Minded Laguna
For Progressive-Minded Radio Fans Who Love Variety In The Music And Local Personalities On The Dial, Downstate Illinois Can Be Maddening.
For progressive-minded radio fans who love variety in the music and local characters on the dial, downstate Illinois can be maddening.
So increasingly, listeners looking for voices and tunes they can not find in west-central Illinois find them online made less complicated with smartphone technology. Folks who are tired of Limbaugh or who miss high-powered stations of years past (Small Rock’s KAAY-AM 1090 and its late-night “Beaker Street” or WHAM-AM 1180 and Harry Abraham’s even-later “Best of All Possible Worlds” were classics in the ’70s) can find music or opinion they enjoy.
Alas, they then give up local news and characters.
Commercial radio today has too few area folk and small news. Most stations depend on syndicated shows, and even on news-talk stations, 86 p.c of news and public-affairs programming isn’t local, according to Steven Waldman’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report, “The Information Requirements of Communities.”
At its best, radio had been a local medium, mixing immediacy with neighborliness, local colour and public significance. Stories were a staple of radio since 1930, when the NBC-Blue network initially began displaying Lowell Thomas’ 15-minute weekday newscasts. Radio news grew in audience and influence through WW2, after which local reports increased, filling the void where war reports had been, and the FCC inspired it.
In 1981 nevertheless , the FCC deregulated its duty that eight p.c of AM station programming and six p.c of FM programming be news and public-affairs programming (discussions, documentaries and dialogues of public interest). The FCC concluded, “We are sure that absent these tenets, significant amounts of non-entertainment programming of a variety of types will continue on radio.”
It did not.
Public-interest radio content declined.
Instead , stations cut shows, trimmed staff and lost such ties to listeners and still made money off the public’s airwaves. Radio firms now make higher profits than the average SP five hundred firm, the FCC says, and even in the previous couple of years and the Great Recession, radio station profits have stayed above twenty p.c, according to Waldman.
Recently, the news / talk format grew significantly, whether right-wing blowhards, sports or all-talk. But for radio journalism, non-commercial public radio is the industry’s news core, with 1,400 hacks, editors and producers in 21 domestic and 17 foreign companies more than any broadcast TV network, Waldman says .
Former president of CBS Radio’s Station Group, Mel Karmazin now Chairman of Sirius XM claimed, “A lot of these larger firms abandoned what had made these list of radio stations terrifically successful, which was local, local, local.”
Deregulation let commercial radio ignore past requirements to serve the towns they were approved to, and cut news staffs or eliminate local news and voices altogether.
Meanwhile, satellite radio started in 1997 when American Mobile Radio Corporation (the predecessor of XM Radio) and Satellite CD Radio (the predecessor of Sirius Radio) won bids to operate a digital audio radio service on the condition they not use them for regionally originated programming or to seek local ad income (reaffirmed in 2008 when Sirius and XM merged).
Arbiton says more than thirty five million folk now hear Sirius XM in vehicles.
Today, besides using PCs, listeners can use smartphones’ online browsers to listen live to any station they need, too including in their automobiles.
Seventeen p.c of Northern Americans report listening to online radio in 2010, a big shift in listening habits. Forty p.c listened to AM or FM stations streaming online, and fifty five % listened to online-only radio (like Pandora or Slacker Radio). And the app for Pandora a sort of D-I-Y format is one of the top five for all smartphone platforms.
Radio critic Alan Hoffman described online radio’s appeal : “Internet radio explodes the boundaries of radio broadcasting, opening up a universe of stations offering much more variety. After you start listening to Net radio, the boundaries of AM and FM a restricted number of stations, within a limited geographic area seem like a throwback.”
Local radio could protect its franchises, continue to profit, and serve its communities with local news and local characters. But they will lose listeners if the music is too dull or safe, or if the voices are all toxic, Sean Hannity types. Audiences will abandon local radio unless stations offer added value and unique content : local personalities and local programming listeners cannot get some place else as reported tagza.com.