Yesterday’s Special

The 10 year old suddenly looked up from the bowl of chow mein noodles he was systematically devouring and blurted a question towards me.

"What do you do?"

We were meeting him for the first time, the son of a friend of Fran's from school days, at a Chinese restaurant in New Jersey, which means chow mein noodles and duck sauce and all the inauthentic Americanized Chinese food with which we were raised. You don't get that specific kind of Chinese food in Los Angeles, but, sometimes, you crave what you crave, so there we were, waiting for chicken with broccoli and spare ribs made the way momma used to order out. And, for some reason, the youngest member of the party decided to do a background check on the guy accompanying his dad's childhood friend.

"Hm?" I hadn't clearly heard him. My mind was on egg rolls and dumplings.

He repeated the question. "What do you do?"

"What do I do? You mean for a living?"

He nodded and shoved another handful of chow mein noodles into his mouth.

"Oh, well, um, I write and I work in the radio business."

He raised an eyebrow. "Radio Shack?"

"No, radio. You know, like stations and... radio. Just radio."

He lowered his head and went back to the noodles. I think he was genuinely disappointed that I did not, in fact, work at a chain store that had recently shut down most of its remaining stores.

When I was 10, radio was a big thing for kids my age. We all listened to the radio. That was where we heard the hits, got the news, laughed at the jocks' lame jokes, called in to win. We tuned into stations crackling in at night from far-off, exotic locations like Fort Wayne and Windsor and Louisville. We did not have video games, or the internet. Television is what the few broadcast stations we got deigned to serve us; the independent and UHF channels were like premium TV (reruns and cartoons being our definition of Peak TV). On-demand? Well, if you had a new solid-state TV, channel 29 would appear almost instantly when you turned on the Sony. That's kind of "on-demand."

But that was a long, long time ago. A 10 year old today knows YouTube and Minecraft. They know you get TV when you want it, anything you want, anytime. If they care about music at all, they hear it on YouTube or use mommy and daddy's Spotify account. They hear the radio in their parents' cars, but they are not hiding the radio under the covers at night, trying to hear the hits on Super CFL. They aren't intrigued by the mysterious voices and they aren't yearning for a shot to talk on the radio so their friends and neighbors can hear it; they can easily broadcast themselves, even on video, to the entire world, any time, for free, with the devices in their pockets.

Which is, as we've discussed here before, a long-term problem. At last week's talk radio conference, at least one speaker, pointing to increased ratings among the older crowd, said that it's pretty much pointless to try to attract younger listeners to AM talk radio with talk that might be relevant to them, since "they're just not gonna listen." That may be correct, but it's not like Millennials or teens or whatever we're gonna call our 10 year old friend aren't interested in relevant content, whether it's spoken word or music or whatever. They don't think of "radio" as interesting because radio isn't offering anything that interests them. And so, we're looking at radio becoming increasingly irrelevant unless....

Unless, that is, radio produces content relevant to the younger demographics and serves it up on any platform. That's not encouraging to the valuation of stations, but it's encouraging for radio companies if they are what they say they are, expert in creating programming that people want. The audience changes, you change your product to appeal to them. And with technology, you can do that without abandoning what's bringing in the revenue right now. AM for the old folks, FM for the middle-aged and older Millennials, streaming and customized listening options for Millennials and younger, podcasts for everyone. Yes, some of the big commercial radio companies say they're doing this, but they're miles behind the digital-only competition, offering me-too music services, repackaged radio shows as podcasts, and just early stabs at original on-demand content that can stand on its own. Public radio's much further along, but there's still a way to go. In the meantime, the market's expanding, new generations are coming along, and radio is still less interesting to kids than a bowl of crunchy noodles.

The challenge is how to get those kids into what it is we do by the time they're the primary advertising target. If we don't, we'll be... Radio Shack. And we don't want that.

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I've been on a semi-vacation this week, bumming around Philadelphia and New Jersey. Most of what I've been doing has involved eating, but through it all I've managed to continue to update All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics, where material that'll come in handy when you're not talking about James Comey is in abundance. Find it all (for free!) by clicking here and/or by following the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item. And there's the Podcasting section at AllAccess.com/podcasts.

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I'll be back in the office in California before the weekend is over, if that matters to anyone. Thanks as always for bearing with me....

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
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