Being There

I was encouraged by a lot of the talk at the All Access Audio Summit 2021, which reflected more recognition that things in the radio industry need to change. At least, the right questions are being asked and the issues are being raised. Whether the answers are either correct or what you want to hear is another story, but the topics that matter did pop up again and again. It wasn't "everything is sunshine and rainbows" talk, but it wasn't doom and gloom, either, and that's to the credit of everyone involved. I did, however, want to expound briefly (like I'm ever brief) on one topic that came up right away, in the very first session with Bob Pittman.

Pittman, and others at times during the conference, discussed localism in the context of how "local" is not a matter of where the host happens to be but the content you're putting out. That is true, but I think that it misses a critical point: People can sense if you're faking it, and, yes, if you're in New York and you're doing local content for, say, Detroit, you REALLY have to know that area to be considered "local." It's not just knowing how to pronounce Hamtramck or what a party store is. There are a ton of subtleties to local markets that you can't know unless you live there. It's why, when a host or jock moves to a new market, there's an acclimation period every time. There's a learning curve. You can't get that remotely. You have to BE there, taking in the entire scene, experiencing everything, taking mental notes that will come in handy when you're telling a story later on and embellishing it with the kind of details the locals will recognize from their own experiences. Dropping a random Wawa reference into a Philadelphia-bound voicetrack isn't going to cut it; describing how you screwed up your hoagie order on the touchscreen is another story that you'd know if you'd actually done that.

We're losing that, and thus we're losing the strategic advantage of localism. Now, I've written before about how great talent translates to any market, and how national programming has its value. It is absolutely the case that living in a small market should not consign you to hearing lower levels of talent on your local radio station; syndication has brought generational talent to every home and car in America, and that's a good thing. And voicetracking isn't automatically bad, if, again, it brings better talent to places that can't afford it or where that talent doesn't want to live. But there's also a need for local programming, reinforced by some of the data in Jacobs Media's Techsurvey: There are emotional reasons for listening to the radio, and one of those is the need for connection. One great way to connect is for people to feel that you're a part of their community, that you experience what they experience. Reading liners with local town names in them, or reading a news story scraped from a local website, is not enough. That's not localism, that's local-ish.

But there's hope in this, because even if the big players end up with voicetracking everywhere, they're not a monopoly. There'll be opportunity for someone else to fill the void. It might not be radio stations -- it might be podcasts, or "social audio" (one thing I was surprised nobody brought up at AAAS), or some kind of customized "morning show" streaming playlist like Spotify's trying out -- but if there's a market for local audio that offers an emotional payoff for listeners, someone can do it. Maybe even you. The bottom line is that localism has a tremendous value and someone can take advantage of it, even if traditional radio as practiced by the biggest companies won't. There's room for what iHeart is doing and for real local programming that isn't remotely operated. The business models are different, but they're both valid, and if iHeart and Audacy are competing on that not-quite-local playing field, the adjacent local playing field is still there and the game is still on.

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The post-convention exhaustion (even though I did the whole thing from home) has me too tired to come up with a segue to the plug, so just go get some material for your show at All Access' show prep column Talk Topics already and save me the trouble. Click here and/or follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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Thank you to everyone who participated in, and attended, the All Access Audio Summit, with special thanks to Jeff and Callie Dauler and Steve Goldstein for a great session on podcasting. You can still check it out if you want to see and hear what happened over the two days, because all the sessions are available on demand to registrants (and you can still do that) starting Monday (4/26). It's all gonna be right here. Pants remain optional.

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