A Change Will Do You Good (Maybe)

Things change.

Used to be that talk radio, and radio in general, were a simple matter. There were ways to do the job right, and there were things that were just taken as gospel. You followed the formatics, you included all the elements, you met expectations. Simple.

One by one, the dominoes fell. Listener phone calls fell victim to the public's increasing aversion to making ANY phone calls, let alone calling in to a radio show. Traffic and weather reports became mostly irrelevant due to apps. The usual approach to topics is being hammered by demographic shifts that comprise one reason talk radio is now largely the province of older folks; AM radio's technical deficiencies, the other reason, have left the band in a long, accelerating decline. And then there were self-inflicted wounds, like eliminating local newsrooms, part of the financial struggles that all traditional media have been facing.

Nobody guaranteed us things wouldn't change. Some of us warned that changes were coming. And here we are.

You're assuming here that this is all doom and gloom, but it isn't. As I've written, oh, about a trillion times in the last 20 years of this thing, with change comes opportunity. Your, and radio's, future lies in the ability to adapt.

We don't yet know how the new world will be monetized, and it may be that it won't reach radio's old revenue levels, but what you can do with podcasting and streaming is hyper-target specific audiences, which has to be valuable to advertisers. You can do content about narrow topics, you can experiment, you can....

Well, let's talk about that a little. This week's "10 Questions With..." interview is talking to Dan Blank, who is not a radio guy. He's a writer and director whose background is in film/video and interactive/VR media. He wrote and directed a new podcast, "Carrier," and it's a scripted, fictional drama, a mystery starring a Tony Award winner, Cynthia Erivo (you'll next see her on the big screen as Harriet Tubman) and a bunch of familiar character actors, none of whom are radio people, either. For them, podcasting offers an opportunity to use the audio medium to tell a story in a different way from the visual. And, really, what it is, is radio drama, which has a rich, almost century-old history. I can tell you from my years at a podcast network, privy to real download numbers, that there is a huge, monetizable audience for scripted podcasts. People outside radio, including a lot of Hollywood folks (and agencies), are seeing this and taking action.

There's also the rapidly expanding morning update category, like The New York Times' "The Daily," NPR's "Up First," ABC's "Start Here," and many, many more. Relatively short updates, headlines plus context and personality. It's working, and there are a lot of opportunities for different versions -- local updates, comedy variants, news for and by particular underserved communities.

Streaming? CBS television stations are, market by market, rolling out local video streaming versions of CBSN, CBS News' streaming news service. The CBSN New York and Los Angeles channels are operating now, and they're combinations of live simulcasts of their local stations' news and additional streaming-only content. How hard would it be for a News-Talk radio station to take its top-of-the-hour news, expand it a little, add some additional content, and repeat it on a wheel, updating when appropriate, 24/7 on a stream?

Things changed. It's an on-demand, online world. Audio's increasingly coming through phones. You weren't going to get away with the formulas forever. That might feel a little scary, but it's a new world, and it doesn't have to be the end of the world. In fact, it could open up a whole new world. Better to explore and take advantage than to bemoan the end of an era.

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Next week: Podcast Movement in cool, dry Orlando. (Note: It will neither be cool nor dry.) One last chance to register. Do that here. Then stop by my panel on "Celebrities in Podcasting" on Wednesday, August 14th, on Coleman Insights' Industry Track and sponsored by Audioboom. See you there.

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