Career Day

What did you want to be when you grew up?

A lot of you are going to say "disc jockey." A few weirdos will say "talk show host." (I wanted to be "something involving radio and/or television and/or writing and/or maybe sports, I don't know." By that token, I succeeded. The bar wasn't high.) Now that you're (I assume) an adult, is what you're doing what you dreamed of doing?

Here's why I'm wondering about that. Obviously, the radio business, if that's where you planned on ending up, has changed. If you're someone who heard a music jock and imagined playing your favorite music and connecting with people and having fun, you surely didn't imagine that voice tracking and computer automation would be the way things turned out. But where talk radio is concerned....

You may have seen the articles in the Washington Post and New York Times this week about talk radio; you may be one of the roughly ten thousand people who sent me the links. And, yes, my response to the stories, which were about how toxic a lot of the talk has been in spreading lies, conspiracy theories, and thinly-veiled threats of insurrection, and how the future of the format post-Rush Limbaugh is unclear, has been to note that there's nothing in there that I wasn't saying years ago, over and over, with nobody listening. Nice to see the rest of the news media catching up. I had another thought, though, which brings me back to childhood.

Like you, I was beguiled by the sounds coming through the radio. I was exposed to a lot of talk radio back then, because my parents were listeners, and I heard it all. Bob Grant yelling at callers to "get off my phone!" on my dad's car radio. Mom listening to "Doctor" (he wasn't a doctor) Bernard Meltzer "with advice and counsel" on Sunday mornings. Know-it-all Brad Crandall arguing with callers. Bill Mazer and Art Rust Jr. talking sports before there was a WFAN or WIP. Conservative firebrands, liberal firebrands, genial apolitical interviewers, all kinds of talk. That was talk radio when I first heard it. I'm not saying it was all great -- a lot of it, if you hear it today, is cringe-worthy. A lot of it was bland "some people say this, other people say that. What say you?" It was a different time with different standards.

If you'd have told me I would do talk radio someday, I'd have been excited. (If you told me I'd be behind the scenes and mostly not on the air, well, maybe I'd have been less excited, but I'll save that for the book I'll never get around to writing.) Yet, If you told me that talk radio would turn into what talk radio is right now, the stuff the Times and Post are just now discovering, I'd have looked, honestly, for another profession. Spouting talking points from a political party, shilling for one side or the other, having to indulge in falsehoods and conspiracy theories in fear that the audience will reject anything else... that wasn't even how it was when I was programming talk radio. There was no requirement to take one side or another. In fact, we reveled in being unpredictable and treating whoever was in power the same way, regardless of party or ideology: Our side was the public's side, ALL of the public. It's different now.

Was this what you signed up for when you decided that talk radio is what you were going to do? No? Then... don't. Be better. Be entertaining, be political if you want, take whatever positions you believe, but break yourself free from the stereotypes, the image that talk radio has developed in recent years. Be yourself. Be independent. Be what the younger you imagined you would be. And if you're not on the air right now, hope that maybe management and programmers will realize that the end game for a lot of what's on the air right now isn't pretty, that this will just end with dwindling advertising revenue and an audience shrunken and dying off. There's a better way to go, and it's not a formula. It's just about being something people dream about doing again. Nobody dreams of being a strident spokesperson. They dream of entertaining, engaging, connecting. Talk radio has largely lost sight of that. Moving forward, that's where the format needs to go, not merely "replacing" the old guard with younger versions of the same thing but a total refresh.

And if it doesn't get there, there's always podcasting, I guess. Maybe the money will catch up someday.

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Oh, hey, look, it's the All Access Audio Summit! Yes, the Summit, rudely interrupted by the pandemic in 2020, is back and virtual for 2021, and I will be on the agenda talking about podcasting and careers and things and stuff. More details on that in coming weeks; until then, mark April 21-22 down and register here. It's two days' worth of people you know and trust (and also me) and you won't even have to leave your house to see and hear it all. Join us, won't you?

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