From The Island Of Misfit Media

How did it feel to get thrown under the bus again? What, you didn't know you were down there under the 23 bus from Center City to Chestnut Hill? You didn't notice the oil dripping on you, the Goodyears leaving tracks on your back? Huh. I saw it happen. Your own industry announced once again that your medium isn't what you've said it was all along. Here, let me show you; it's in the NAB's Petition for Reconsideration of the FCC's ownership rules, way down starting on page 27 of 32, the part about "radio's contribution to viewpoint diversity," the latter meaning the individual "voices" providing news and information and engagement to the public for purposes of how many outlets one entity can own.

SPOILER ALERT: Turns out you don't contribute to viewpoint diversity.

I'll try to boil this thing down to the essentials: The FCC reversed course and now once again thinks that "voices" for determining who can own what and how much they can own includes just daily newspaper, broadcast, and radio, and not internet stuff. The NAB is objecting to that. And in objecting, the NAB wants the FCC to re-reconsider radio's position in the marketplace, particularly as it applies to the bans on newspapers owning broadcast licenses and TV stations being co-owned with radio stations. There's some disagreement about whether radio stations are even important to listeners for local or national news or if they've even been that for almost 50 years, but I'm going to skip down to the part where the NAB objects to counting radio stations when it comes to viewpoint diversity because the FCC thinks they provide an "additional opportunity for civic engagement" and, well, I'll let the NAB say it: the internet is "the greatest platform in history for engagement between individuals and groups with each other and with community organizations, political candidates, government officials and myriad others." Saying that the FCC order "visibly strains" (visibly? Stretch marks?) by crediting radio with providing "local residents unique opportunities to participate interactively in a conversation about an issue of local concern" via call-in shows, the NAB says that "radio obviously is not 'unique' in offering a platform for interactivity."

Yup. You're not unique, you're not the best platform for civic engagement, you're not even important enough as a unique voice to count -- you're a dime a dozen, you are. (23-Skidoo, too.) Granted, the NAB's job here is to get rid of the rules so that iHeartCumulusCBSEntercom can be sold to Tegna or Warren Buffett or someone, but radio, in this filing, comes off as a trifle, insignificant, eclipsed by the internet.

Thing is, they're kinda right, on some levels. And it's partly the fault of technology and partly your own fault.

Take the election. We've seen the ratings returns by now, and some stations benefitted, while others were sort of flat and some actually managed -- I have no idea how they did it, but they did -- to lose ground. In most cases, the demographics remain dire, way too old. I'll go further: If you're a station owner or programmer and you're happy with something like third or fourth or seventh place in the ratings with most of your cume landing in the 55-plus or older demos despite being handed the most talked-about campaign in memory.... I really don't know what to say. This should have been one of those moments, when talk radio rocketed to the top of the ratings, when everyone in town went to talk stations for -- here's that word again -- engagement. They didn't, you didn't, and, yes, as the NAB noted, you were eclipsed by social media. I'd put away the champagne if what you're celebrating is a spike from fifteenth place to ninth place 25-54.

What could you have done? I don't know that I have a solid, single answer, but I can speculate. First, while you were congratulating yourselves on getting, say, a couple of minutes' call-in with Trump, none of what he said on the radio was news. Meanwhile, every one of his tweets, his speeches, his off-hand remarks made headlines. Make fun of cable news all you want, but people watched; if you got Trump on the air, did you challenge him? Did you get anything worth noting out of him? Or were you too worried about being deferential enough so that he'd come back on later in the campaign, or remember your name? Bulletin: He doesn't remember your name, unless you're Howard Stern or Sean Hannity, and I'm not certain about Sean. And his people are done with you until re-election time, when once again they'll want to use... er, they'll need you.

And there was so much else to talk about with this election. There were a LOT of critical local issues that got ignored that people DID care about -- pot legalization, for example, or California ballot measures like the bag ban or the ridiculous L.A. transit tax giveaway that only now is the news media recognizing as having a major, and unpleasant, impact on the public. Were you all over that stuff? Did you own that? Or were you just doing what Twitter and Facebook were doing with the presidential race after your audience had already seen it all and commented on social media?

Enough post-mortem. The trick going forward is to prove that you ARE part of the conversation, that you ARE important to the audience, that there IS a place in the new media marketplace for radio in general and radio talk and news in particular. This business likes to trumpet that "93% reach" statistic when it's convenient, but that's meaningless in a world that favors engagement and results. You need to be ahead of, or at least contemporaneous with, social media, but, more importantly, whether what you're talking about is current or old or new, you have to be unique. You heard the NAB: Your platform itself is not unique in its interactivity. Calls to a talk show? Tweets and Facebook posts.

What's missing is you, your personality, your facts, your entertainment value. The industry, busy cutting costs and praying that the next FCC lets them consolidate all stations into one large quivering mass of radiotelevisionnewspaper, doesn't really see the value in that, but it's what radio, ultimately, has always been about (or should have been). The one unduplicatable (is that a word?) thing in the equation, the one thing radio can use to stand out and be different from social media, from music streamers, from TV and newspapers and everything else, is you. You can put on a show. And a show is what radio needs to once again matter, to be a viewpoint that isn't duplicated, to bring in an audience and keep them.

You can stay there under the bus, or you can fight your way back out. Maybe the industry can take a page from the orange guy -- Make Radio Great Again. If it's great already, the message isn't getting out too far.

=============================

To be great, you need great material. Enter All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics, with show prep topics galore, many of which you will not find at your other show prep sites and "weird news" sources. You will find all of it by clicking here, and you should also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item. And there's the Podcasting section at AllAccess.com/podcasts. And you will not want to miss "10 Questions With..." the outspoken and entertaining Clay Travis, now morning host at Fox Sports Radio, who explains his ideas on how to stand out not just in radio but on TV, video, and online. It's a good one.

You can follow my personal Twitter account at @pmsimon, and my Instagram account (same handle, @pmsimon) as well. And you can find me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pmsimon, and at pmsimon.com.

=============================

And I do want to send best wishes to my about-to-be-erstwhile competitor Al Peterson, who is wrapping up his talk media newsletter this month. Al, good luck in the future, and let me know what sleeping past 5 am feels like....

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
www.facebook.com/pmsimon
Twitter @pmsimon
Instagram @pmsimon