A Place For Us

Right now, I'm in a Starbucks on the SMU campus, decompressing after two days at Talk Radio Boot Camp, and maybe the last thing I want to think about is talk radio, or radio, or, well, anything, because it's Friday afternoon and I just want to get home and sleep. But I'm halfway across the country, my flight doesn't leave until tonight, and I have nothing else to think about.

So, yeah, talk radio. At a loss for a topic, I've been wandering around Dallas, eating BBQ in Deep Ellum and walking around neighborhoods, and what keeps coming to mind is what talk radio's place would be in typical Americans' lives right now. I haven't done research on it, but it's clear that whatever role talk radio played in people's lives in the past, it's changed now. I do remember what we worked with when I was a programmer -- talk radio was a companion, entertainment, distraction from life's travails, a place to hear opinions and information you couldn't get anywhere else. We'd do that thing where we imagined a composite of our target listener -- she's 35! She has two kids! She works part-time! She enjoys coffee! She's frustrated that she can't find decent day care! -- and we endeavored to be relevant to her interests. We imagined that we played a role in her life, and our content aimed to occupy that role.

But today, it's different. We don't occupy the same role. You can get information faster on social media or the web. You can get audio entertainment from an almost infinite number of sources, from streaming and podcasts to satellite and broadcast, and with the wave of connected devices here and coming in the future, radio has a lot of competition for listener's ears. We can provide personality, but so can podcasts, and so can streaming, and so can social media and online video, where stars are now born. Companionship, a friendly voice during the day, that we can do, but a lot of what we do involves angry hosts talking about aggravating things. It's successful in that it has a core audience that wants it and advertisers who'll pay to reach them, but those numbers aren't growing and they're not getting any younger.

That's not a criticism of talk radio today. You dance with who brung ya. An AM station, especially one that isn't 50,000 watts non-directional, is just not going to attract new, younger listeners. It's not a growth situation, it's maintenance, and to anyone who can do that with an AM signal in 2018, more power to ya. You're a magician or a genius. But we've already determined that there's a surprising and growing desire for spoken-word audio entertainment among younger audiences, and right now podcasts are the vehicle for that. Considering how complicated the average user thinks it is to get podcasts, and how the largest OS for smartphones, Android, still has no native pre-installed podcast player and store, that growth is phenomenal, and proper, audited measurement and monetization are on their way.

Again, then, what is talk radio's role -- broadcast commercial talk radio -- in this new world? It's a matter of determining what role it can play more effectively than other media, because radio doesn't have to deal with some of the hurdles other media do. You don't have to teach anyone how to listen to a radio station, they have the equipment -- there's still AM/FM ubiquity in car radios, your pal Alexa offers access to radio streams in the house that's even easier than your old clock radio -- and, really, radio and podcasts both have the same marketing problems but radio does have more of a built-in audience base already sampling the offerings. All things being equal, besides the latter edge, what advantages can broadcast talk radio exploit?

That's something we didn't really address at the convention. I don't know that the answer is clear, but I do know that we can agree the answer lies in the content. We've always believed that if your programming is strong enough, people will seek it out. I think it takes good marketing, too, and ease of use, and no technical issues like interference, but let's go with that for now. That means it comes down to talent, unique personality. And if we can further agree that we in talk radio have done a poor job of that over the past, say, thirty years, and that it's more than a little disturbing that the big names and/or prevailing style of talk radio is the same as it was all those years ago, the need to develop talent is becoming a crisis.

What talk radio needs to do isn't just to find talent. We know there's a plethora of new, compelling personalities out there. It's finding them and convincing them that they should do talk radio instead of podcasts or YouTube where they can do what they want without interference or restriction. How can we do that when you can see podcasts becoming TV shows, and YouTubers making more money than talk radio can possibly pay? Well, money IS one thing: A regular salary and benefits can be more appealing than the roll of the dice on a social media-based career. And that supervision thing might be a plus for radio, because for everyone who thinks they're best off without coaching, there's someone else who knows that proper coaching from experienced pros can make them better than they could ever be on their own. Plus, there's the immediacy of live radio, the built-in base of listeners from day one, and the fact that doing talk radio not only doesn't prevent you from doing podcasts and video, it can be an effective springboard for that.

Or talk radio can circle the wagons and wait for the last listener to fade away. I'd still like to think that there's opportunity to grow this thing and for what is commercial talk radio today to be tomorrow's spoken-word content industry. People are making clear that there IS a place for spoken-word content in their lives, that space is changing, and that talk radio has competition for their attention but is not yet out of the race. Better get going on that now, though. Public radio's already pretty far down that road, and time's a-wastin'.

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Good to see many of you at Talk Show Boot Camp 9, where, despite my best efforts, I was neither ejected nor pummeled by angry syndicators. (Thanks for letting me live, Eric.) Next up: a panel at the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Convention attached to the NAB Show in Las Vegas in April, followed by my panel discussing the future of your career at the Worldwide Radio Summit in Hollywood May 2-4, featuring Tom Leykis (another stop on his "farewell tour"), Steve Goldstein, Rob Greenlee, Doug Reed, and Gina Juliano; Register here, right now. And I'll be on a panel at The Conclave in July in Minneapolis, and at Podcast Movement in Philadelphia, also in July. See you at one or more of those.

Perry Michael Simon
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