The Local Angle

People, it seems, no longer bother to read past headlines these days. It's too much trouble. You could put anything in a headline and people will skim past it, absorb it, think, oh, it's real, and move on to seething outrage over Hillary being an alien or oxygen causing cancer. Not having read the details of a story, let alone checking the facts to confirm their truth, isn't stopping anyone these days. I used to think that this was the Talk Radio Caller-ization of America, but it's more like the Internet Comment Section-ization of the World now. Whereas I once advised talent never to read the Internet comments, I wouldn't do that now, because it doesn't matter. The world is now one big febrile pile of half-baked opinions, misinformation, and trolling.

You can insert your own political comment here. I'm going to talk instead about how this applies to the broadcasting industry, because I'm supposed to write about that in this column and because you can get your fill of political ranting pretty much everywhere else now. Specifically, I'm thinking about the reaction, from people both inside and out of the broadcasting industry, to things like the elimination of the Main Studio Rule. The moment, for example, the Main Studio Rule elimination came to pass, I saw much hand-wringing and anguish from everyone other than the NAB and big broadcasters, and the angst tended to take the form of declaring that this was the nail in the coffin of local radio and TV, that the FCC was allowing companies to ignore their communities, that we'll immediately see broadcasting drop all local programming and become national relays, probably of biased news and infomercials. It's a calamity, everyone said. We're doomed. See? The headline says "Main Studio Rule Eliminated." That sounds bad. So it's bad.

Truth: It won't matter. It doesn't really change anything. Okay, it'll change one thing, because licensees won't have to go through the motions of filing for a waiver to locate the studio outside the community, but, ultimately, it won't be the end of localism in broadcasting, because that, to whatever extent it was going to happen, already occurred years and years ago. What isn't local now wasn't local a year ago, wasn't local five years ago, wasn't local before the rule change and won't be local after it.

But there's more to consider. The rule's elimination doesn't mean stations HAVE to close their local studios, and most won't, because you have to have sales people and promotions staff somewhere in the area. This is more for the networked religious station operators and public radio stations that have traditionally gotten waivers so they could do K-LOVE nationally or have a statewide public radio network without having to staff relays in rural areas. Even the Evil Empires -- the biggest commercial radio companies -- will still have local studios. The rule didn't cause that and its elimination won't change that.

However, that assumes that putting a physical presence in a market constitutes "local." It does not. You could have ten "Main Studios" in a city and still not be local. You could broadcast from a studio 3,000 miles away and be local. It's not about where you wire up your board and mics. It's about the content. And that's a problem for radio that has nothing to do with the Main Studio Rule being eliminated.

Radio has always promoted itself as being a paragon of localism. We cover local news, the boosters would point out. We do local promotions. Our personalities talk about local things. We care. And then you'd turn on the radio and the jocks get maybe twenty seconds to talk, and they fill it with a prep-service joke about "Stranger Things" and the computer fires up the next song and it's all merged neatly together. Maybe there'll be a break where the personality mentions a concert coming up at the local sports arena, and there'll be a weather update, but that's what local means for a lot of stations. And when the news is being generated by the news department at a sister cluster in another state and it's full of mispronounced town names and stories that were in yesterday's headlines, it's worse. The rules don't require more -- they don't even require that much, not if you keep a list every quarter of what your Sunday morning 5 am public affairs show talked about. (I hosted one of those. I know.) There are many stations that take their local responsibility seriously and do great local news and have jocks who live and breathe what's happening locally, who know every mover and shaker in town and talk about things that matter to local residents. There are many more who just shut up and play the hits.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the latter, either, not, at least, if it's not the only available option listeners have. People WANT the hits. People don't care if the hits are being played by a person in a studio on Main Street or by a server the location of which is undisclosed. They wouldn't be using Pandora or Spotify or any streaming service if they cared that much. The difference isn't just having a jock read a liner card between songs, it's what they're saying. And for talk, if you're not talking about local issues, it REALLY doesn't matter where you are. Does anyone even know where their favorite podcasts are produced? If I wasn't in the business, I wouldn't know, either. As they don't care where their TV shows are produced, so they feel about radio, unless what you're selling IS the local material.

Which is why getting rid of the Main Studio Rule is irrelevant, and why radio has an opportunity in localism that isn't disappearing just because licensees don't HAVE to be local. Streaming services CAN do local stuff, but considering that they potentially have worldwide reach, and that it's pointless to restrict advertising and subscription sales to a small geographic area if the world market beckons, they won't. Local podcasts are still in the nascent stage, and while I think there's a good market for that (check out our All Access and Jacobs Media pal Seth Resler's new Detroit-centric podcast), radio stations have more resources and can crank those out, too. But for local news, local events, local advertisers, even local music, radio as it's structured in the U.S. just happens to be built for that. It's a strategic advantage, not entirely beyond duplication but something nobody else has an incentive to do.

That's not going to happen, though, unless the industry takes its "we're local!" marketing seriously and realizes that you really DO need someone in the market, some feet on the ground, networking with local leaders and listeners, finding out what local people want and need, being more than a liner card machine and jukebox. If radio wants a place in the future of audio entertainment, whether the dashboard or on smartphones, it's going to have to earn it, and stressing the local angle is one very important way to do it. For that, the FCC rules don't matter. It's just smart business. Or it's survival instinct. But it's not dependent on a federal mandate, and that doesn't fit into a headline.

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I could go on about the opportunity in local programming, even down to how my town's about to have a City Council election and there's practically no coverage beyond one weekly paper's skimpy coverage without analysis. I wouldn't expect any Los Angeles radio station to bother with one suburb's council election, but they COULD cover it in a podcast. They could cover EVERY town or section of the metro in podcasts. See? There's opportunity. Things aren't over, they're just changing. That doesn't have to be a bad thing.

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