For Progressive-Minded Radio Fans Who Love Variety In The Music And Local Characters On The Dial, Downstate Illinois Can Be Annoying.
For progressive-minded radio fans who love variety in the music and local personalities on the dial, downstate Illinois can be exasperating.
So increasingly, listeners seeking voices and tunes they can’t find in west-central Illinois find them online made less complicated with smartphone technology. Folks who are bored with Limbaugh or who miss high-powered stations of years past (Tiny Rock’s KAAY-AM 1090 and its late-night “Beaker Street” or WHAM-AM 1180 and Harry Abraham’s even-later “Best of All Possible Worlds” were classics in the ’70s) can find music or opinion they like.
Alas, they then give up local stories and personalities.
Commercial radio today has too few area folk and small stories. Most stations depend on syndicated shows, and even on news-talk stations, 86 % of stories and public-affairs programming isn’t local, according to Steven Waldman’s Fed Communications Commission (FCC) report, “The Information Needs of Communities.”
At its best, radio had been a local medium, mixing immediacy with neighborliness, local colour and public significance. Reports were a staple of radio since 1930, when the NBC-Blue network initially began displaying Lowell Thomas’ 15-minute weekday newscasts. Radio stories grew in audience and influence thru World War II, after which local news increased, filling the void where war stories had been, and the FCC inspired it.
In 1981 nonetheless , the FCC deregulated its duty that 8 % of AM station programming and six % of FM programming be reports and public-affairs programming (discussions, documentaries and dialogues of public interest). The FCC concluded, “We are convinced that absent these tenets, heavy amounts of non-entertainment programming of a variety of types will continue on radio.”
It didn’t.
Public-interest radio content dropped.
Instead , stations cut shows, trimmed staff and lost such ties to listeners and still made money off the public’s airwaves. Radio companies now make higher profits than the average SP 500 firm, the FCC says, and even in the last few years and the Great Recession, radio station profits have stayed above twenty percent, according to Waldman.
In recent years, the news / talk format grew dramatically, whether right-wing blowhards, sports or all-talk. Except for radio journalism, non-commercial public radio is the industry’s stories core, with 1,400 hacks, editors and producers in 21 domestic and seventeen foreign firms more than any broadcast Television network, Waldman says.
Former president of CBS Radio’s Station Group, Mel Karmazin now Chairperson of Sirius XM related, “A lot of these larger companies deserted what had made these list of radio stations enormously successful, which was local, local, local.”
Deregulation let commercial radio ignore past obligations to serve the towns they were approved to, and cut news staffs or eliminate local stories and voices altogether.
Meanwhile, satellite radio started in 1997 when American Mobile Radio Corporation (the predecessor of XM Radio) and Satellite CD Radio (the predecessor of Sirius Radio) won bids to operate a digital audio radio service on the condition they not use them for regionally originated programming or to find local ad cash (reaffirmed in 2008 when Sirius and XM merged).
Arbiton asserts more than 35,000,000 people now listen to Sirius XM in cars.
Today, besides using PCs, listeners can use smartphones’ online browsers to listen live to any station they need, too including in their automobiles.
17 % of Northern Americans report listening to online radio in 2010, a significant shift in listening habits. 40 p.c listened to AM or FM stations streaming online, and fifty five percent listened to online-only radio (like Pandora or Slacker Radio). And the app for Pandora a type of D-I-Y format is one of the top 5 for all smartphone platforms.
Radio critic Alan Hoffman described online radio’s appeal : “Internet radio explodes the bounds of radio broadcasting, opening up a universe of stations offering far more diversity. Once you start listening to Net radio, the boundaries of AM and FM a limited number of stations, within a limited geographic area seem like a throwback.”
Local radio could protect its franchises, continue to profit, and serve its communities with local news and local personalities. But they will lose listeners if the music is too dreary or safe, or if the voices are all venomous, Sean Hannity types. Audiences will desert local radio unless stations offer added value and new text : local personalities and local programming listeners cannot get somewhere else as reported tagza.com.
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