Talent? Where?

Posted by Frank Absher from an "undisclosed location"

Have you noticed the recent flood of “talent” showing up on the airwaves whose names you don’t recognize? There’s good reason for your lack of familiarity with them.

Think about it. How often to you turn on the radio to hear a specific person? I can only think of one personality in this market who has that kind of following.

Yet there are a lot of people on the air who consider themselves “talent.”

Once I left KMOX and had the benefit of hindsight, it was easy to see that even the quality folks I’d worked with there were not what would be considered destination talent. One of the things GM Robert Hyland understood was that the sum of all the station’s “parts” was much greater than the talents of any individual. People turned on the station and stayed there.

Even today it’s obvious that those who consider themselves to be the franchise would be nothing in a different environment. The joke among ad agencies used to be that KMOX could run a 1,000 cycle tone on the air back then and still have significant Arbitron numbers.

So what happened? Where is the talent today? With very, very few exceptions, it no longer appears on the local airwaves. In fact, owners would rather not have “talent” on the air because they’d have to pay higher wages.
Would you like to work at a place where there was no value placed on what you could contribute?

Watch local TV news and see how many of the on-air types you can actually name. It seems these folks see St. Louis as a short stop on their career ladders. From what I’ve seen, many of them should be exploring other lines of work.

What would the media be like today if higher quality people were getting into the business? We’ll never know.

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