The death of local radio
The title is a cliche that has become the bitter moniker of the displaced and disgruntled local radio personality and the signs are pointing to more dramatic reductions in local facilities, considering the recent bolstering of centralized management teams and infrastructure.
No one should be surprised when radio leaves Main Street USA; it's been coming for 16 years.
If you work in local radio and you're 25 or younger, your grandchildren may not believe you when you tell your stories about local radio. "They did what with 100,000 watts? And a thousand-foot tower? That's stupid!"
I took a four year hiatus from radio in the nineties and when I returned, the carts and card catalog were gone and automation had been rolled out and the the President had just signed the 1996 telecommunications bill, essentially opening the door for the massive corporatization of my beloved career.
What happened in '96 was not the death of local radio, but the seeds of a gradual streamlining of worldwide media. What I had been secretly daydreaming about while pulling overnight shifts at a small-market 100KW in the eighties was coming true. Back then I had free-run of the station and all night to imagine dozens of better ways to do what we were doing in our building, some spurred from John Schad's innovations with audio and computer hard drives. The tasks we laboriously repeated hour after hour and day after day were also being repeated by station after station, and all of it was wasted on inefficiency.
So to me today's changes are not all bad. The old-timers will say, "It was a fun ride," but as the days of local terrestrial radio and television stations makes way for personalized pocket media, we'll realize we were just too bloated to compete with what was started by a teenager from his college dorm room. We'll recognize that the term 'local' has actually been upgraded to 'location-aware'.
Radio people can continue to hopelessly cling to their antiquated processes until the last receiver goes to static, but the evidence is mounting that there's nothing so special about what they actually do when it can be done more efficiently from a datacenter.
Think about what we do. Today we sell air time to local businesses, then write and produce commercials. A local traffic team schedules those commercials into the daily logs, producing pounds of paper along the way. The rest of the programming is done in much the same way; local folks drop in nationally syndicated songs, nationally distributed voice tracks and weather from national prediction centers into the daily schedules and click 'save'. Old-timer tube-heads spend most of their days struggling to bridge the technology gap between antiques and modern devices with soldering irons and duct tape.
The sales staff has already been trained to input everything into a central computer, unwittingly making way for centralization of the other moving parts -- functions which could just as easily be performed from a coffee shop.
That begs for a revelation: local businesses can just as easily use online tools to buy air time and website banner ads. They already buy banner ads from Google and Facebook, just like they buy direct mail services from Vista Print. Select a theme, enter some text, drag & drop in an element, enter the number of impressions, select a target audience, and voila!
What's that, you say? That business model couldn't possibly generate enough revenue to build and maintain massive broadcast facilities? Exactly! Therein lies the rub. In this digital age, what media company can justify keeping hundreds of local office buildings and a thousand high-powered transmitter facilities scattered around the countryside to do what Facebook and Google can do with a fraction of the capital?
Enter Bob Pittman, the leader of the newly-minted Clear Channel Media + Entertainment. He is steering an antiquated industry into an era that began 16 years ago, but that clung hopelessly to its past.
No one should be surprised when radio leaves Main Street USA; it's been coming for 16 years.
If you work in local radio and you're 25 or younger, your grandchildren may not believe you when you tell your stories about local radio. "They did what with 100,000 watts? And a thousand-foot tower? That's stupid!"
I took a four year hiatus from radio in the nineties and when I returned, the carts and card catalog were gone and automation had been rolled out and the the President had just signed the 1996 telecommunications bill, essentially opening the door for the massive corporatization of my beloved career.
What happened in '96 was not the death of local radio, but the seeds of a gradual streamlining of worldwide media. What I had been secretly daydreaming about while pulling overnight shifts at a small-market 100KW in the eighties was coming true. Back then I had free-run of the station and all night to imagine dozens of better ways to do what we were doing in our building, some spurred from John Schad's innovations with audio and computer hard drives. The tasks we laboriously repeated hour after hour and day after day were also being repeated by station after station, and all of it was wasted on inefficiency.
So to me today's changes are not all bad. The old-timers will say, "It was a fun ride," but as the days of local terrestrial radio and television stations makes way for personalized pocket media, we'll realize we were just too bloated to compete with what was started by a teenager from his college dorm room. We'll recognize that the term 'local' has actually been upgraded to 'location-aware'.
Radio people can continue to hopelessly cling to their antiquated processes until the last receiver goes to static, but the evidence is mounting that there's nothing so special about what they actually do when it can be done more efficiently from a datacenter.
Think about what we do. Today we sell air time to local businesses, then write and produce commercials. A local traffic team schedules those commercials into the daily logs, producing pounds of paper along the way. The rest of the programming is done in much the same way; local folks drop in nationally syndicated songs, nationally distributed voice tracks and weather from national prediction centers into the daily schedules and click 'save'. Old-timer tube-heads spend most of their days struggling to bridge the technology gap between antiques and modern devices with soldering irons and duct tape.
The sales staff has already been trained to input everything into a central computer, unwittingly making way for centralization of the other moving parts -- functions which could just as easily be performed from a coffee shop.
That begs for a revelation: local businesses can just as easily use online tools to buy air time and website banner ads. They already buy banner ads from Google and Facebook, just like they buy direct mail services from Vista Print. Select a theme, enter some text, drag & drop in an element, enter the number of impressions, select a target audience, and voila!
What's that, you say? That business model couldn't possibly generate enough revenue to build and maintain massive broadcast facilities? Exactly! Therein lies the rub. In this digital age, what media company can justify keeping hundreds of local office buildings and a thousand high-powered transmitter facilities scattered around the countryside to do what Facebook and Google can do with a fraction of the capital?
Enter Bob Pittman, the leader of the newly-minted Clear Channel Media + Entertainment. He is steering an antiquated industry into an era that began 16 years ago, but that clung hopelessly to its past.
