Think of the cost to pay someone to be in the studio all the time! And you want the newsroom staffed 24 hours a day too? What have you been sniffing?
Welcome to the good old days, when the lack of technology forced radio owners to serve their audience better. Pity the poor owner who had to pay the overnight guy minimum wage to baby sit the limited listening audience until the world woke up again. What a stupid waste of money. If only there were a way to avoid forking out those few bucks.
What about that one night every five years when the area is under a tornado warning? What about that one night out of several thousand when there’s a true local emergency and law enforcement officials need the instantaneous ability of radio to get the word out to the public? Is that worth the many nights of minimum wage? Probably not.
Look at what has happened here. Because it was no longer important that the stations be staffed overnight, people stopped turning to the station when information was needed. They knew they wouldn’t get the info they wanted, so they went somewhere else to get it.
Well, that was okay, because now management could justify cutting out the news department. “No one listens to the radio for news anyway.” And since radio stations were no longer required to serve the public by providing news and public affairs, news operations quickly became expendable, and management gave the public yet another reason not to turn on the radio.
So here we sit now, amid 10 minute stop sets, voice-tracked “music” shows, satellite programming that shouts “non-local” to the listeners, and screaming numbnuts (deluded by what Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm dubs “messianic self regard”) making stupid statements about everything from politics to sex. And management cries in its beer and wonders why business is so bad and people aren’t listening.
These managers may be too young to remember a time, just a couple decades ago, when radio was the go-to source for breaking news, intelligent entertainment and talk. One vivid example of just how far that image was carried is stuck in my mind.
In the time I worked for one of the nation’s top news/talk stations, I covered the local election headquarters during all the elections. Things then were a bit primitive by today’s standards.
Each medium had a designated area with a telephone and electrical outlet. I brought my portable radio, as did many other reporters. Mine was used to keep track of what was going on in the rest of our station’s coverage.
Every time a new batch of numbers came out, every reporter was given a copy. I would immediately go to the phone to call in a report, and as soon as I got on the air, every reporter in the room stopped talking and listened to my report over the air, even though they all had the same numbers on the sheets they’d just been given.
The implication was clear: Once it had been broadcast on our station, the “news” became official.
Today, it’s not worth the money to have that kind of reputation.
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