Happy New Year Radio Survivor readers. Good luck in writing your first check with “2013” instead of “2012.” Advice columns for radio are showing up on my RSS reader, and I thought I’d share some of the wisdom.
Edison Research has a fun post titled “Radio’s Bad Ideas That Won’t Die.” Here’s the entry on “Holiday Layoffs” (aka Clear Channel’s):
“Yes, things are tough out there. And maybe the radio personnel who lose their jobs in January instead find only cold comfort in the month’s delay. But the round of budget cutting that usually takes place in early December always leaves even radio’s fiercest defenders a little less bullish about the health of their industry. And this year, it became more of a consumer press story, possibly because Clear Channel’s Bob Pittman had spent so much time enthusiastically plugging radio from coast-to-coast over the previous 18 months.”
The essay encourages radio stations not to get too hung up on localism, a tendency that the writer thinks results in “broadcasters who are unable to avoid using out-of-market resources and unwilling to walk away from the notion of localism, leading to a lot of radio that satisfies on neither level.” Edison also expresses relief that the industry has eased up on insisting that Pandora and similar venues are “not radio”:
“Had existing broadcasters claimed personalized radio as part of their industry sooner, they could have displayed a robust and expanding product line that increased the usage of programmed audio, even if it did not leave existing radio listening untouched. With a TSL decrease impossible to hide anymore, the ratcheting down of the anti-Pandora rhetoric seems to acknowledge a late willingness to co-opt other forms of programmed audio.”
Meanwhile the Radio Television Digital News Association has advice for radio and television station Facebook pages, sterting with tha obvius:
“1. Dust off that dictionary. Sure spelling doesn’t matter on the air, but just like on your web page, you look foolish when you spell things incorrectly on your Facebook page. Facebook doesn’t have spell-check, so you may actually have to look things up. Do it…look it up. Your station loses credibility every time you spell something wrong.”
Yikes! Other tips: actually, like, post stuff on your page: “I found a major all-news radio station in a top 25 market whose most recent Facebook post was on December 20th. The post before that was written on November 28th. Is it any wonder they have only 131 people who ‘like’ their page?”
Last but not least—a pre-New Years’ advisory from Mark Ramsey Media. Let your radio genres collide!
“It’s a useful reminder to those of us working in the narrow genres defined by radio formats to reconsider from time to time what the world of radio would be like if the lines could be finer, more porous, and a whole lot smudgier.”
Right on . . . here’s to a smudgy and porous 2013!
