SO WHAT DO YOU THINK?

[CaptBob92]

I've been thinking about the disconnect between radio and listeners now adays. Here's my theory about what's happening:

When radio broadcasting began it was the only medium to provide immedient coverage of newsand local things. Up to then In my town people went to the newspaper office to ask for wire copy about important stories. Radio came and my newspaper friends say people stopped coming, just waited for it on the radio. Most of radio's programing then was from networks, shows like Burns and Allen, Bob hope, Edger Bergan etc. What facinates me is if you ask people about those shows they vivdly remember them but can't tell you what stations they heard them on.

TV arrived and radio went local. STATIONALITY happened. My mother could remember all local shows and what stations they were on from 1947 on but only the shows prior to that time because stations were generic before TV. By the 70's satellites began providing long form programing like morning shows, mid day stuff, evening shows but all these Sat shows are generic by nature. Sure, you can put your calls, frequency or weather in but the personality speaks in general terms and can't refference local things like the big firedowntown local teams, local controversies or local humor. So we're back to early radio, no STATIONALITY.

20 years ago kids figured it out and would ask " is your station GENERIC?" meaning automated, produced elseware and they didn't like it. Now they are adult listeners and looking for other sources of info and entertainment. Arn't we fooling ourselves by conventional wisdom that syndicated programing is the way to go? how do we localize and not bust the budget? Any thoughts?

 

[chriscollins]

You will never go back to the 'all local' days of the past in a medium or small market. The best you can hope for is to try to max out the local dayparts and live assist the satellite stuff. I program an Urban station and I am actually very happy with my syndicated morning show. I see people posting about funny stuff they do on Facebook all the time. A young listener doesn't care whether the talent is local. That is old school. Young people just want content they enjoy. That is one of the reason syndicated morning shows do well on Hip-Hop stations. We are live the rest of the day and it works. Now, take our Country station for instance. They have a local morning show. Their audience is older listeners and it 'does' matter to them. Everybody is different and decisions are made for 'the cluster', not for the individual stations.

That's my .02

 

[bturner]

I think we might be talking about something people still crave: the knowledge their world is safe. As crazy as it sounds, older listeners count on media to keep them informed and thereby feeling safe. We offer news, weather, traffic and timely info, especially in morning drive to simply make the listener prepare for the world out there beyond the front yard.

By having a national program or local talent on the air the listener feels they will be able to stay on top of what is going so so the listener can adjust their routine accordingly.

Let's not forget the voices we hear on the radio have an objective not to just entertain but to relate to the listener so the listener bonds with the local or syndicated voice on their preferred station. They feel compelled to listen in because they like the person behind the microphone and consider them somewhat of a friend (much like touching base with your friends to find out what is happening with them).

I know this sounds real basic, but we humans are a funny species and there are certain things that simply help us move through our daily routines. How many times have you gotten mad when you came up on a traffic accident that wasn't reported during the last traffic report? We get mad because the radio station didn't help us prevent this taffic backup.

Automated and satellite delivered usually don't do that well because listeners are smarter than we think. They can tell the difference and because they understand things like satellite delivered radio, voice tracking and computer driven radio, they know there is nobody at the station to alert them to changes in the world about them.

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

Discussing what is acceptable and/or desirable radio programming has a lot in common with observing what and how people eat.

My wife has always been a venturesome cook. And there is one part of going grocery shopping with her that is always fun. We get to the check-out and the younger, the very young cashiers pick up something to scan-it and realize it is from produce and you have to know what it is, and then punch in the code. (Radishes do NOT grow with a bar-cade in their skins.)

The conversation goes like this: What is this? What do you do with it? Cook it... you actually cook things?

And you look on the belt at the customer unloading a shopping cart behind you and you see there will be no interesting conversation for them. Twinkies. Potato chips. Blue Ribbon beer. White bread. Hot dogs.

In these forums we discuss radio as though the listener has not appetite for any kind of radio but Twinkies, potato chips, beer, white bread and hot dogs.

Is there some place in the Bible that decrees that programming can be automated or programming can be local but it can't be both? We who have a few more skin wrinkles than most of you all have a favorite decade when we think "the soup kettle" where radio programming was actually cooked was at it's very best. My memories of stations doing some kind of local news coverage is a memory of most of them doing it "on the cheap". I will concede that trying to run a news department in a metro area, particularly a state capital, gets rather costly. But in a market like Captain Bob's producing a reasonable amount of local content including some news does not have to be a budget-buster. But you have to be venturesome like the housewife who takes the time to stop in the produce department and figure out the difference between Romaine and Radicchio and as one of my friends says "plain ol' Mississippi lettuce". Then you have to train the kids (the listeners?) to expect a bit of variety.... and train them to think they like a venturesome meal.

Radio has been feeding the kids potato chips and hot dogs so long, neither the cooks nor the kids know what to do if real food is put on the table.

 

[TheBigA]

TV arrived and radio went local. STATIONALITY happened.

So now the internet arrived and what are most stations doing? The same thing they did before.

THAT is wrong. Radio needs to respond, and the way to respond isn't by simply continuing as though nothing has changed. We've gone through a social and information revolution. This revolution has made all former media obsolete. That includes newspapers and TV. Stationality was a fine response 50 or 60 years ago, but doing the exact same thing now, as though what worked then will work now, is wrong.

Here's the truth: Radio before TV wasn't generic. They called it "The Golden Age of Radio." Look it up! And it wasn't called that because of local DJs. All the most memorable programming from radio's golden period was network. It was shared experience. That's why we all know it today.

Radio folks have somehow convinced themselves that what the people want is what radio has been doing for 50 years. If that's true, then why are they flocking to foms of media that aren't local, don't have local talent, and don't promote "stationality?" Generic and syndicated programming isn't what's pushing them to other media, because the programming is way more generic and non-local elsewhere. You need to come up with another answer.

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

TV arrived and radio went local. STATIONALITY happened.

Radio folks have somehow convinced themselves that what the people want is what radio has been doing for 50 years. If that's true, then why are they flocking to foms of media that aren't local, don't have local talent, and don't promote "stationality?"

locality.
Stationality.
How about community-ality.

The Internet has made possible a whole new concept and definition of community.

Where I live there is still a good whiff of historical lifestyle in the air. My wife's g-g-g-grandmother's grave is five miles away. As we try to turn over rocks and find genealogy clues, I think what "community" and Communications was like in 1830. You were stuck with the people in your geography... whether you were comfortable with them or not. (And they with you.)

But look at us at R-I. We are community focused on radio. And even here we zone ourselves off in little subgroups of community. From Arizona to Maine we communicate, we joke, we argue, we insult each other, and then we get sappy and sentimental. We're a new genre of 1830.

Young people are crazy over Face Book. We used to take our cars and do a circuit around the court house square and down to the Doodle-burger and back, and again, and again. Today we do a daily circuit around our Face Book collection of friends. And sometimes in one day we do it again and again and again.

I suspect there are a lot of creative ways a given radio station operator could recognize and serve a "21st Century Community". The sports-talk format attracts a community of sports addicts. And since a lot of sports is at a national scale, a national network works well.

Talk Radio has identified a very pro-active listener community based on conservatism, family values, strong defense and weak taxation. That is a community with members nationwide and again a national network works very well.

The various genres of music collects people into communities. Music knows little or nothing about state lines so rock fans from Oregon to Florida can populate a music sub-community.

Evangelical Christianity is a community that knows no geographical borders so the CCM music stations and the Preach-and-Teach Talk-Religion outlets function as community.

For listeners who fit into some kind of "community of listeners" that can span large amounts of geography, BigA is right on target. This is THE Golden Age of Radio for political talk, for sports, for about four major forms of music, for consumers of Bible-thumps.

But if you are in the city (and what, 80% of our nation's peope are) and you don't really feel at home in any of these "listener communities" and if you are a broadcaster with a 13th rated station is a big city.... are there unserved communities of listeners sitting around in the "media soup lines" starving for some media to make them part of a community that we don't seem to be smart enough to identify and serve?

It's not about disc jockeys and towers and cart machines and top of the hour news and format clocks. It's about thumb-soaking people who have no community.... yet.

At the rate we are going, the Internet will give them one before a broadcaster does.

 

[TheBigA]

For listeners who fit into some kind of "community of listeners" that can span large amounts of geography, BigA is right on target. This is THE Golden Age of Radio for political talk, for sports, for about four major forms of music, for consumers of Bible-thumps.

Well...maybe.

The fact is that talk radio is the next format to be in trouble. It's heading in the same direction as oldies and smooth jazz. Too old, too white, too predictable. Other than two or three top talk stars, the format is getting 2 shares in most places, and will be dead soon. The golden age for talk was 15-20 years ago. We're on the tail end of it.

I think sports radio gives us a sense of what could be the next big thing. No question that people are passionate about sports. They love to talk about things they're passionate about, and that makes for good radio. So what else are people passionate about? THAT will be the next big thing.

I agree though with your main thrust in that radio creates its own community, and it's one that isn't limited or identified necessarily by geography. I'm talking cyber-community. I'm talking community of the mind. THAT is what's missing from radio. Not the fact that the DJ is talking about the local high school. But that he's got his finger on the pulse of some kind of community that we all feel a part of, regardless of where we live. And I think THAT is what people are finding on the internet. Hey! Radio folks have found it here. That should tell you something.

 

[bturner]

Great post Goat Rodeo Cowboy.

Even though my hair has changed to white (I blame radio for that), I find my needs are being met online versus radio. I end up getting my news, weather and sometimes traffic on-line before heading out the door.

Local versus syndicated doesn't matter if listener's needs are met.

Here I am at an AM daytimer in a top 10 market with pretty good market coverage (lots of other stations have less). I tried selling a format. I could be advertisers that would spend about enough each month to equal the cost of getting them on the air. The sad fact was that with dozens of frequencies, our listenership was so scattered there were just a handful of listeners within the trade area of a single location businesses. We had no substantial ratings to catch the attention of the mover and shaker advertisers in the city.

I went brokered to keep costs low enough to make sure there was no red ink.

Now we have China Radio International with a very interesting English program service. In a typical day you can hear pop and MOR hits of the 50s, 60s and 70s, country and an interesting rock based show as welll as a few talk shows. The guy doing the rock based program is from New Mexico but took a gig in Bejing. It's certainly not local; in fact it's global.

We pick up quite a few listeners to various shows because it's not the same old tired playlist. You get the same feel of live DJs and hourly news. Heck, they even do local news, traffic and weather (although they might mess up a local pronounciation here or there...like "Cat-ee" versus "Kay-Tee": Freeway.)

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

Who are their customers? Describe how they obtain revenue that you did not harvest.