If I've said it once....you know the rest.
The salvation of broadcast radio (and TV too for that matter) is LOCAL. Bloggers aren't going to reproduce it...too time consuming. If they become the sole source of that local information, I believe they can survive even the coming Internet-radio-in-the car invasion. Simply stringing a hundred stations together and giving a local temperature twice an hour won't cut it.
There is another kind of local radio too. And The N.Y. Times has published a well-written piece about one example in Montana.
"All politics is local."
ReplyDeleteWe've all heard that line. And, it's true.
Having spent some years in Broadcast myself, I saw the proverbial handwriting on the wall when the FCC changed what is referred to as the "ownership rules."
Essentially, what those rules did was to limit ownership of media outlets (broadcast and print) to a percentage of the local market and national market. And if I'm not mistaken, it once forbade foreign ownership as a majority stake position.
(Your readers may find information about the issue on the FCC website HERE and HERE. CNN has a news story on the sweeping historical change in 2003 HERE.)
When those rules were "eased" as advocates of the changes describe it, we saw the rise of Cumulus, Clear Channel and other Big Business enterprises which gobbled up radio stations left and right... only to operate them via remote control.
Former competitors then became owned by the same company. Not only did they have a bigger slice of that pie, they had the whole damn thing!
Local radio was decimated.
Locally owned and operated businesses (radio stations) that once fed, housed and clothed and otherwise contributed to the community at least perhaps 15 families (about 45± people or more) in the community, were sold to giant corporate interests, and their staffs suddenly found themselves without jobs.
It is the concentration of power, with the simultaneous diffusion of responsibility - the model of which is an inverse triangle, and has guided corporate operations for many years.
It has not, nor does it serve the interests of entrepreneurship, small business creation nor does it enhance or serve the greater interests of any community in which it has happened.