Talk Of The Town

This week, I'm indulging in a little dreaming, some spitballing, thinking out loud. Put this in the category of throwing out ideas for the sake of conversation and argument. And, if it works, send me ten percent of the gross.

You may have heard in the past couple of weeks about the controversy in the city of Bell, California, where the council and top officials gave themselves astronomical salaries and the residents, once apprised of the situation, are now practically rioting in an attempt to throw the bums out. It's a fairly spectacular story of egregious greed and abuse of power, and it's become a national story as well as dominating local talk radio.

How did these guys get away with it? How did they conspire to raise their salaries to ridiculous levels, plus guarantee themselves massive pensions no matter what the outcome would be, right under the noses of the voters?

Simple: Nobody was paying attention. And by "nobody," I mean, Bell had no local media. No local radio, no local newspaper, nothing. Nobody was covering the local government. And without local reporters asking questions, the politicians didn't have to answer to anyone. The public just didn't know what was happening. By that time a new councilman discovered what his colleagues were up to and the L.A. Times began to investigate, it had been going on for five years.

Would this have happened if there WERE local reporters from local media? Maybe, maybe not, but you gotta think that someone would have asked questions a long time before these reports finally hit the paper. Like so many other towns across America, though, there's no local radio station there, no local radio news operation. There's no local paper -- the weekly that covered that city died a long time ago. Forget TV. And if there are websites covering the city, they're a long way from achieving the kind of awareness they need to be effective; It's coming, but not yet. The result of this situation is that nobody was watching, and that's an invitation for the mice to play.

I'm not going to argue that a suburban city of less than 40,000 people can support a radio station of its own. It probably can't, and there aren't any open frequencies, anyway. But there are other opportunities for radio to seize that local news position. Think "long tail." I'll explain.

There's a lot of money being bet on -- er, "invested in" -- the proposition that there's a business in providing "hyperlocal" news and information via the Internet. There are networks of small "neighborhood" websites providing news, event coverage, calendar listings, and message boards geared to individual towns. They use freelancers in each town at low or no cost to post reports. Each individual city's site might not in itself be economically viable, but as a group, they can sell both local and regional advertising. That's the "long tail" -- hundreds of neighborhood sites serving hundreds of neighborhoods, rather than one big site for everyone.

Radio can do that, too. A big station can create a weekly podcast of news -- it doesn't have to be more than five minutes each -- about every town or section of the market. Like the websites, it can be done on the cheap, with freelancers or volunteers sending in audio. Tag it with regional and local ads when the ad dollars start to come around to this kind of model. Send your street team to paper the town with flyers to let people know to subscribe. And with that, your station attaches itself to every town in the market, and local politicians have to be on their guard again.

Maybe I'm wrong and there's no way to make this work. But radio's promoted "localism" as a prime feature of the medium, and the definition of media localism's changing again. If radio doesn't do this, someone else will. Radio has a privileged position, though, with an existing marketing advantage and branding that startups don't have. I'd like to see someone give this a shot, because I think there's a need for really local news the way radio's capable of doing it.

Plus, I'm not the one paying for it. But if radio's going to be a viable news medium going forward, this is the kind of thing I think it can do to be relevant in a more competitive, and diverse, media landscape.

(For more on the Bell situation and the lack of coverage there, from a more newspaper-centric position, check out a piece from the Voice of Orange County website by clicking here)

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The Bell story was one of hundreds of topics at All Access News-Talk-Sports, where the Talk Topics column once again has plenty for you to talk about. Examples? How about the study that says people are sexually attracted to their own parents? The cheeseburger in the gas tank? "Revirginizing"? Why Americans -- even with insurance -- are going to the doctor less often? The lost art of keeping score at the ballgame? There's more, all ready to help you put on a show; you can also see the headlines at the Talk Topics Twitter feed (twitter.com/talktopics), which will link directly to each item. This week, there's also the very first "10 Questions With..." involving a former Penthouse Pet (at least, to my knowledge), as we visit with HotTalkLA.com and MAV TV "The Single Life With Sam Phillips" host and producer and former KLSX/Los Angeles host Sam Phillips, plus the rest of All Access with radio and music industry news first, fastest, and best, plus columns, ratings, job listings, and all the resources you need, all free.

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I'd write something clever to close this thing out if I had anything clever left. I don't. Maybe next week. Enjoy the weekend anyway.

Perry Michael Simon
Editor
All Access News-Talk-Sports
psimon@allaccess.com
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