Lowered Ceiling

A few weeks ago, I wrote something about the effect that discarding experienced radio personnel diminishes the industry's institutional memory, with the older jocks and managers and staffers taking their been-there-done-that knowledge with them out the door and leaving the next generations to learn critical lessons on their own. This week, I remembered another thing afflicting the experienced that might be a problem for radio as well.

You've surely noticed by now that some prominent folks in the business have been losing their jobs, and I'm not going to examine the specifics beyond one fact: The departing older staffers certainly make a lot more money than younger, less experienced personnel. That's standard in most businesses. You work for a long time, you achieve success, your salary goes up. It's how we who work in a capitalist society expect things to be. And it's how radio operated for years, until recently.

Now, and ever since private equity got involved in radio ownership, the concept of "making too much" became a thing. When staffing is analyzed not so much by performance as for the cost to the company (and investors), someone who's been performing well becomes a line item in the budget, and when you're a manager told by corporate to cut your budget by a substantial percentage, you're going to look at those numbers and make the call with your fingers crossed, hoping that dumping your veteran morning co-host or afternoon host or PD or news director won't come back to bite you in the short term. (Let's face it, managers aren't thinking long term at all. A lot of decisions seem to be made in the manner of "hey, by the time this comes home to roost, I'll be retired/in another business/dead and buried.")

But surprise: This is not a column purely decrying age discrimination, although there's an element of that. Radio DOES need to get younger and DOES need input from later generations. In fact, radio needs, desperately, to research not only how Millennials and Gen-Z use media but how they live their lives and what interests them and what they do that ISN'T media-centric. And it needs to do more than what some of the panelists suggested at last week's Worldwide Radio Summit, hire young people and ask THEM what they want (remember, they're already in radio, so they might not be representative of the wider public). And I'm not going to repeat myself on the value of retaining older employees for their institutional knowledge and to mentor future generations. We've discussed that already.

What struck me is that we're sending an interesting message to those younger people we want to attract to work in radio. We're telling them there may be an ever-lowering ceiling to their future if they come into the business. Hang around "too long," make too much money, and you're toast. Your value won't save you. Gotta make the numbers for the quarter. Someone else can do your job cheaper, if not better. Hey, we don't need people or personality or anything -- look at Spotify (which, incidentally, is expanding its podcasting business because THEY see the value in exclusive content beyond just music playlists) and Pandora (which instituted its own "stories" sounding a LOT like, you know, radio). But, yeah, come in, work hard, give us the benefit of your generational knowledge and your enthusiasm and your energy and, someday, you, too, can be kicked to the curb because you've earned one too many raises.

Not a great message, but that's how a lot of industries are working. Maybe the assumption is that younger workers, accustomed to changing jobs a lot more frequently than their elders, won't have a problem with the idea. But I do think that when someone with talent is considering what career they'll pursue, they're less likely to pick a field with a reputation like that. And if money ISN'T the object, they can do their thing with zero supervision or interference by making their own content for podcasting, streaming, and video, so if radio has the advantage of being able to pay a salary, it needs more than that to convince a talented young person to do radio instead of the alternatives.

Or maybe not. Maybe the Youth of the World isn't looking long-term when choosing careers. But it's something for management to consider when it's looking to make goals by cutting costs. The message you're sending may have longer-term effects than you know.

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I don't have a neat way to segue into the plug for Talk Topics, the show prep column at All Access News-Talk-Sports, so just go there, okay? It's a ton of show prep topics and it's all free; find it by clicking here and/or by following the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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Sorry about missing last week; convention stuff got in the way. Speaking of which, I'll be at the NAB Show in Las Vegas all next week, so we'll see if I can get a column together next Friday. Should be a close one.

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