Lemme see what I got here Joe, good conversation IMO regardless of how much/little we agree
jpedicino said:
I can't speak for the stations where you grew up...
Just FTR, north Georgia (Pickens County to be exact).
It sounds to me like you never listened to radio for the content anyway.
I would disagree with that phrasing, because it
was the content that was driving me to listen ... except that the primary motivating factor
was the music. Just semantics probably, but then again, in a non-talk format music makes up the largest part of the on-air content. Not the announcers, not the spots, but the music. Word choice aside, I'll generally agree with what I believe you were getting at: I can count on one hand with fingers left over the number of on-air people (in non-talk formats) that ever created a desire for me to listen (although it'd probably take a calculator to count all the ones who caused me to turn the knob/push the button/flip the switch).
I really believe there's a pretty good argument to be made, about radio in general, that the decline of the medium began with the trend away from an emphasis on the music as well as the development of good MD's.
Stations started paying less, using only part timers, and most of all spent no time or money training the young people that wanted to get into the business.
By the time I got into the business (1983), most of the stations around couldn't have legally paid less
I think that's probably one of the differences in our perspective, you saw it from the inside (I'm pretty sure) earlier than I did, which means you saw those things change whereas things like minimal salaries were already an established norm by the time I showed up.
But as I sort of mentioned, with the hindsight of being both older & with the experience of owning a business, I have a tough time crying too foul about a lot of those low pay jobs since a lot of the stations were operating in the red (or close enough to it to worry about it every month). And, again with the hindsight, I don't believe most could have recouped a significant increase in their expenses regardless of what improvements they made.
It sounds like someone in radio hurt you sometime in your life!
Gee, is there anybody who ever worked in the business that wouldn't fit that description?
In the years soon after I left the station side, I often described radio as being a lot like AIDS: if it ever got in your blood it was likely to kill you eventually. A bit politically incorrect/insensitive perhaps, but not inaccurate either. Alternately, I referred to it as a wonderfully miserable way to make a living ... and I used the term "make a living" very loosely.
Did you know that over 100,000 people live in South metro and DON'T COMMUTE to Atlanta every day... they work right here in the area. THEY CARE about what is going on here.
You hit on something here that is relevant to the topic in several ways, including one that I wished that I had at least commented on when I was posting before.
When we talk about the word "local" today, I have a tendency to define that too narrowly. That's kind of ironic since one of my longest running arguments when I was on the station side of things was that the word "local" was usually broader than how it was being defined internally. What I mean by that is that, for example, when it comes to say baseball, "local" for most listeners in GA means the Braves. For football, it not only means the various HS teams under the signal but also UGA (or VSU in that area, or GaSouthern in that area, etc.).
I used to like to define the word as meaning "whatever is a common topic of conversation at the meat-and-three down the street". Point being, there used to be a tendency, at least in some places, to fail to connect with what the listeners/potential listeners within the coverage area were interested in ... strictly because it wasn't happening within a five minute drive of the station (or because too many people were unwilling to think through the logic of it, since it might have required them to make an effort to actually keep up with what was going on around them).
Sorry for that sidetrack away from the point you were making, but I needed to take care of that oversight from my original post. It was bugging me that I didn't do a better job of defining "local", which is something that I do have fairly strong opinions about
Now, as for those 100,000 you mentioned, it brings up another of the points that I think gets lost in the conversations about "local" too often: it means different things in different situations. You used the phrase "South Metro", which is a fairly definable area ... but how "local" is that? What I mean is, it's easy enough to draw that map, but how much connection do all of those people in the different zip codes have to one another? At some point, when you try to draw that pool of potential listeners together, you have to begin to try to accomodate their differences too ... which begins to homogenize the product ... which moves away from a good bit of the most commonly lamented absences of "local". But if you fail to do that, then you severely reduce the potential numbers, which reduces the revenue possibilities, which produces one of the Catch-22's of the situation. (Note: when I say "you", it's in the royal sense, not specifically about you, your market, etc).
And I guess that brings me to another shortcoming of several of my posts on this subject, a tendency for me to lump too many stations into the same category instead of treating them separately. I make the distinctions mentally usually but when I look back at my posts I feel like I do a lousy job of making those clear. I believe there's a big difference in the possibilities for, say, a decent stick FM in a good exurban location versus a 1KW AM that has serious geographic challenges. A lot of the pessimism that most surely comes through in my posts on this topic is really about the latter and not the former, but I suspect it doesn't come across that way.
Not to exclude anybody or shortchange any stations by omission, but simply because I'm in the process of moving to Athens & they provide a ready example, I'll use WNGC as an example of the exactly the sort of station that I'm _not_ pessimistic about. They are, by definition, a non-metro station & one that deals with the issue ... but I think they do a good job of quite a few things (and have for as long as I can remember). They aren't perfect, nobody is, but they get it right IMO more often than they get it wrong, and that's a big part of why they're successful.
Well, shoot. I'm all over the place in this post, just blame it on me being tired & having a bout of insomnia at the same time. But for all my pessimism, I find this to be an interesting topic. My roots are in those small stations, good experiences & bad experiences combined, they're a part of what made me what I am today (grumpy though I may be). I haven't forgotten that nor do I regret it. I don't particularly like some of the conclusions I've drawn but I believe them to be valid based on the sum of my experience too. As the saying goes, I may not be right ... but I am convinced
