No Fun To Hang Around

There's an old Warner Bros. cartoon in which vaudeville performers Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck compete for applause. Everything Bugs does gets wild acclaim; Daffy, despite frenetic attempts to please the crowd, gets silence or literal crickets. Frustrated to the end of his rope, Daffy rolls out his sure-fire stunt (actually, a recycled gag from a Porky Pig cartoon, if we're going to be pedantic): He swallows explosives and a lit match and explodes. As the audience finally goes wild and Bugs tells him "they want more," Daffy, now a ghost floating into the afterlife, sadly responds, "I know, I know... but I can only do it once."

In cartoons, self-immolation is entertainment. In talk radio, it's really not. And that's a problem, because...

Okay, let's go back to a basic element of the format: It's supposed to be entertaining. Even when talking about politics, it's supposed to be the kind of entertainment that you can appreciate regardless of whether you agree with the host or not. In fact, some of the best talk radio came when hosts and callers disagreed. Even now, PDs tell call screeners to move calls from opposing viewpoints to the front of the queue, because that kind of conflict has been considered talk radio entertainment since Joe Pyne told callers to "go gargle with razor blades" and Bob Grant snarled "get off my phone." And hosts, cognizant that their jobs were not to promote a candidate or party but to get ratings to sell at high rates to advertisers to make money and keep their employment, followed the advice to entertain rather than proselytize. Put on a show and everyone's happy.

You can contend, as I noted here last week, that there's an argument for doing what talk radio does today, namely, what else are you gonna do with an AM station? The only people left listening to AM radio, the argument goes, are mostly old and male, so why not superserve them with conservative talk until they all die off, at which point maybe there'll be a miracle and someone will have a better idea, or all-digital will make the stations more valuable, or the land can always be sold off and the license donated or turned in? You got a better idea, genius?

(I had a paragraph here about talk on FM, but I've been talking about that for quite literally over 30 years, so I chopped it out. You know the drill by now. I should have some kind of shorthand to refer to stuff I'm tired of explaining over and over. "Insert FM Talk argument here." "Insert HD Radio argument here." Gotta conserve brain cells more than ever.)

The attitude that talk radio has to do what talk radio is doing today is fundamentally anti-growth, and businesses need to grow to survive. Current political talk radio, the dominant version of the format, constrains its audience to true believers, a group which is not growing in number. The kind of talk we get today limits itself to being palatable only to those true believers. You cant even get a good disagreeing call anymore; you're not entertaining enough for dissenters to listen. You're saying you don't want to grow your audience, and you only want to hold onto what you have for dear life. And so you tell them what you think they want to hear, afraid of them, giving a small sliver of the available audience what they want and sending everyone else to other options, while also limiting advertising to the handful of potential clients looking to reach the 65-plus demographic by radio. ("Male enhancement," you say? Interesting.)

That's one strategy, I guess. But you need to entertain a wider audience to grow, and talk radio lost that thread a while ago. Remember Daffy and the vaudeville act? Think of the theater as losing patrons throughout the show. They aren't being entertained, and they leave. You're left with a small gathering, a fraction of the audience that would fill the seats. You self-immolate with fringe-y political talk, blowing yourself up for their love. The remaining fraction applauds. And as that fraction shrinks -- people leave, or the audience dies off -- your act isn't filling those other seats. You gave some of the people what they want. You're pleasing only a small segment of a much larger audience. You need a better act to get the others back from wherever they went -- podcasts, maybe, or sports radio, or music, or social media. They'll go someplace else to be entertained unless you offer something better.

And, again, this doesn't mean you can't talk about politics. To the contrary, it's 2021; EVERYTHING is political. Just remember that you're not a pundit, you're an entertainer. Even people who disagree with you should enjoy listening to you (the old Stern "I hate them butI want to hear what they say next" model). The more you try to please the narrow P1 audience, the harder it is for others to listen. Look, it's my job to listen to talk radio as well as cover it, but I'll admit, it's been very hard to listen in recent years, not because of the politics -- that doesn't help, yet it's not dispositive -- but because it's no fun anymore. It's just one-sided anger. It's what ruins family gatherings when your crazy uncle tries to goad you into an argument. It's the petition gatherer at the grocery store entrance you go out of your way to avoid. It's no way to grow an audience.

Will this change? I kinda doubt it, because, as I pointed out last week, the more likely options for the radio industry end with talk radio withering until the company just sells off the tower site, while podcasts serve people who want to hear talk but don't want to hear talk radio-style talk. That's not a bad thing, just sad. Maybe we should have emulated Bugs instead of Daffy.

=============================

Whatever kind of talk radio you decide to do, you'll find material to talk about at All Access' show prep column Talk Topics -- Click here and/or follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item. This week's "10 Questions With..." highlights someone you should know, longtime -- and I do mean longtime -- WSGW/Saginaw host Art Lewis, who became a mainstay in his market with the kind of community engagement talk radio should be doing as a matter of course (but rarely does anymore). Art is a smart and interesting guy, and you should read what he has to say.

Make sure you're subscribed to Today's Talk, the daily email newsletter with the top news stories in News, Talk, and Sports radio and podcasting. You can check off the appropriate boxes in your All Access account profile's Format Preferences and Email Preferences sections if you're not already getting it.

You can follow my personal Twitter account at @pmsimon, and my Instagram account (same handle, @pmsimon) as well. And you can find me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pmsimon, and at pmsimon.com.

=============================

Okay, then, go and entertain. Right now, your audience needs you more than ever to offer not the screeds that populate social media but to just be their buddy, their go-to for laughs, perspective, fun, and the truth. That's what you do best, right?

Do it.

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