Been There, Done That

If there's an industry that's more steeped in nostalgia than radio, it's hard to imagine it. Okay, maybe baseball, but that's it. Radio people have always been a little obsessed with the Good Old Days, swapping stories and complaining that today's radio isn't worthy of the Ingrams and Lujacks of yore. It's fun to reminisce, but it can often be a little much, and it has led to an attitude of resisting change and doing things "because we always did things that way."

In that light, it might surprise you that I'm going to argue the case for placing a greater value on experience. Hear me out.

As a writer, I've experienced first-hand what can happen when people with first-hand knowledge of past events and practices are devalued. (Not here. Other sites.) Articles I could knock out off the top of my head were assigned by younger editors to younger writers born well after the subject's heyday, and the results were a combination of cursory Wikipedia research and the writer's own feelings about the subject. I was reminded of this when I read a story at another site -- I won't bore you with the details, but it was one of those "remember this fast-food chain?" articles for which I am a sucker -- in which the writer, too young to remember the chain when it was still a thing, reviews two stores still in operation and admits to having had to search with Google for a reference point. Would it have been better to have someone old enough (in his or her 40s would have sufficed) to have eaten there in the glory days do the piece, able to compare the present with actual memory of the past? Yes, it would have been better. But that's not how some editors, or managers, think.

Yet, it's also true that in order to appeal to youth, and because advertisers want younger demographics in general you're going to have to do that, it helps to have people in charge of content who, in the parlance of Help Wanted ads, "live the lifestyle." Understood. And the radio industry needs more young, diverse, fresh thinking. Plus, the top management IS stodgy, homogenous, very, very slow to change and adjust. All true.

But the shrinkage of radio, like the shrinkage in other industries, has sent a lot of older employees packing out of the business and unable to get back in. That's a lot of institutional knowledge and memory. These are people who innately know things about the business, about how to do effective radio, about how to engage with audiences and reach people and win, that can surely be valuable to the new generations who will, yes, know more about things like social media and digital but who would benefit from mentoring. The value of knowing from experience how to do things right, and what pitfalls to avoid, is immeasurable.

You don't want to flush that away. Other industries have been badly hurt by losing that institutional memory. There have even been surveys showing older workers, pushed out the door, not sharing what they've learned on the job with the Millennials who are replacing them, not out of unwillingness to teach but largely because they weren't asked or paid to do so.

Again, this is not to decry the youth movement. Radio needs new generations of talent and management, and it's getting more critical as it's getting harder to attract those aspirants. But it shouldn't be a case of "making room for the new guys" so much as a cooperative transition. Maybe you can't teach old dogs new tricks, but the old dogs might be able to teach the new dogs things they won't easily learn on their own.

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Whether old dog or young pup, any radio host (in any format) can get stuff to talk about on the air at Talk Topics, the show prep column at All Access News-Talk-Sports. Find it for free by clicking here and/or by following the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item. There's also a great "10 Questions With..." David Brody, Executive Producer of the syndicated Elvis Duran show at Z100/New York and the co-host of the very funny "Brooklyn Boys" podcast. Brody's smart and funny and a Mets fan, so we'll overlook that last one and focus on the smart and funny.

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Hey, if you're attending the Talk Show Boot Camp this Thursday and Friday in Marina del Rey, I'll be there, too. If you haven't registered, do that here. Drop by the back of the room and we can talk about Bryce Harper's contract.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
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