You Can't Make This Stuff Up... or Maybe You Can

Talk radio has enough problems these days... its audience is shrinking, more to the point it's aging, and hosts like Limbaugh and Beck are going so far off the rails that it's hard to take what they say seriously. Local talk radio has been getting downsized and merged out of existence in most markets (more on that later). So the last thing the format really needed was the recent revelation that SOME OF THE CALLERS ARE FAKE.

This goes beyond that whole snafu at WGN in Chicago where Kevin Metheny (a.k.a. "Pig Virus" of Howard Stern infamy) got staffers from inside the radio station to call Mike McConnell in his first week on the station so they could prove people were listening, a stunt that undermined the credibility of a terrific talk show host, and likely was one of the reasons that Metheny later got fired. No, there's a PROFESSIONAL service that does this sort of thing, hiring "voice talent" to call shows at the request of the station, read from a provocative script, and generate buzz and discussion. Sickening to be sure... and not surprisingly, it's Clear Channel who was behind this "innovation." The same company that brought you voice-tracked DJs from hundreds of miles away to replace your favorite live-and-local guy. Now you can have a talk show host from another city make you think he cares about your local issues while taking calls from an actor pretending to be a local caller.

Sorry, but unless your name is Phil Hendrie (in which case, the fake callers are... Phil Hendrie), there is NO reason for a service like this to be used on the air. Part of the charm of listening to the radio may be that it is the "theater of the mind", but not in this way. Randy Dotinga makes a good point: When it gets out that part of your "real-life" talk show is using staged content, the listener may think that it's ALWAYS fake. Talk about undermining credibility.

This was at the top of the stack of radio-related things I had yet to cover in recent months as I was too busy writing academically about radio to write about radio in my usual much-more-snarky manner. But as you'll see in the months and years to come, I tend to write about the same radio-related topics in both places, both the good and bad of the medium. The good includes those people who "get it", who push management and talent to try new things, innovate, and advance the medium beyond the stale, getting-eaten-alive-by-Pandora-and-iPods state in which it currently finds itself. Of course a lot of that requires reversing the bad: the continued downsizing of live and local out of the radio business, leaving in its wake vastly inferior content that fails to connect with its listeners.

The bad is why I fear the Citadel-Cumulus merger and how many people who are part of the good will be lines on a budget waiting to be cut so that Cumulus can make up $50 million in "synergies". And don't even start quoting those studies that find more people listening to radio than ever... those studies also say that teens and young adults are listening for shorter periods, and that a lot of the gains come from the increasing popularity of Hispanic stations. So I guess radio has figured out a way to serve the portion of the population that speaks Spanish, but they are falling short on the English-language content. The most nauseating analysis comes from those who are trumpeting the industry line that such mergers as Citadel-Cumulus pump "life into the radio industry". No, they pump life into radio STOCKS... for about 5 minutes... until investors remember, "Oh, right, these companies are DROWNING IN DEBT."

The good comes from people like Lee Abrams, long regarded as one of the finest minds in the biz. He finds that a lot of what radio does hasn't changed in 30 years. No wonder younger listeners don't listen anymore! Radio is "what their parents did" and it hasn't changed much. It needs to change. It needs originality. It needs (gasp) creativity. Abrams lists a lot of ways that radio can return to its roots, what makes it work, content and connecting with listeners. We've seen the extremes of super-serving the listening audience (the early days of FM Progressive Rock) and not serving the audience at all (the current voice-tracked, over-consulted mess). I think the pendulum has swung about as far in the latter direction as it can (or I hope it has)... it's time to start swinging back the other way.

The bad is the fear people have of following advice to put in more of the good because corporate execs won't like it. The PPM numbers hold way too much sway over micromanagers, and although so many of us know what we need to do and what we should do, we can't because either we no longer have jobs, we live in fear of corporate retribution, or we're too jaded to try.

Of course, some of the things that do get done to fix the problems of radio wind up causing new problems. Consider the new trend of simulcasting heritage AM news/talkers on FM. That's a great way to try to solve the problem of an aging talk radio audience, but at the same time the content is the same. If you think Rush Limbaugh is a bomb-throwing blowhard, it doesn't matter if you can hear him in mono or stereo, you're not listening to him. About 10-15 years ago, radio tried to fix this by putting talk formats on FM that appealed to younger listeners with content they would enjoy... but the "hot talk" format imploded after the Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident and Howard Stern's subsequent departure to satellite radio obscurity. And now the "second wave" of FM talk is... well, AM talk on FM. And making that format flip might piss off listeners of the FM station you blew up (or moved to AM) to put your talk station on FM... like in Syracuse where the primary station serving the African-American community was sent to AM. Logistically, the move made sense in terms of sheer numbers, but people don't get riled up over numbers. They get riled up over the connection they have with a station, and anything that affects it.

Could AM become as retro-cool and niche-friendly as vinyl records, as one columnist suggests? Well, nothing's impossible, but if that's going to happen, at least make sure your retro-cool AM station is still being innovative and doing all the good things previously mentioned. And don't even think about faking phone calls... fake is about as retro-uncool as it gets...