of the second half speaks directly to some of the issues involved in the regulation and non-regulation of broadcasting. If broadcasters are NOT going to include serious journalism in their portfolio along with everything else........ who is?
Can the empire survive if NOBODY plays the role?
I watched the first half last night. After writing the previous message here, I watched the second half of the program. If you are conservative, watching this program will be painful.... no, MORE painful. Take your blood pressure medicine first. Anyone who does not find this program painful.... check with your mortician who may be leaning over you by now.
The first 10 minutes of the second half speaks directly to some of the issues involved in the regulation and non-regulation of broadcasting. If broadcasters are NOT going to include serious journalism in their portfolio along with everything else........ who is?
Can the empire survive if NOBODY plays the role?
Goat Rodeo Cowboy said:
I watched it. I think we're going through a phase. It may not last. Those who are serious journalists will always be compelled to report, and they have more power than ever to go directly to the public without gatekeepers. Their audience just might be smaller than it used to be. Then again, even Edward R. Murrow had to do celebrity interviews in order to occasionally do CBS Reports.
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