Who's Gonna Save Us?

So yeah, I promised you a blog entry about what is going right with radio... but I am a doctoral student and, well, things happen, like a lot of work, and a week off that wasn't really a week off, and more work. This is why, unlike certain other media bloggers about whom I spoke last time, I don't charge you for the privilege of reading my wisdom. You get quality product for free, but sometimes you have to put up with me not writing for a month or two. I'd say it's a fair trade.

So we know what is going wrong in the radio industry, but all is not lost. There are lots of places where people are trying to find new ways to make the medium work for its listeners. There are far too many to note here, so maybe I will just make this a regular feature. But let's start with these few places which are to be praised:

Cathy Hughes, CEO of Radio One, the leading African-American chain in radio. Even as consolidation has squeezed minority voices off the air (more so in TV than in radio), Radio One has survived and in a world of corporate radio debt, has managed to thrive and continue to represent the community for which it cares so much.

WPRB-FM in Princeton, NJ: A community-focused radio station that seems to be out of place well into the commercial end of the FM band, but maybe that's what's so great about this station. One of the original free-form FM rock stations back in the day, it today plays music that I guarantee you will not hear ANYWHERE else. As much as I do like to listen to music I know and love, I know there's a place I can always turn my radio (or Blackberry, or Internet stream) when I want to step out of my comfort zone. Give it a listen sometime, especially on Monday nights between 9 and 11... nice little plug there for you, Maria T.

Jeff Pollack, owner of a couple radio stations in Aspen, Colorado. The rule on his stations is 2 minutes of commercials an hour. TWO MINUTES! How will he make money doing that? Simple... if you're advertising on a station with only 2 minutes of spots each hour, you know it's a station that cares about its listening audience and they will care about that station, and by extension, you as an advertiser. So you'll pay the high ad rates that Jeff charges for the scarce ad time available on his stations. What a novel concept! And it's an OWNER who sees this! Will wonders never cease...

WECK in Buffalo, challenging establishment AM stations WGR and WBEN by touting its mostly LOCAL lineup between 6am and 10pm each weekday. Granted, WGR is local 6-10am and 3-7pm (3-9pm when they don't have a game to carry... which this time of year is usually the hometown Sabres), and WBEN also is live and local in AM and PM drive, but WECK is a little station with local ownership, and whereas many of their mom-and-pop counterparts have just decided to stick a computer in the air studio and go completely off the satellite to make a few bucks, this station is going to go after the big guys and try to take them down. Just like the good ol' days...

Staying in upstate New York with another local lineup, I credit Citadel's "The Score" 1260 AM for putting in place a local sports talk lineup from 10am-7pm every weekday (and most nights, the live and local continues into the night as the home of the hockey Crunch and baseball Chiefs). The station has already started to restore the place of Syracuse as a place for top talent to emerge fresh from the Newhouse School, cut their teeth, and move on to greatness, and they've had quite a bit of entertaining radio during the SU basketball stretch run (including, unfortunately, the aftermath of their sooner-than-expected exit from the NCAAs). With Cumulus taking over ownership of the station soon, I hold my breath in fear that this will be one of the first stations where they pink-slip the entire air staff.

And this time around, I will leave you with Michael Robertson and his long-overdue "TiVo for radio". It's called the "DAR", or digital audio recorder... ya know, like the DVR digital video recorder you use to record all the TV shows you can't watch because you're too busy drowning in classwork. Anyway, his online service DAR.fm will allow you to search the programming schedules of about 600 stations across America and record up to 4 hours of a station in his cloud-based online system. If your favorite show doesn't offer a podcast yet (and they SHOULD), record it here and listen to it whenever you'd like. Not only should the radio industry jump all over this and embrace it, Arbitron should find a way to count DAR listens in the ratings, just like Nielsen is doing with DVR recordings of shows if they are viewed within a certain amount of time. I'm sure they can tweak the PPMs somehow to make this happen.

More of the good (and bad) of radio in the weeks and months to come. Sandwiched around periods of heavy grad school work, of course...