Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On

Timing is everything, and so the press release announcing a new morning show for a Los Angeles Top 40 radio station showed up the same morning that we had an earthquake, not the biggest quake but one that most people here felt. The new morning show is not here, it's in Phoenix, and they'll be doing "special edition" Los Angeles content added into the Phoenix show.

No, I'm not going to decry syndication. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with syndication, and there isn't a single other entertainment medium in which being national is a bad thing. You've heard the arguments before, right? Like, why should people not be able to listen to the best talent and content just because they don't live in the biggest cities? If we don't complain that TV shows are, other than local news shows and the increasingly rare mid-morning local chat show, all produced in L.A., New York, Vancouver, or wherever production is cheapest, why should radio be any different? It doesn't hurt SiriusXM that its shows are national and its hosts are all over the map. And, besides, times have changed, and you can hear radio from practically everywhere on Earth on your iPhone or Echo or your toaster oven, probably.

And then the Earth shakes and people want to know what just happened. Radio used to be the place you'd instinctively go for just that. It's not the only place anymore; Twitter's become a go-to for that, although most of what you get when there's an emergency incident is people tweeting "EARTHQUAKE" or "Was that an earthquake?" or "WHAT WAS THAT?," which confirms that you haven't lost your mind but doesn't tell you much more than that. It doesn't matter, though. If the radio industry wants to continue to tout its localism as a benefit, being live and local in an earthquake would be one of the things it has to do, and do well.

You're not going to be able to do that if your morning show is in another city. They won't feel the earthquake, and if they find out about it and talk about it the way Los Angeles listeners want them to, the folks in their home market won't stay tuned. So if the next quake -- oh, there WILL be a next quake, many "next quakes" -- is during morning drive instead of just before it, you'll have some shows plowing ahead as if nothing happened. Sure, they can plug in coverage from a sister station, but one of radio's selling points has always been engagement and community, and if your hosts are clearly not part of your community, you're losing something.

(Brief digression: The industry is presently trying to convince Congress and the Senate to treat local clusters of stations as small, local businesses to qualify for the Paycheck Protection Program, rather than be counted as part of their large national-footprint corporate umbrella companies. It might be more convincing if the trend wasn't towards eliminating local jobs and programming and going towards the national/regional model. Just a little unsolicited advice there.)

In normal times, that might not matter. The ratings won't move much one way or another. Stations need more than ever to conserve money, both due to the pandemic and because those private equity investors want to see the numbers they want to see, future be damned. But it IS about the future, the development of that local connection that will draw people to listen to your station and not Spotify or some other stream or podcast, the creation of a two-way sense of loyalty. There's room for syndication, regionalization, voice tracking, automation, AI, whatever. That also, however, creates opportunity for stations to do local, live content, because when there's a quake, a tornado, a big local story, people will look for someone local, someone they trust and with whom they feel a bond. That used to be the folks on the radio. It can still be.

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What? Oh, no, I didn't feel the quake. I was awake, but we didn't feel so much as a rumble. I only heard about it on Twitter. Sorry, radio.

Perry Michael Simon
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