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BNM’s Andy Bloom has avoided directing harsh comments toward any company – until now after Audacy announced another round of workforce reductions.
Since I started writing this column several months ago, I have written about radio’s precarious position and criticized the industry’s leadership for harming the business. However, I have avoided directing harsh comments toward any company – until now.
This week, Audacy announced another round of workforce reductions (WFR)
(Full disclosure) My position at CBS Radio -Philadelphia was eliminated (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) for budget reasons. After CBS sold to Entercom, some people who remained after the transition helped me find a home in the new company as operations manager for the Minneapolis cluster. Modernizing WCCO-AM was the key role. After extensive talks, we agreed on a plan. I’ll just say everything changed from the day I started. It was a very difficult and short tenure with Entercom (now Audacy).
There was a hint that another round of workforce reductions was coming during Audacy’s second-quarter earnings call on August 5th. During the call, Audacy President and CEO David Field reported that after a promising first quarter, “deteriorating macroeconomic conditions and increasing uncertainty has caused ad spending headwinds, which had impacted our business. In second quarter our revenues grew 5%.”
Audacy’s results were especially disappointing, coming on the heels of iHeart and Salem reporting double-digit growth for the quarter and Townsquare announcing its all-time best second-quarter revenue and profits.
Field explained what steps the company would take to improve results for the third and fourth quarters. “We are working to enact substantial, sustainable savings through a number of measures to improve margins and profitability across the business. We believe we will be able to deliver meaningful cost reductions without hindering our strategic priorities and growth plans,” he said.
If that didn’t raise eyebrows for any Audacy employees listening, when CFO Rich Schmaeling elaborated, there could have been no doubt.
“If you look at our expense performance so far this year, you go back and see in the first quarter our expenses grew 8% year-over-year. They’re growing — they grew 6% year-over-year in 2Q, we’ve given guidance that for 3Q, expenses will be up 1% to 2%. So we are making substantial progress. We are working on a program to meaningfully reduce our expenses, and we will provide further details about the scope and extent of those actions on our third quarter call.”
Schmaeling repeated expense reductions were coming several times throughout the call.
Listening to a radio CEO and CFO talk about reducing expenses almost always means people are about to lose their jobs.
This week, reports are that up to 5% of the company’s total workforce, spread across all divisions and markets, could be laid-off. That means another 250 people will lose their livelihoods. Some already have.
The entire staff was let go, and all local programming was eliminated at 1250 The Fan in Milwaukee.
At WCCO-AM, Minneapolis, Mike Max is out, but at least he still has his full-time TV gig with WCCO-TV (the two are no longer affiliated). Unfortunately, producer Craig “The Hammer” Schroepfer, one of the best people I met at the station, isn’t so lucky. He’s a solid producer, and I hope somebody will pick him up. BTW Max was the only person at the station with conservative views.
Morning hosts were let go in Denver, Dallas, Seattle, and Pittsburgh, as well as several afternoon personalities across the country. Many others have already been let go, with more to come.
Field and Schmaeling are doing what they believe necessary to survive. The disappointing second-quarter results are in addition to the difficulty Audacy’s stock is facing. The NYSE warned that Audacy’s stock could face delisting because it has traded below $1 for 30 consecutive days. That’s a tremendous amount of pressure for anybody running a large company. Cutting expenses must seem like the easiest and quickest solution. Of course, cutting people just digs a deeper hole toward restoring long-term viability.
Cutting people to save a fiscal quarter reminds me of one of my favorite holiday movies, “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” Specifically, I’m referring to the scene where cousin Eddie (Randy Quaid) kidnaps Clark Griswold’s boss, Mr. Frank Shirley (Brian Doyle Murray), and brings him to the Griswold home where he sees the impact of cutting Christmas bonuses.
Realizing what he has done, Shirley says: “Sometimes things look good on paper but lose their luster when you see how it affects real folks. I guess a healthy bottom line doesn’t mean much if, to get it, you have to hurt the ones that you depend on. It’s people that make the difference.”
Hopefully, you’ve been lucky enough to work for at least one person or company who believed “people are our most important asset.” No matter the business, the product suffers when people are just lines on an expense sheet easily cut to maintain profits margins for the quarter.
Emmis is a company that treats people like its most valuable asset. A few weeks ago, I wrote about its departure from radio. I’ll share more from the extensive interview I had with CEO Jeff Smulyan and President of Programming Rick Cummings on their thoughts about what the industry needs to do going forward:
Rick Cummings: “Radio is going to have to evolve much more to spoken word and personalities, which is a tremendous hurdle when you consider what most of the big groups have done over the last 15 years, which is to voice track things and pipe things in from out of market. The only thing radio can offer these days that is unique is personality. Because music delivery as a linear system is really, really fading fast. I think that’s going to be a very challenging hurdle.”
More cuts mean less local programming, fewer unique personalities, and a reduction in personal connections in the community. It’s the exact opposite of what once made radio important to many people.
Jeff Smulyan succinctly sums up the net impact of the radio industry continuing to make cuts (I should emphasize that he was not referring to these workforce reductions or any specific company).
“The problem is the more they cut, the less compelling they make the product to the consumer.”
For now, Audacy will continue its workforce reductions and dig a deeper hole.
Andy Bloom is president of Andy Bloom Communications. He specializes in media training and political communications. He has programmed legendary stations including WIP, WPHT and WYSP/Philadelphia, KLSX, Los Angeles and WCCO Minneapolis. He was Vice President Programming for Emmis International, Greater Media Inc. and Coleman Research. Andy also served as communications director for Rep. Michael R. Turner, R-Ohio. He can be reached by email at andy@andybloom.com or you can follow him on Twitter @AndyBloomCom.
Active Social Media Presence is Part of the Radio Host Job
John Curley: An Impossibly Funny, Extemporaneous Guy
Tiffany Cross: A Civil War in the U.S. is Here
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Brian Stelter: Rare Privilege to Host Reliable Sources
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BNM’s Pete Mundo is still shocked when I see that there are hosts in major markets who have almost zero social media presence.
You just put a bow on a GREAT on-air segment. It was informative, entertaining, funny, and opinionated, all wrapped into one.
It felt fantastic. Your producer and board op also felt the same way. Callers, texters, and social media are complimenting the show.
You wish that your entire market had heard that segment. The reality is unless it was teased perfectly and promoted for a specific reason, the audience that is usually there was there, along with hopefully a few extra sets of ears.
And yes, you can recycle and re-do the segment or bit in a couple of hours, if you want, but it won’t be the same. It rarely goes just as well the second time around.
The good news is that you can make sure that the segment lives forever and gets more attention via digital media.
But this is where radio doesn’t do itself any favors.
Despite the fact that radio has some of the most talented content creators producing outstanding work for hours each and every day, there is a massive portion of the potential audience who doesn’t even know your content exists.
We can bemoan the fact that there are “too many options” in today’s media world or embrace it. And it’s still amazing to me how many, notably on News Talk radio, choose the former.
I’m still shocked when I see that there are hosts in major markets who have almost zero social media presence. If they do, it’s a Facebook or Twitter account a former producer made for them years ago that has no content or information on it.
Like it or not, being engaged on these platforms is part of the job and is a huge part of the way we can promote our own content to listeners who may have missed it live. Plus, it hopefully reminds them why they should be tuned into us every day, or it allows us to connect to a potential new audience that doesn’t currently make radio part of their day. However, if they find us via a podcast or social media clip, they may become podcast subscribers and start making radio part of their day-to-day.
Also, what about that business professional who hasn’t driven to the office in over two years because he/she now works from home? They are out of their routine of radio listening based on their new schedule, but they find your show/content on social media and make listening on their Alexa or Google Home now part of their daily routine.
As broadcasters, we can find all the excuses we want. “I already do a four-hour show.” “I don’t have time.” “We all have other responsibilities around the station.” “We don’t have any marketing.”
Sure, those convenient excuses can be used, but they’re just that… excuses. And lame.
It’s our job to go where our potential customers are. And in 2022, yes, they’re on the radio, obviously, but they’re also on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and several other platforms and places we should be exploring as well.
And if you need that extra push: Don’t you want more people to be listening to your great content? Don’t you want them to find out about you, your show, and your station? Wouldn’t it be great to have more listeners who can potentially make purchases from your plethora of great clients, who then end up making more money? Isn’t that the end game here?
It all seems so obvious, but it’s amazing that of all formats, despite News Talk producing engaging, thoughtful, compelling, and informative content every day in local markets around the country, that content rarely makes it beyond the airwaves it was originally heard on.
It’s a disservice to those in the market, the station, the advertisers, and ultimately, yourself.
Pete Mundo is the morning show host and program director for KCMO in Kansas City. He graduated from Villanova University, and has worked for FOX News Talk Radio, WCBS Newsradio 880, Bloomberg Radio. WFAN, CBS Sports Radio, WEER 88.7FM, ESPN 1230/1320, and, K-1O1 and Z-92. He has also won an Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters small-market award for his coverage of the Bobbie Parker trial in the summer of 2011. To interact, find him on Twitter @PeteMundo.
I’m going to hit the boilerplate information at the top. Then I can venture into the complex, funny and curious mind of John Curley.
Curley has worked alongside Shari Elliker on KIRO since January 2021. He had been paired with Tom Tangney on The Tom & Curley Show, which debuted in 2014. Tangney had been at KIRO for nearly 30 years. Before that, he was an Emmy Award-winning TV host.
Curley explained Tangney’s departure this way.
“Tom’s mother was 94 while she struggled through the pandemic,” Curley said.
“He’s in his mid-60s, and I think he essentially understood life is ephemeral, and he had other things to experience. Perhaps he felt the job wasn’t as much fun as it once had been.”
Curley described his former partner as a polar opposite when it came to politics.
“You could hit your brother on the head with a telephone,” Curley said. “Then, a short while later, you’d be playing Nerf football in the yard because there was nobody else to play with. That’s the way it was.”
You just buried differences you were bound to have that day and moved on.
“Patch it up quick,” Curley explained. Tom and I had that brother relationship. We’d go at it on the air, and after a commercial break, we’d be fine again.”
Politics was a contentious issue between the duo, but Curley said on the radio today that the Left vs. Right thing doesn’t work anymore.
“The audience feels the tension.”
The pandemic affected Curley’s life hard and forced him to redefine his priorities. “I lost half a million dollars,” Curley said. “My auction business cratered.” Still, John Curley Auction Entertainment is doing quite well, thank you. The man could sell hair extensions to Donald Trump. Maybe even dreadlocks.
One afternoon on the air, Tom Tangney pissed Curley off something fierce. So Curley set down his headset and went outside in the middle of the show. Broadcasting from his cabin, he figured he had some chores to do anyway.
“I didn’t want to scream at him, so I hopped on my tractor and took care of a few things,” Curley said.
You might ask how that went over.
“I know a big fan who listens to our show a lot. She said it was 20 minutes of intense radio. She thought Tom was going to have a heart attack, wondering where I had gone. But he is one of the most good-natured human beings I’ve known. Nothing phases him. He’d laugh at negative text messages sent his way and never took anything personally.”
Sounds like a eulogy, but Tom Tangney is alive and well.
Curley never looks at his messages at work.
“The IT guy would call me and ask me to delete 87,000 unread emails. I guess I was clogging the system.”
Curley is an impossibly funny, and it turns out, extemporaneous guy. He can really think on his feet. A woman in the office, Stephanie, asked Curley if he could come back and take a look at a video. The guy in the video was drunk as a skunk, holding a mop and fixing to smash in a window on a truck.
“Stephanie asked me to do a voice-over, kind of like a baseball play-by-play description of what the guy was doing.”
Curley did. And it was hilarious.
“The man fixes his stance and starts reigning blows on the window with the mop handle. That’s 14 attempts if you’re counting at home.” That’s just a snippet. The man goes on to climbing on the roof and quickly falling off the relatively short roof. Somebody get some salami and cream cheese and rub it in this guy’s face. He’s down.”
We laugh at an idiot’s expense, but he deserved it.
As the kids say, the video was picked up and went ‘viral.’
Curley is a little odd. And I mean that in the most fantastic way.
He lives in a 300-square-foot cabin with no indoor toilet. But that’s not the odd part.
“I never watched The Godfather until recently when I was flying back from Paris,” Curley said.
“I remember reading about Marlon Brando and how he worked the scene. The cat with him wasn’t even supposed to be in the scene. Somehow the cat was on the set and tried to get off. He jumped into Brando’s lap before the take when he’s in his office for his daughter’s wedding. Here is Brando, just petting the cat. It’s biting at his hand, all while this guy is asking for a favor. When Don Corleone comes to a decision, he sets the cat on the desk, and it disappears. It just all organically developed.”
Yup. That’s a taste of what it’s like talking to John Curley.
He’s tight with his brother Chuck, always has been. They made a pact when they were kids.
“We were having breakfast and reading the ‘commercials’ on the side of the cereal boxes. On one box was an ad for the movie Star Wars, which had just come out. We vowed to never see the movie. A sacred pact.”
They never did. To compound matters, Curley said he interviewed George Lucas on a junket a while back, and Lucas asked him what he thought of the latest installment of the series.
“I told him I never saw any of them,” Curley said, once again, no trace of embarrassment. “I can still see his face.”
You had to figure if there was no indoor toilet in his cabin; a television was not part of the scene either.
He’s never seen Cheers, Titanic or ET. So Curley gets a pass on those. None are what I would refer to as required viewing. Besides, there was still room on the door for Jack.
If he were ignorant of movies and television, you’d assume the guy read books all his life. You’d be wrong. But he did catch up.
“I read magazines or newspapers to be current, but I had never spent time reading books. I’d never read Dickens, Slaughterhouse Five, Great Expectations.”
“I knew I had a lot of catching up to do. I also knew television was like heroin. I can’t believe how many times I’ve heard about people sitting at home and binging a series. I’d just feel empty. I’d never do it.”
His father subscribed to one of those book series where if you purchased Little Women, you’d get The Great Gatsby for free! “Collect all l00 of our classic books,” and get a free bowl of soup.
“I plowed through them all,” Curley said.
“I do see why it’s important to read classics. Not just going through the motions, but what you can really take away from them. I don’t feel any smarter. A great sense of satisfaction. Now I see that reading is important, and I’m not just going through the motions.”
When his father passed away, he and his brother Chuck couldn’t help themselves from goofing around–even at the funeral.
“Each of us were on opposite sides of the grave,” Curley said. “Chuck was lifting up his leg as if he was going to climb in. I did the same. What we realized and what we were saying is, we recognized we were the next ones in a grave. One of us was going to be first. We wondered how many more summers each of us had left.”
His mother left him some money when she passed, as well as 10 acres of land. Curley said he sees all sorts of snakes, cougars, bears, and bobcats.
“I know a guy named Larry who tracked a cougar who had jumped over some fences,” Curley explained. “He tracked it down and killed it.”
A couple of weeks later, Larry invited Curley over to dinner. While he was enjoying his meal, Larry’s wife Dana asked Curley how he was enjoying the cougar meat.
Amazingly, Curley didn’t drop his fork and stop eating. He wasn’t repulsed.
“It’s just a cat,” he said. “I’ve only got a couple more bites, just let me finish.”
Just as he lives off the radar, Curley said he doesn’t have a lot of friends.
“People assume if you’re on radio and TV, you hang out with all sorts of people. I don’t. My mother told me she was going to throw a surprise party for me on my 26th birthday. She said she couldn’t do it because she couldn’t think of any of my friends.”
I’m pretty sure he loves his brother Chuck, even if Curley didn’t say it. Maybe it’s an Irish thing. Chuck is a lawyer and enjoys a fine life. Still, Chuck is very intrigued by the way his brother’s life turned out.
Chuck told his brother that he’d followed all the rules in life. He said he completed all the assignments on time, worked the extra credit problems, went to law school, graduated top of his class, had a rainy day fund, changed the oil in the car before he was required to, changed batteries in his home fire alarms regularly. Chuck played life by the numbers.
‘You’re further along than I am,’ Chuck told his brother. ‘You don’t play by any of the rules. You have nice clothes. You’re successful.’ It’s not that it bothered his brother. Instead, he was just amazed at how far his brother had gone coloring outside the lines.
“We talk all the time,” Curley said. “He’ll call when he’s driving into the office.”
The magic still happens when Curley visits his brother at Christmas.
“I’ll sneak up behind him and start pounding on his back for no reason.”
When they were younger, one of them would just start doing jumping jacks out of nowhere.
“My brother would be watching TV, and I’d start doing jumping jacks. That was really a warning. It symbolized that ‘Grand Dad had something to say.’ That meant I was about to drag him to the carpet, put him in a wrestling move, and fart in his face.”
When they get together today, if one starts doing jumping jacks, it’s a clear signal for the other to start running.
A Billy Bob Thornton Story.
Curley interviewed actor, director, and writer Billy Bob Thornton on a press junket. He said you sit a lot closer to your interview subject than you’d think. Almost knee to knee.
“You sit around with the star and wait for them to adjust the lights,” Curley said. “Billy Bob, like most of them, was polite. But they’ve been answering the same questions for hours. You can understand how this could be hard for them.”
They were at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles, asking each other which way they were going to sit for the interview.
“I’d never seen that switchblade thing,” Curley said without embarrassment. He meant to say Sling Blade. “We were just waiting, and I told him I figured he was sent a lot of scripts.”
Billy Bob politely smiled and nodded.
“I’ve got a great movie idea,” Curley told Thornton. Keep in mind, Curley is a guy who hasn’t really seen a lot of movies. It figures he’d have an idea for one.
“I could tell Billy Bob was thrilled,” Curley said sarcastically. “I told him it was a true story, and he said, ‘Let me hear it.’”
Curley did. It’s a rather long and convoluted story, but the critical component is that Billy Bob listened to Curley’s pitch.
‘Hollywood would have ruined your story,’ Billy Bob told Curley. Curley asked Billy Bob what he would do with the story.
It’s not essential here what Billy Bob told him, just because Curley had the brass balls to pitch a goofy story to an accomplished Hollywood guy like Thornton.
Curley presumably got his dry wit and humor from his father, Jack Curley. He kept his father’s last voicemail before he died.
“He told me he’d just come from the doctor,” Curley said. “It’s cancer, he told me. The fast kind.”
The senior Curley told his son if he didn’t have any plans on Sunday, he should come out to see him and say goodbye.
“I got to the house and saw my father,” Curley said. “I asked him how he was feeling.”
‘Anxious,’ his father told him.
“I said, why? You’ve been a good Catholic all your life. He told me he didn’t think there was a heaven. Statistically, he said, there was no more room in heaven. There were too many people.”
It was time. As Curley was walking out of the room, he told his father goodbye.
“He told me I was a good son,” Curley said. “I couldn’t believe it. My father was about to cry. I figured, god-damn, I’m going back to that old Irish guy and get an ‘I love you’ out of him before he goes. I turned at the door and said, ‘I love you, Dad.’ He just nodded at me and said, ‘I know you do.’”
In a way, this was hard for Curley. He didn’t get the ‘I love you’ he’d hoped for. His brother Chuck told him, ‘You know, in his world, him saying ‘you were a good son’ was better than an ‘I love you.’
“My father had a giant personality,” Curley said. “I once asked him what he considered a friend to be. He told me, ‘A friend is someone I can borrow five bucks from, not pay him back, and he never says anything.”
His interview with daredevil Robbie Knievel is another humdinger.
“I said to him, ‘So, you’re going to jump 150 motorcycles.”
Knieval let Curley in on a secret. Yes, he was going to jump the motorcycles, but there was much more of a show to it all.
“He told me, I’m gonna ride out, take a couple of laps around the track as fast as I can. I’m going to sit and stare at the ramp for ten seconds. I’m going to go to the top of the ramp and sit some more like I’m thinking. I can easily jump the bikes; I’m just milking the moment. Some of my crew would come up the ramp and talk with me. I’d point to something in the distance, but of course, I was not pointing at anything. Just trying to create tension.”
Curley said it’s just like on his radio show. When the show goes off the rails, the audience can feel it. Then Curley said, like Robbie Knievel, he’ll bring it back.
“I know a guy, John Medina, who wrote Brain Rules. He teaches at the University of Washington. He said the human brain can only stand a certain amount of information in so many minutes. In the middle of a lecture, he’ll come out of nowhere and ask the students, ‘What color is a giraffe’s tongue?”
“He’d go around the room, and people would guess. Nobody would be right because they probably had never thought of such a thing.” He told them, “I’m going to give you a hint–a giraffe eats 80 percent of the day.”
A student raised their hand and said the color of a giraffe’s tongue is purple. Medina told the student he was right. Because the tongue is in the sunlight for so much of the day, it could get sunburned. The purple color of the tongue would, in essence, repel light and avoid sunburn.
“All of this was to give the student’s brain a rest,” Curley said. “Medina refers to it as Brain Candy. He said he knows if you come up with some kind of trivia question during a long lecture, the thought and answer will release some dopamine, thereby satisfaction when you know the answer. The brain is now refreshed with the presence of dopamine, and they will retain the rest of the lecture.”
Then Curley gets to the interview he conducted with Woody Allen.
He told Allen his brother Chuck dated women for two or three dates. Then came a test. He would show them the VHS or DVD of the movie Annie Hall. If the date didn’t laugh at three specific points in the film, Chuck would not ask them out again. So that’s three significant laughs in three particular spots.
“I told Woody Allen my brother chose his wife because his then-date laughed at those three spots in the movie. Chuck figured these were easy laughs, and if they didn’t, that was it.”
Woody Allen was intrigued. He leaned forward and asked Curley a question.
In a dynamite Woody Allen impression, Culey said Allen asked, ‘What scenes did your brother pick?’
First, laugh. When Christopher Walken told Allen’s character Alvy Singer told Walken, ‘He was due back on the planet earth.’
Second laugh: When Alvy was at the dinner table with Annie’s parents and grandmother.
Third laugh: When Alvy was in bed with his girlfriend and couldn’t put his mind at ease, wondering how Oswald was able to get three shots off from a book depository. How it made no sense.
Allen asked if his brother was married. Curley told Allen he wasn’t, that he couldn’t find anyone to laugh at those three spots in the movie. Allen replied, ‘that’s funny.’
“I told him, ‘no, seriously, he didn’t get married because he couldn’t find anyone to laugh at those spots.”
John Curley is probably the only person in history to cause Woody Allen to remain flabbergasted.
And I’m exhausted.
Jim Cryns writes features for Barrett News Media. He has spent time in radio as a reporter for WTMJ, and has also served as an author and former writer for the Milwaukee Brewers. To touch base or pick up a copy of his book: On Story Parkway: Remembering Milwaukee County Stadium, available on Amazon, email jimcryns3_zhd@indeedemail.com.
Take a listen where you are if there even is local programming and it will not take long to figure out; we are one plane, one singular loop.
To begin, I beg forgiveness if this turns out to be way too much of an “old man yells at clouds” tirade of observation and opinion but, unfortunately, my megaphone just does not reach very far. I’m in the car a great deal and when not listening to my music playlists, I lean very heavily on the people talking on the radio. I used to enjoy real talk shows and I miss them terribly. Now, before you say, “But Bill, there is still plenty of local talk shows out there.” I’m just going to boldly interrupt. There may be hours of somebody originating from a specific location, sitting in an air studio within a local station but what they’re talking about is seldom local and pertinent to the listening area. Moreover, if by chance, the conversation does turn to issues affecting the state, the city, or the town, it rarely goes in-depth and rarely runs very long. I will be the first to admit that I was spoiled, almost ruined to be even more accurate. My upbringing in News-Talk, and that is what it was, News-Talk; happened in what was at the time, a stellar talk radio market. I’m talking a major west coast city where the things that you would expect to happen, did occur every day. There was rarely anything to address, analyze and open to discussion with guests and callers. We did homework; we lobbied for the newsmakers and people in the know and we tried to do whatever we could to do good radio. Where am I going with this? Take a listen where you are if there even is local programming and it will not take long to figure out; we are one plane, one singular loop. All politics, all the time. All national, all the time. All White House, all the time. Hey, I expect that from the national, syndicated pageantry. It is their bread and butter and I am quite sure it’s hard to find new ways to call other people feeble, stupid and unscrupulous while at the same time maintaining their camp is as pure as snow, forthright, and benevolent. Did life’s daily activity just cease in your region? Concerns about the rising crime rates, individual acts of objectionable behavior, or outrage over a mayor or city council member becoming too big for their bootstraps; did it all disappear? People and listeners; care about such things. They want to know somebody, somewhere is thinking through the problems and even brainstorming solutions. They also want to be a part of those discussions, the strategy sessions, even if only as a spectator.
Nothing distresses me more than to hear day after day, a supposedly local host playing cuts from a White House briefing or a cabinet member’s comments and fixating on some sort of partisan minutia, simply because it is exactly what the national heavy hitters are doing. There are apparently just the two nations now when it comes to talk radio, whether we like it or not. And why? Do we honestly believe that those listeners and potential listeners what to hear and talk about nothing else? Ever talk with people whose biggest complaint about their local media is that there is nothing local about it? Those people are out there, they’re an audience. A lost audience. Who is encouraging their listeners to tell them what’s going where they live? It’s not like there is nothing happening. There seems to be a lot of local news to fill up newscasts yet I think the talk hosts are in the bathroom or looking at Facebook at the top and bottom of the hour. There is so much more out there and it ventures far beyond the political arena. Quality of life and social issues rarely need to be outlined by a mayor or state representative holding talking points. They are just easy gets; they do not require much show prep, if any at all. And, it shows. I think communities are more than fortunate when they have access to local, news and issue based talk programming only to suffer the shortsighted management, producers or hosts squander the opportunity to be useful. Every day you can find local content that is a carbon copy of national content. I see it as a blatant fear of being original. Even the concept of localizing the regional and national issues falls by the wayside too often. There are climate, health and budget issues everywhere. Social problems unique to where you are and it seems the thought of turning it all into content is as popular as reading off garage sale notices. This is not small town stuff. There are issues and overtures with the schools, the cops, the floods and it regularly gets lost because these groups of people want to cross swords for the 817th time over who supposedly won, who allegedly lied and whose agenda doesn’t match theirs. This is completely generic problem, found virtually anywhere a radio signal can be heard. And please, do not chalk it all up to staffing and budget cuts; there are no cuts or layoffs when it comes to thinking about and planning a strategy for a three-hour show. It is no longer about choosing the low hanging fruit, it’s about those so lazy they pick the rotting, bug infested pieces that have long fallen off the tree.
We and frankly everyone out there with the car radio on deserve better.
Bill Zito has devoted most of his work efforts to broadcast news since 1999. He made the career switch after serving a dozen years as a police officer on both coasts. Splitting the time between Radio and TV, he’s worked for ABC News and Fox News, News 12 New York , The Weather Channel and KIRO and KOMO in Seattle. He writes, edits and anchors for Audacy’s WTIC-AM in Hartford and lives in New England. You can find him on Twitter @BillZitoNEWS.
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