Adaptation

Nothing has changed, but everything has changed.

Twenty years ago Saturday, I was... okay, it's the standard, cliche question everyone asks on the anniversary of a major event, "Where were you when you heard the news and what were you doing?" For me on 9/11, the answer is that I was sitting exactly where I'm sitting now, doing exactly what I'm doing now, writing news stories on the computer. In that sense, nothing has changed. I'm still doing the same job for the same company in the same location. I'm older, but the circumstances are, on the surface, identical.

Yet we've been through a lot since then. History happened. You don't need me to recount everything that's occurred over the past 20 years. We're all older and we may not be any wiser, but here we are.

Radio -- excuse me, we should call it audio to be inclusive, and that's another change -- hasn't changed much in twenty years, as I've discussed and rehashed over and over since this column began. One critical thing that's changed over that time, however, is radio's role in people's lives.

You can see where this might become a problem.

In 2001, radio still held a primary position in a lot of its listeners' everyday routines. Facebook was still a few years away from emerging from the swampy muck of Harvard, and Twitter was five years away. Depending on whose history you accept, podcasting was either in an embryonic stage or three years away. It's true that a lot of radio, then as now, was consumed as background noise, passive listening, but more of it was foreground, active consumption, especially talk radio, which by nature requires a little more attention than music radio. A lot of people, myself included, first heard the news of the attacks on the radio, and many tuned into local radio for more news and just to hear some reassuring, familiar voices helping them get through the horror.

In 2021, it's different. The role radio plays in listeners' lives has, if anything, become more about passive listening than before. There are other options for everything radio can offer, and many of those options are more interactive. In an emergency -- Hurricane Ida is an example -- radio can offer live, immediate information and human interaction that podcasting can't offer and social media can't easily match, as I highlighted in last week's column. Otherwise, if you want talk, you can pull up podcasts on demand with content that's exactly what you want to hear. If you want music, you have Spotify and Apple Music and Tidal and YouTube and music you, not a radio PD, choose. If you want news, you'll hear about things on Twitter before anywhere else, and if you want political noise, you'll get plenty on Facebook or Twitter.

Does that portend radio's demise? No, not really. It's just time to recognize that listeners' needs have changed over the decades, and to adjust the product to serve the audience that's still around.

Recognizing that a percentage of the radio audience is going to use other media for things like music or talk is step one. Step two is to identify what the audience still wants from radio. One obvious thing is personality, and if you doubt it, just look at Spotify's stabs at doing "morning show" material to intersperse throughout playlists or encouraging podcasters to use Anchor to create what amounts to radio shows, or Apple actually having a linear radio stream of its own. Personality -- entertaining and informative -- is key. More personality, more engagement, more companionship, more connection between listener and broadcaster. You'll be filling a need that a music service can't easily fill.

Step three is to find and develop talent to deliver that personality. This is tricky, since radio has done a poor job of finding and developing new talent, and young, creative people have little interest in radio. It's been a long time since "Did you hear what (name of jock) said this morning?" was a thing, but it can still happen (and, to be fair, there are some really entertaining shows out there). Canned, standard bits won't do. Nor will liner cards. And listeners don't want you talking over the music, either. But when they say they don't want talking to interrupt the music, they're really saying they don't want lame, standard jock talk. You'd be annoyed by some guy busting into your playlist telling you about some reality show person's latest exploits, or telling a bad joke pulled from a prep sheet, too. Original, entertaining talk is a different story. It's also really hard to do, which makes talent identification and development that much more important.

For talk radio, which hasn't really changed in decades, podcasts offer a lot of what talk radio should offer but doesn't: a wide range of viewpoints, topics, and styles. It's true that the hard-core P1 talk radio audience wants what it's gotten over the last twenty years (and more), which is to say the angry conservative guys ranting. It's also true that said audience is alarmingly shrinking. Don't be fooled by those 6+ shares you see on the ratings page; look at the cumes and see what's happening, which is that the audience for traditional AM talk radio keeps getting smaller but those who are left are listening more (and are much, much older, but we knew that already).

So, for some listeners, needs haven't changed. But that's a small subset of the potential audience; a lot more people aren't listening to talk radio, and many of them are repelled by what's on the air. Can talk radio attract new listeners? Sure, and here's how: Entertain them, do it on FM, do it live with lots of audience interaction. If listeners want monologues and interviews, podcasts do that better and on demand. If their needs involve hearing a live person interact with other live people and talking about a wider range of interesting stuff, that's what talk radio's role should be. Don't give them what they can find elsewhere. And play to your medium's strengths, which are being live, being ubiquitous (whether by broadcast or streaming), being an actual human instead of a disembodied entity posting things on social media.

Sports radio poses the dilemma of how social media, especially Twitter, has become home to the kind of instant reaction that used to be radio's specialty. Yet you can see how well sports radio still does, because the audience's desires still include hearing fellow fans vent. That holds true today; it's one thing to read anguished tweets from Eagles fans, and entirely another to hear the fans call in to WIP and complain in thick Delco accents. The critical element is that sports stations be local when they need to be local; when your local team plays, you need to be talking about them the morning after. There's nothing worse on sports radio than when your local team plays a big game and the local sports station is talking about other games and other teams in other cities because you don't have a local show for fans to call into. Know your audience.

Change can be good or bad, but you can't get far by ignoring it. The answer for radio isn't to abandon the medium in hopes of competing in podcasting or streaming so much as it's to adjust the product to reflect those changes, along with expanding podcasting and streaming, that is. It's not 2001 anymore. The audience's expectations and behaviors have changed. The medium should change, too.

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And twenty years later, the memory is still fresh. Radio helped me get through that day, and I know that, even in today's somewhat diminished state, it can and will take that role again whenever it's necessary. Whatever you think about the industry and the people who run it, it's also filled with people who, when the chips are down, will come through, because it's just what they do. Technology, ultimately, is really all about the people behind it, and that's one of radio's strengths.

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