Radio’s Not Dead. Local Radio Is.

Radio has always been special to me since receiving a transistor radio for Christmas when I was six years old. Ten years later my broadcasting career began a few weeks after my 16th birthday at a little 3,000-watt radio station in rural Iowa. Over the next 35 years, I worked in the radio industry in variety of roles including on-air personality, program manager, college instructor, and sales. Five years ago, I walked away from radio and moved to television because I could see radio as an industry rotting from the inside out. The slow decline of the radio industry began with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the loosening of ownership restrictions and with technological advances.
 
The recent Alpha Media bloodbath resulting in the firings of local on-air personalities, news staff, and sports announcers doesn’t signal the death of radio. The bloodbath signals the death of LOCAL radio which is even more devastating for the communities to which these radio stations were licensed to and committed to serve.
 
Until now.
 
The phenomenon of corporate ownership announcing mass layoffs of staff certainly is nothing new. This has been happening for many years. However, what is different is for an ownership group to move away from staffing morning drive announcers, news staff, and sports staff enmasse. Local radio stations – and newspapers – have kept us informed as to what’s going on in the community, have covered city council meetings, school board meetings, county taxation hearings, reported on crimes in addition to sharing local human-interest stories about our community members. Local radio has also given high school sports an important platform, providing a way for family members and friends to listen to their local athletes and teams as they compete in their sport of choice.
 
And now, sadly, communities in small markets across the country have lost that connection to their local heartbeats in all of those contexts. Local broadcast television does a terrific job in covering the big stories and the important goings-on in the communities it serves BUT local television stations do not have the resources – human or financial – to be in every one of these communities covering all of these meetings and events with the depth and intimacy that their local radio stations do.
 
Or used to do.
 
Local radio stations in small market communities will become automated, voice-tracked, syndicated, soulless automatons with no more heart than the human beings at the corporate levels who decided their investment bankers were more important than their FCC mandate of reflecting the communities in which they were to serve.
 
Granted, the slow decline in radio – and local radio in particular – has been coming for a long time and it’s been easy to see if you’re paying attention. To be fair, the decline is not solely corporate driven. Technology, the economy, and society have all played a role in an incremental decline in the radio’s viability in all sized markets.      Here are factors that contributed to the slow erosion of an industry:
 

1. The “land bubble”. In the 1980s corporate farm operations began buying family farms but they bought the land at a price that would be difficult to sustain profitability. There are only so many bushels of crops that land could produce each year and the ridiculously high values at which they were purchased. When the market could no longer support the over-leveraged farmland, the bubble burst and the farm economy with it. The same is true with radio. Consolidation brought forth a “land rush” of radio stations, purchased in multiples that were far above their actual value and sustain profitability. Corporate ownership groups could barely keep up with the debt load. When the market corrected itself, the value of radio properties collapsed along with some companies, unable to get out of the debt load it created. Cost-cutting measures i.e. layoffs were the easiest way to try to get radio’s financial house in order.
2. The “Would You Like Fries With That” philosophy.  In the late 1990s former Clear Channel CEO Lowry Mays said that he wanted his stations to be like McDonalds restaurants on the programming side. His philosophy that – like McDonalds – despite where a listener traveled in America, the quality of the product would be consistent. That’s a nice sentiment in principle but it flies in the face of radio’s mission – to operate in the best interests of the community it serves. The tastes, beliefs, and priorities of each community are different, regardless if those communities are in the same state or across the country from one another. Radio – local radio – was never meant to be homogeneous. Radio was meant to be a reflection of its community.
3. Commercials are a bad thing. Research is important but it can also create a trap from which you can never escape. Radio is a prime example with one phrase: “More music, less commercials”. Yes, when asked, people will respond that they’d rather hear less commercials but the “more music, less commercials” mantra trained listeners into thinking they didn’t like commercials…that they were, in fact, bad. Radio commercials are bad because radio professionals are clueless about writing effective, engaging (not necessarily entertaining) commercials. People watch the Super Bowl for commercials, right? Every radio commercial has become homogenous, interchangeable, and meaningless because of laziness and lack of training for its production and sales staffs. Every business proclaims “great products, great prices (we won’t be undersold!), great staff, great location, conveniently located, been in business 100 years” and all of it is boring. It’s no wonder why listeners want more music.
4. Voice tracking. Personally, I think voice tracking is a cool tool. To be fair, automation is nothing new to radio. Voice tracking is slick and allows you to do an on-air show that is so close to live it is tough to tell it’s recorded. However, voice tracking has turned into a crutch rather than a tool. As “land values” plummeted and revenues dropped in economic downturns, voice tracking was utilized as the ultimate cost-cutting device. Announcers from markets across the country could voice track other stations in their local group of stations or voice track stations in cities in which they didn’t live. Ownership groups also could have an announcer in one market voice track a handful of stations it owns across the country and save money by paying the voice track talent less than the full-time announcers it used to employ. What radio has now is a live or syndicated morning show with voice tracking the rest of the day…for now, anyway. Which, thank God, gives us even more music and less commercials.
5. The digital love affair. The final radio company I worked for positioned itself as a “digital marketing company that owns radio stations”.  Advertising revenue fell across the board before corporate types realized their core enterprise – radio – had lost market share to other media and scrambled to recover (if it is ever able to do so). Every medium has fallen in love with digital because it provides more direct access to consumers and there are big dollars to be had. Radio has gone all in on digital to drive new revenues at the expense of its core product. Print and phone books HAVE to sell digital to survive. It won’t be long until radio is in the same boat as print and phone books because radio has fallen in love with the shiny object and has forgotten what made it special. Digital is important but it is not special; regardless if you claim your digital offerings are different than your competitors. Digital connects advertisers to consumers but it does not connect nor serve the local communities. Digital simply serves ads.
6. Radio forgot what it was. The corporate types and the researchers thought radio was a communication enterprise. It most assuredly is not. Radio is a relationship business. Once upon a time, radio was the most intimate medium. Radio is a relationship between the personalities and the listeners. The “people at the top” thought that websites, email, and social media would connect listeners to the radio station and to its personalities in a way never before possible. And it’s true, they did. But in – again – falling in love with digital, the connection became more disconnected and less personal. Digital provides listeners greater access to seeing their favorite personalities, learn about them, and communicate with them BUT the greatest connection between the personality and the listener was the request line. Forget social media, a listener can have instant interaction – a relationship – with their personality. Or just call to find out if the “cue to call” to win a contest is coming up or if they missed it. Radio forgot who it was and lost touch with the people who made radio the most powerful relationship builder and community connector ever.
7. Radio became just another jukebox. The cumulative effect of points 2-6. When iTunes, Spotify, satellite radio, eta al, came along, radio had one very large collective bowel movement (“Why, they have even more music and less commercials they radio does!!!”) and further turned away from their mission of super-serving their community and their most fervent fans. Television didn’t poop itself when cable tv came along or when satellite tv appeared or now as connected devices/streaming services have emerged. No, television never forgot who it is but adapted to the new developments/new technologies/societal changes while maintaining its core mission. Local television still super-serves the communities in which it broadcasts and reminds people who they turn to for happenings i.e. severe weather that the other television outlets will never be able – nor want to – compete.

 
In the final analysis, the radio industry is the epitome of a man going through a midlife crisis…panicking at his loss of youth, his receding hairline, and those couple extra pounds around his midsection who buys a Corvette, divorces his wife, turns his back on his kids, and starts dating a 20-something blonde with “legs up to here” in a desperate attempt to recapture something he lost. When the days comes that the man finds his life has fallen apart, his ex-wife and kids want nothing to do with him, the twenty-something blonde moves on to another sugar daddy, and he’s alienated his friends, the man wonders where everything went wrong.
 
I’m not going to be one of those people who proclaim that radio is dead. People have been beating that drum since broadcast television came into existence. Radio is not dead.
 
Local radio is.