Will Work For Food

The problem isn't that people don't want radio content, or podcasting content, or audio content, national or local, good or bad. It's not that there isn't a hunger for the shows and features and music you create. In fact, for creative people, this is the Golden Age, the best time ever, an era when you can make what you want and instantly deliver it to your audience, with no middleman or program director or general manager to tell you what to do... as long as you don't mind not making any money.

Oh, you want to make money? This is your career? Ah, now, that's the problem.

There's a very good, heart-wrenching story at The Guardian this week that you might have seen, the one about a small-town radio station in Willcox, Arizona, KHIL, where staying on the air is a struggle because there's little financial support from the community. You should read it. The upshot is that this station, trying to serve a small community, is an example of how small-town radio the way we knew it for a century is withering away, and that's a loss for the people there.

But you can read it as a canary in the coal mine of a problem that will affect radio, and, really, all media as we move forward. The problem isn't just that there's a lack of adequate advertising revenue to support a radio station in a small Arizona town. It's that we've arrived at a time when people's appetite for content of any kind is not necessarily matched by a desire to pay for it, or at least there's a limit to what they'll pay.

This isn't a problem limited to radio. It's going to be, or already is, trouble for everyone. You know how advertising on the radio side has slowed, and how while spending on digital is growing rapidly on a percentage basis, it's still a fraction of the pie and it's divided among more players. The debates over attribution and measurement assume that these are the only things holding advertisers back from triggering a spending avalanche, but it's also possible that they've decided in the interim that they don't really NEED to spend so much when they can use social media and viral marketing and "influencers" at lower cost. Local radio isn't immune; Main Street advertisers are being fed the same philosophies as agencies and multinationals, that consumers are more easily reached and influenced by Facebook and Instagram posts. (Anyone else's Instagram feed overrun by local restaurant paid posts? Like, not just from your own area but from all over America? Because I get a ton of ads from pizza joints in Florida and sandwich shops in Illinois and I'm in California. Why target when it's cheap enough to buy national?)

So, subscription. A monthly fee for valuable content. We've talked about how the public's pocketbooks have a limit on what they'll spend for content. Once you tally up Netflix and HBO Now and Hulu and Amazon Prime and Spotify (which, of course, is free if you listen on your computer and accept ads) and, if you haven't cut the cord, cable, what's left? And then there's the sentiment I even see friends IN THE MEDIA expressing, the hatred of paywalls. I see more than a few people complaining that their local newspaper has a paywall, and they vow not to bother with those sites anymore, as if the reporters are supposed to work for free. I've seen the attitude expressed that the inability to sell enough online advertising to support making content free is somehow the fault of the sites themselves, that it's a sign of incompetence. But for general interest news sites, the ads aren't there. You can't sell something if there are no buyers. And getting indignant over having to pay for your local paper (or the New York Times or Washington Post or any other paywalled site) is an insult to the people who are trying to serve you with the content you say you want.

Okay, then, advertising and subscription aren't panaceas. What else? Donations? I proposed the nonprofit concept in my column two weeks ago, and I think it's still something commercial radio and podcast networks and television should join newspapers in exploring. But I fear that podcasting, in particular, will end up with hundreds of thousands of shows begging for donations through Patreon, and, again, there's a limit to how much people can and will spend on entertainment.

No, this isn't easy. But it's something all of the media -- local radio, national radio, podcasting, streaming, television, SVOD, newspapers, cable -- will have to solve. (Including digital, because some of the big digital players' business models seem to be based on NOT paying the writers decent wages, and that is not going to work long-term once the staffs wise up and unionize. Ask Vox. Ask anyone who's created content and been paid in "exposure.") The task is to convince the public that the media are worth paying for, not something to take for granted as free. Or it's to convince advertisers and agencies that the social media/viral path is significantly less effective than the tried-and-true (and more expensive) traditional media advertising methods. Or it's to restructure control of traditional media to take the desperate need to provide an ever-increasing return to investors out of the equation and treat things like local radio and news as public institutions. Or....

Or I don't know what. But whether you're in Willcox or Washington, you have to hope that someone figures out the future of our business before it becomes a hobby.

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Enough of the June Gloom for now. You still gotta do a show, and you can find material for it at Talk Topics, the show prep column at All Access News-Talk-Sports, all free when you click here and/or follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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My podcast is "The Evening Bulletin with Perry Michael Simon," a quick (two minutes or less) daily thing, and you can get it at Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Google Play Music, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Stitcher, and RadioPublic. Spotify, too. Google Podcasts? Click here. You can also use the RSS feed and the website where you can listen in your browser, or my own website where they're all embedded, too. And if you have an Amazon Alexa-enabled device, just say "Alexa, play the Evening Bulletin podcast."

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