On The Clock

"I don't have time for this."

That's my response to practically everything these days, which is, I admit, an odd thing at a time when the pandemic has, it seems, given others plenty of time to do all kinds of things. Binge-watching TV shows? Baking? Doing hot yoga in the bathroom with the shower steaming everything up? Everyone, it seems, is finding the time to do new things, everyone, that is, but me.

And that, of course, is not quite accurate. Sure, if you do nothing but read New York Times lifestyle features, you'd think that everyone is becoming an expert on baking sourdough bread and owns a Peloton. You'd also think that everyone lives in a multi-million-dollar luxury co-op on the Upper West Side or a renovated brownstone in an up-and-coming part of Brooklyn, but the bottom line is that real life is a little different from that, and we have a limited amount of time to devote to everything, regardless of whether we're working from home or out of work or back commuting to the office. They haven't extended the day beyond 24 hours. You have to figure in some sleep hours. The remainder is apportioned among everything else. Saying you have time or don't have time for any particular thing is really a function of what you need to do and WANT to do with the time you have. Some people have more free time than others, but it's a partially zero-sum game: If you choose to take three or four hours of the day watching Netflix, you aren't using that time to, say, read a book or whip up a perfect creme brulee, the recipe for which you undoubtedly found in the New York Times.

That's been on my mind -- the time thing, not the creme brulee -- while I've been checking out Clubhouse, which is one of the latest social media things. In case you haven't seen all the posts on Twitter and Facebook from people pleading to get an invite or humblebragging that they've been busy in a just FASCINATING Clubhouse room discussing life management skills, Clubhouse is an app, currently invite-only, and it's the latest iteration of the concept that started with people gathering in person to talk and later morphed into the telephone party line, Google Hangouts, and Zoom conferences. The difference is that Clubhouse goes back a few generations to embrace audio; it's audio only. You get notifications that someone has started a room on a topic of interest, and you can join in. Some participants are "on stage" (they can talk) and others are in the audience but can go up "on stage" by raising a virtual hand to get a moderator's attention.

So it's a convention panel with more Q&A. You would think I would break out into hives at the prospect, but, so far, I've liked it more than I like convention panels. One reason is that if someone says something worth a response, you can go up on the panel yourself to do it. Another is that there's a button on the bottom that lets you "Leave Quietly." I would love to have that at real convention panels. But Clubhouse is an interesting concept that is a little rough around the edges at the moment, and it'll be interesting to see if it's even remotely navigable once it's open to all comers (or whether it can maintain its coolness factor or die off like so many other social media startups). There's even a competitor of sorts, Stereo, that limits conversations to two people but allows for an audience, kind of listening in on someone's phone call. We'll see which model works better, or at all, soon enough.

Yet, this: I get a notification about a Clubhouse room that I might be interested in checking out, but I just don't have the time to devote to it. This happens more frequently than not, and I look at these rooms with dozens of people in them and I wonder, how do they all have the time? They do, of course -- they're in the room, right? -- but they made the calculation that I did not, that listening to that discussion was more worth their time than whatever other options they had at that moment. I decided that I had other things to do that took precedence.

This is something about which anyone involved with generating content for radio or podcasting should be aware. Your audience has a LOT of options, and that list is getting longer. We all talk about knowing that our competition isn't just, say, the other radio station across town in our format, but other media and other things vying for our attention. It's bigger than that. You're competing with life. Anyone who says "there's nothing to do" is leaving out the important part: "there's nothing to do that I WANT to do right now." There's ALWAYS something to do, whether it's an essential chore -- when ARE you going to clean the bathroom? How about paying those bills on the kitchen table? -- or a leisure activity or, I don't know, learning a new language. There's always a plethora of options. Radio and podcasts are on that list, and have the added bonus of being easy to use while multitasking -- you can listen while doing those dishes, for one thing. But there are so many options, you have to fight to get attention.

The standard you need to meet can be encapsulated by asking yourself one question. Why should someone devote their time to me? Why should they pick my show or podcast when they could be listening to a Clubhouse room, or watching something on Netflix, or following a recipe they found online for some vegan dish that seemed interesting, or helping the kids with their math homework, or.... You get the idea. What makes you worth their time?

That's why doing the same old talk radio isn't going to work as more things demand our attention. The industry needs to assess what cuts through the clutter and offers something worth making a priority, something that it can offer that nobody else can do better and has an intrinsic value that's greater than other things they could be doing. (Turns out that podcasting isn't the only medium with a discovery problem. I'll offer one idea for you: If my phone is alerting me to Clubhouse rooms I might find interesting, perhaps radio can send alerts when a show's particularly compelling, or podcasts could send notifications when new episodes are posted.) It's not going to get easier. Ask yourself why someone would use their precious time on your content, and if you don't have a clear answer, it's time to rethink what you're doing.

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One thing you can do is talk about fun, interesting topics that aren't the same old thing. Where to find those topics? Try 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.

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By the way, I took last week off and somehow STILL didn't have time to do everything I wanted or needed to do. Any time you get a few extra minutes, everything -- work, chores, appointments -- expands to overfill that time. Always been, always will be.

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