NorthEast Radio Watch: The 1999 Rant

[Scott D Fybush <fybush@world.std.com>]

Back in the fifties, conventional wisdom said radio was dead.  All its
traditional functions -- from soap operas to dramas to comedies to the
evening news -- had been supplanted by television.  Maybe you've seen
the cartoon with the little boy in the attic asking Grandpa what that
"radio" in the corner was for; it wasn't considered far-fetched at the
time.

It's been half a century since then, and the only thing that's
radio-related up in my attic is all the memorabilia of one of the most
successful periods any medium in history has enjoyed.  You know the
story as well as I do: radio found the personal niche TV couldn't.  It
spoke to the teenagers who discovered their voices and their music in
the fifties.  It invented 24-hour news just in time for the turmoil of
the sixties.  It rediscovered the scorned technology called FM in time
to shine anew in the seventies.  It learned talk could change a
nation's politics in the eighties.  And as the nation's economy soared
from height to height in the nineties, radio found out just how much
money it could make.

It was the worst thing that could have happened to radio.  

It's easy -- too easy -- to blame the big corporate owners, to say
that every time Clear Channel or AMFM or Citadel or CBS added to their
clusters, it was another nail in the coffin.  But there's nothing
inherently bad about group ownership, even out-of-town group
ownership.  Look back at the classic stations of radio's second Golden
Age (we'll say for the sake of argument that it began around 1960 and
ended that June day in 1982 when WABC went talk) -- WRKO, KHJ, KFRC
all controlled by RKO; WBZ, WINS, KFWB all Westinghouse-owned; CBS
setting stellar standards for news and public service half a continent
away from corporate headquarters at stations like KMOX and WBBM.  

It's too easy to blame the FCC.  Hindsight tells us the mistakes began
with Docket 80-90 and the flood of new FM stations in the late
eighties that never had a chance to be viable if they played by
traditional standards of local service and live programming.
Hindsight tells us there was no way to square the repeated increases
in ownership limits with the stated committment of at least some
commissioners to opening the airwaves to new voices.  

It's too easy to blame programmers for relying on research over
instinct, for ignoring the rising tide of evidence that listeners are
tiring of insanely long stopsets and responding by turning away from
the radio to other media.

It's too easy to blame owners for being willing to sell stations that
have been part of their community for decades to buyers who have no
intention of continuing that legacy.  Faced with a similar choice, and
with the inflated prices being paid for stations (20 or more times
cash flow is not uncommon now in large markets, where 10-12 was the
standard just a few years ago), who among us would reject the chance
to cash out on a life's hard work?

It's too easy to blame listeners for not demanding better.  Radio is
just one small part of an ever-growing media diet, shouting to be
heard above a cable and satellite TV dial that now offers something
for every imaginable niche, a Web that brings to the home an
unfathomable range of music and talk, not to mention an explosion of
print offerings that would have been unimaginable half a century ago.

Radio is again threatened, this time in ways far more serious than
the flickering test patterns of early Fifties' television.  Back then,
the industry knew it had to change to survive.  This time around, I'm
not so sure, and in my uncertainty lies the core of this year's rant.

 *  *  *

Like most of you reading NERW every week, I've always loved radio.  I
remember, as a child, looking out the window at the AM array a
half-mile away while trying to pull in "distant" stations (Belleville,
Ontario, seemed a world away) on my little GE portable.  I studied the
history and the personalities and the legends.  I built my little
homebrew pirate station.  I spent too much of college at the radio
station and not enough in class, and even before graduation I began
the career path I always thought I'd pursue, working my way from
weekend morning small-town news to the mighty clear-channel fire of
WBZ.  

Even after that career road hit a dead end, stalled by the continual
closing of radio newsrooms and subsequent lack of opportunity in the
business, the love of radio remained, if anything made even stronger
by the distance created by a new career in television.  Vacations
included (or better yet, focused on) visits to studios and tower
sites.  My aircheck collection grew.  And of course, every week ended
(and continues to end) with an evening at the computer reflecting on
the week's changes in our region through the writing of this column.

But something happened in 1999: The spark went out.  Each week's news
melted into an unmemorable string of mergers and conglomerations and
meaningless changes of format and call.  The excitement of hearing an
aircheck of another market faded, again and again, at the realization
that (with a few notable exceptions) it was all the same voices
reading the same inane liners around the same 40 or 50 or 80 songs
from the same corporate playlist.  Even listening to the airchecks I'd
taped myself during travels began to seem more like a chore than a
pleasure.

 * * *

At the same time, I knew it wasn't just my own personal burnout.
Every once in a while, the light came back on.  It happened in Canada
in June, seeing the outpouring of nostalgia and emotion -- is "love"
too strong a word? -- that accompanied the shutdown of the CBL
transmitter in Hornby.  It happened every time a flip of the dial to
the public airwaves turned up one of those moments on "This American
Life" or the "Lost and Found Sound" segments that reminded me of the
incredible potential that still lives in the medium of radio.  It
happened in the tributes to Jean Shepherd and John Otto and Bob
Raleigh, voices stilled for good or merely retiring.  And it happened
in those times, every once in a while, when my dial (or my Web
browser) ran across one of those stations that still connected deeply
to its community.  As big as Steve LeVeille's 38 states all night
long, or as small as the bingo-playing crowd over little CKRZ,
Oshweken, there's something all of these moments drove home to me in
1999.

Radio is magical.  

In the push for profit, though, radio has forgotten how magical it is.
And the magic of radio is the only thing that will keep it alive in
any form for very long in the 21st century, in the face of attack from
new challengers.  Already, most of us can sit down at our computers and
sample thousands of stations from all over the world, not to mention
hundreds of Webcasters transmitting to small Net-only audiences.
For many, radio is no longer a necessity to hear the music we want;
that comes by way of cable and satellite's digital music services.
By this time next year, we'll be able to walk into Best Buy or Circuit
City and pick up a car satellite receiver that will allow us to listen
to dozens of commercial-free music services anywhere in the country.
And within a few years, it's a good bet that the Net will have gone
wireless, enabling Webcasters to reach into the final frontier of the
moving vehicle (hey, I'll get CBC back at long last!).

So how has the radio industry reacted to these threats? 

Local programming has continued to disappear from the airwaves.  Big
groups like Clear Channel now routinely program entire formats on a
national level, often with voicetracked jocks from halfway across the
country and contests that are impossible to win at a local level (it's
a good sign, at least, to see the Florida Attorney General's office
investigating some questionable actions on that front).  At many
stations, even the once-sacred morning show has been replaced by
Stern, Bob & Sheri, Bob & Tom, Joyner, or one of their clones.  

Local news?  With few exceptions, fading fast, especially in medium
markets.  Radio is still the best and fastest way to convey breaking
news, yet broadcasters continue closing newsrooms and moving anchors
to centralized facilities hundreds of miles away.  The more the
industry forgets about the importance of local news, the more the
listeners stop thinking of radio as a source for community
information.  An entire generation is now growing up with no thought
of using radio for local news.  Can the industry ever win them back?

Community service?  What was that, again, exactly?  Again, with few
exceptions, the idea of serving the community has been reduced to the
occasional PSA and perhaps one or two fund-raisers a year.  This year,
we even ran across one station that had the gall to try to CHARGE
non-profits for running community calendar announcements.  Whether it
means to or not, radio is sending its communities a strong signal that
they're no longer important.

That's especially true in markets where formats and frequencies and
call letters are shuffled with wild abandon on a near-monthly basis.
How can we expect listeners to develop any loyalty to radio when they
can't feel any sense of attachment to a jock or a station that might
not be there when they turn on the radio tomorrow?

The radio industry, hand-in-hand with regulators, is also foreclosing
on its own future through its short-sighted response to the LPFM
proposals that made their way through the FCC this year.  There's a
message buried deep within all those pirate busts and LPFM letters of
support: These are people who want to be part of radio, and
communities that want to be served by radio -- and big radio isn't
serving them properly.  So how did big radio respond?  With head in
the sand and ears tightly shut, almost every big radio group quickly
signed on to engineering studies showing massive threats to their
signals and a lobbying effort aimed at a legislative end-run around
the FCC to ban LPFM in Congress.  The FCC itself is hardly a shining
beacon of logic in all of this: Even as it slowly creaked forward on
an LPFM proposal, it kept filling every imaginable future LPFM
frequency with satellite translators explicitly prohibited from
offering local community service.  (Why is nobody else seeing a
connection here?)

Sure, the radio industry may preserve the sanctity of its 100-kilowatt
FM blasters for a few more years.  But guess what?  The people being
shut out of LPFM are, in many cases, exactly the same people whose new
blood and fresh ideas will be needed in a few years to breathe some
life into radio's stagnant corpse.  Just when radio most needs the next
Todd Storz and Rick Sklar and Alan Freed, they'll have found there's
no room for them in an industry programmed entirely from Covington and
San Antonio and Denver, and they'll be off doing their creative thing
in some other medium, lost forever to radio.

Radio is squandering the strengths that are uniquely its own, instead
becoming a bad clone of the satellite and Web-based services that can
do automated music services and national programming so much better
(no missed breaks, no sudden format changes, no 20-minute stopsets to
drive the audience away).  The profits may keep going up for another
few years, but in the long run, as debt service comes due and
listeners continue to disappear, the course is clear, and it ends up
in the attic:

"Look, Grandpa, a RADIO.  What was that?"

It doesn't have to be that way, and at the local level in some
communities (whether as small as Concord N.H. or as big as New York
City) it's not.  But it will take committment at the very top of the
radio food chain to bring radio back to the strengths that will keep
it a valued medium into the 21st century.

Radio can connect its listeners to their communities in ways no other
medium can.  If we don't start using it that way again, it will, to
paraphrase Ed Murrow, be nothing more than a hard drive and a
satellite receiver in a box.

Happy New Year, everyone.


* * * 

To all of you who have helped make NERW possible during 1999, my
sincerest thanks.  Your contributions *are* NERW, and I value all of
them.  Specific thanks, as always, to GARRETT WOLLMAN, the technical
brains behind NERW and the man who makes it possible for all of you to
receive the newsletter each week, and to LISA STEIN FYBUSH,
"Mrs. NERW," whose patience in the face of radio is not only
invaluable but downright heroic.

We'll see you next week.

---------------------NorthEast Radio Watch------------------------
                     (c)1999  Scott Fybush

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