The Night Radio Became Irrelevant FROM MARK EDWARDS WORLDWIDE

This entry is reposted from the Mark Edwards Worldwide blog.

A fallen tower, no more effective than a

radio station that doesn't let its listeners

know what's going on in their world

February 11, 2012 will always live in my mind for two reasons.  First, the tragic loss of Whitney Houston, one of the greatest singers I've ever heard and in the same league as Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and other iconic singers throughout music history.  But that's not the only thing that happened that night.  It's the night that radio, as a medium, proved itself irrelevant because Houston's untimely death happened on a Saturday night, a time when the majority of American radio stations look like this.

Nice studio, but nobody is in the chair. Automation is in control.

It doesn't have to be that way.  Over the years, the companies who own radio stations, especially the biggest companies with the biggest stations in the biggest markets, have been forced by economics and debt to run much, and in many cases, most of their programming using automation and a practice called voice tracking, where a faraway Air Personality records the things said on the radio days in advance.  Many local radio stations only are live weekdays from 6AM-7PM, prime time for advertisers, and a growing number of stations are moving to automation in parts of that time period as well.  And few if any stations have a real contingency plan for situations like the death of Whitney Houston.

Whitney Houston 1963-2012

So what does all this have to do with February 11, 2012?  Plenty.  Whitney Houston's death was announced shortly after 8PM Eastern that evening, and thousands of radio stations were already running unmanned from empty buildings, airing voice tracked local-sounding shows if they were lucky, but most likely broadcasting pre-recorded oldies shows, reruns of talk shows that aired already, dance mix shows assembled days or weeks before, or some other kind of "it's Saturday night and nobody is listening" content. And without a contingency plan or someone willing to take control of their stations in times like these....



What they weren't running in most cases was the news that one of music's all time greats had died in a bathtub in Beverly Hills.



I'm not making this up, I heard it.  While updating the story on The Music Meeting website, I listened to the streams of over 100 radio stations, in multiple formats, with multiple owners, and in markets ranging from New York City to Minot, North Dakota.  Less than a dozen of those stations either played Whitney Houston's music or talked about her untimely passing.  Yes, there is an argument that a Country station shouldn't talk about the death of a pop star, but Whitney Houston was bigger than a normal pop star, she was a Pop ICON.  Every radio station should have at least mentioned her death.  Or at least that's what I think.  You can tell me I'm wrong in the comments below.



Sadly, people who were in charge of the few radio stations who did do something about Whitney Houston's death were busy giving themselves high fives and not helping the other stations in their local cluster or chain to get the word out.  Here's a tweet from a Boston radio programmer.

dylansprague@dylansprague

Proud of @Kiss108 and @JAMN945 - on live tonight with Whitney tributes @iHeartRadio

11 Feb 12

• Reply
• Retweet
• Favorite

So who DID cover the death of Whitney Houston best?  Who stopped everything and devoted all their time to the biggest pop culture story in a very long time?  CNN and Piers Morgan.  The network's Don Lemon told the story on the air that he had finished his usual Saturday shift and as he was leaving the CNN Center in Atlanta he got the word to go back upstairs to the CNN studios because Whitney Houston was dead.  Lemon had no time to prepare for the story but did a tremendous job of covering it in the early moments as the news was literally being fed to him in his ear and he was reading it from his Blackberry.

In time, Piers Morgan showed up from his Los Angeles studio.  He was on his way to the annual Clive Davis pre-Grammy party at the same hotel where Whitney Houston died.  Along with his showrunner Johathan Wald, Morgan did a tremendous job of doing interviews with Houston's friends and entertainment business heavyweights, getting live reports via phone and from reporters on the scene around Los Angeles, and telling the story of Whitney Houston's death with respect, sensitivity, and compassion.  He and the CNN team did what radio used to be great at no matter what time it was, clearing the decks and providing complete coverage of a story that certainly was news, but was also pop culture and certainly would be the only thing people would be talking about for days, probably weeks.



It isn't too late for radio to reclaim the position as the "go to" place when a musician or pop icon dies, or even when severe weather hits.  



We all remember the stories from last summer of radio stations who waited too long to broadcast severe weather alerts because there wasn't anyone in the studio to quickly get them on the air. With a little thought and a commitment that starts at the top and filters down to the entire radio station staff, radio can be ready to deal with whatever comes up, no matter when it happens.

If you're a radio owner, manager, programmer, or the newest "Baby DJ", here are some things you can do now to be ready for the next "big thing":

• Make a written plan, with copies in every studio, the engineering department, every department head's office, and on the station's computer network with plans on what should be done in the case of big events, including severe weather, serious local news event, major power outages, national emergency, national news, news of interest to each station's listeners (by format and location) and more.
• Decide who has the authority to interrupt regular programming to get the news on.
• Know what resources are available to each station: other stations in the cluster, local news partners like TV stations or newspapers, national news networks, and local experts on different types of mayhem and pop culture.
• Have a plan for someone to come into the radio station to deal with the situation.  Whether it's a tornado warning or the death of an artist, someone on staff should be on call at all times to drop everything and do what Piers Morgan did as soon as he learned that Whitney Houston had died.
• Work with sister stations in nearby markets, especially larger markets, to see if they can help you get content on the air when you can't do it yourself.
• (Sorry, this may make engineers and some Managers cringe) Investigate a way to get on the air from outside the station when the studios are unstaffed.  Can you use a remote control and code to break into programming via telephone?  Do you want to get fancy and do it over the internet?  Can the news/talk station in the cluster, the one most likely to have people on staff for the most hours, take over the air of all its sister stations?
• Don't forget, radio is now more than just radio. What's the plan to update text message subscribers, social networks, and your website?
• Finally, discuss with all the stakeholders in each station what qualifies as important enough to break in to each station.  Music format can help you decide how big a star from another format should be before you break into a totally different format.  There may be other considerations as well, like what if someone from your area is in the news or passes away?  Sometimes there's no set answer for this question, but thinking about it will make the decision to interrupt or not interrupt much easier.

I still believe that radio can fix many of the things it has messed up over the last few years.  One of them is reclaiming the place in listeners' minds as the first place to go for the latest news and information.  What do you think?  Please feel free to comment below.  Let's come up with some ideas every radio station can use.  

Related articles

• RIP Whitney Houston on Spotify
• Celebrities Remember Whitney Houston (popsugar.com)
• Whitney Houston, 48, is Dead [Video] (jezebel.com)
• Whitney Houston's Death Rocks Hollywood; Celebrities React to Sad News (gossipcop.com)
• A Tearful Jennifer Hudson Will Perform Whitney's Biggest Hit at Grammys [Whitney Houston] (gawker.com)

Is Local Radio Dead? In Some Ways It Is, But Owners Don't Know It Yet

via followthemedia.com

I came across a post on LockerGnome, Chris Pirillo's website about all things tech and geek (and I say that in only a good way) posted by Matt Ryan that asked if local radio was dead.  Chris's conclusion on a video that was part of the post was that it was but it just doesn't know it yet, and it got me to thinking about the industry I've been involved with for most of my life, its past, and most importantly its future.

According to the ratings service Arbitron, local radio reaches 93 percent of Americans 12 years and older in the average week.   I certainly have had my disagreements with Arbitron over the years, especially since they've introduced the PPM as the way to measure radio listening, but I do believe that local over the air radio still touches almost everyone almost on a daily basis.

For now.

The PPM, or Personal People Meter, is a means to electronically measure what listeners are hearing and it has forced many broadcasters to drastically change the way they program their stations so they are more "PPM Friendly".  That means stations have had to move commercial breaks to "better play the PPM game", tell talented Air Personalities to cut down the amount of talk they do on the air, and make it easier to import generic programming to local stations.

Those changes have led to mixed results and hundreds of lost jobs in the radio industry in the last month alone, (FD) including mine.  PPM wasn't the only reason for the layoffs, big radio companies had to cut expenses because of lower revenues, and even one large company said the layoffs were designed to make their stations better.

All that is just background for the meat of this post.  The people who own radio stations, whether they are the big companies or the smaller operators, simply do not understand that the way they deliver "radio" has to change, and they have to get out in front of the change.  

CourtesyTom Bosscher

Those big giant towers in the middle of cornfields and cemeteries, those 50,000 watt legendary AM stations, those HD Radio channels that nobody is listening to, they are losing value and necessity every day.  Broadcasters think all those things are trophy's, somehow showing how "heavy" they are in the industry.  Going forward, all that hardware and early 20th century based technology will mean very little to listeners or advertisers.

Wireless device usage is exploding, and now there are more wireless devices activated than there are people in the United States.  Most of those devices have the ability to play audio, whether they be iPhones, Android devices, tablets like iPad or Kindle Fire, or gadgets we haven't even heard about yet.  Yet, broadcasters continue to do a second rate job of serving those devices and don't see the future where people can receive the radio station from their home town, Spotify, Pandora, or a local radio station in Turkmenistan on the same device WITHOUT using AM, FM, HD Radio, AM Stereo, FM Quad, or any of the other failed and antiquated technologies that broadcasters have tried to force on consumers.  Toyota is rolling out a car with Pandora and I Heart Radio in 2012, making it even easier to not listen to local radio.

image via randallcole.com

The days of wireless delivery platforms and complete parity for any kind of audio or video stream are here, and American broadcasters are not prepared for the migration from those old school technologies they've relied on for almost a century to the wireless, personalized experience that listeners will discover, adopt, and almost certainly use to replace traditional broadcasts.  As media guru Fred Jacobs wrote almost a year ago, being local matters, no matter how the content is delivered.

Local matters.  While consumers may enjoy renting movies from Netflix, buying toaster ovens from Amazon, bidding for cars at eBay, or creating custom music channels on Pandora, that doesn't mean they've lost interest in what's happening next door, down the street, and in the heart of where they live.

 Jacobs isn't the only one who sees the future, The brilliant media strategist David Martin wrote this blog post in August of 2004 about the future of music radio.

It is time to admit it - we are operating in a fundamentally different business environment; the rules of the game are changing and so must we.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit last month, KCPB's Mary Meeker showed the growth of mobile usage and the fact that Pandora, the online radio network, is already getting 60% of it's traffic from mobile devices. Those people listening could be listening to traditional broadcasts, but they're turning off AM and FM and turning on digital streams. 

Radio companies will tell you they have a "digital strategy".  Here are real live examples of those strategies in action at some of the major radio companies right now.

• A major radio company has moved all its stations to its own app for smartphones and tablets, but after testing the Android app on six different devices over three carriers, the app was only able to stream listenable audio on two of the devices.  Android now commands 40% of the U.S. smartphone market, but this company's stations can't be heard on a majority of those phones and many Android tablets.
• Clear Channel Media Holdings, the country's largest radio owner, has recently hired Bob Pittman to run the company.  Pittman is a very smart man and understands the future of content delivery as shown by the company's huge investment in I Heart Radio, their streaming and station creation app.  Unlike the above example, this app works on every Android device I tested it on, as well as devices on other platforms.  They may have some of the right ideas, but have eliminated hundreds of jobs in the last month as they add more centralization to their programming, completely ignoring the fact that being local is one of traditional radio's most important ways to differentiate itself and keep listeners, regardless of how the content is delivered.
• Most other radio companies let each station create their own digital presence, controlling the overall look of websites, but using a myriad of vendors for streaming and mobile applications.  Most of the reason for this is that the companies either refuse to acknowledge the future of mobile while they concentrate on those big towers in the cornfields, streaming a single station (often badly), or trying to make people care about HD Radio.  One major company will let any station have an iPhone app, but the station has to wait until a certain number of iPhone apps are downloaded before they can have an Android app.  Looking at the penetration of Android, it is clear this company does not understand how listeners use streaming or even what they listen with.

All of this brings us back to the topic of this post.  Is local radio dead?  Not yet, but in most cases the people who own local radio stations don't realize that their properties are dying slowly in a hospice called AM and FM.

These broadcasters, notorious for spending their lifetimes in perhaps the last industry to see the world as it really is time after time, need to get their brands on life support by coming up with a well thought out, forward thinking strategy that involves delivering audio how and when people want it, making local information available no matter where the listener is (how many radio executives really understand the power of GPS and location based application development?) and adding a strong social and interactive component to their brands.  The benefits will be immediate, and will keep their brands viable for years to come.

There once was a radio in the kitchen

Almost a decade ago, these same broadcasters began to see the number of people using radio in the morning begin to decline  Traditionally, the morning show was the most listened to and most profitable daypart for radio stations.  Where did the listeners go?  Directly to television, because TV figured out they could give all the local information and much of the entertainment people were getting on the radio and add pictures to it.  Morning radio listening continues to decline, especially among listeners under 40, and some of the most successful local TV morning shows are produced by former radio morning show producers.  Yet, the radio industry for the most part has done little to fight the migration of listeners to television.

A recent story in the Chicago Tribune talks about how FIVE local TV stations are doing local morning newscasts starting at 4:30AM and two of them continue locally after the network morning shows start on affiliate stations.

The moves reflect a national trend that has reached critical mass over the past two years. Most large-market stations now broadcast local news at 4:30 a.m., with at least one station starting that early in all of the top 50 markets, according to Steve Ridge, president of the media strategy group for Frank N. Magid Associates, a television consulting firm.
"Thirty years ago, we had to beg stations to get into the morning news business," Ridge said. "Now, it has become the most lucrative daypart in local television."

I for one do not want to be a pall bearer at local radio's funeral, but I'm afraid that I'll live to see that day.

What do you think?  Comments are welcome!