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:
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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorDr. Eric Shoars shares key marketing insights to help business owners make their marketing more efficient and effective. Archives
October 2024
Categories |