Posted by Charlie O'Brien
on September 30, 2009, 10:32 am
205.210.253.12
Where's the new blood in the business? Here's a excerpt from Sean Ross' recent blog:
If a corollary of the “we must fix recruitment” discussion existed at NAB, it was the “we must stop living in the past” theme that emerged at the “Stimulus” panel and elsewhere. At that panel, Jacobs Media’s Fred Jacobs announced that he had stopped going to radio reunions, while Fig Media/Peak Broadcasting’s Bill Figenshu declared that the legendary ‘60s/’70s Los Angeles Top 40 “KHJ is dead. Long live The Boss. The boss is the consumer.”
It’s a great line. And I’m all for moving forward at a time like this. But let’s be clear about which past we’re mired in. With the possible exception of Oldies KRTH (K-Earth 101) Los Angeles, you won't find many nods to KHJ in today’s radio. Broadcasters are not holding the industry back by hiring the seven best air-personalities in the market and giving away a car every day. They do not persist in hiring full-time music directors, who would find twice as many hits as today’s PD-of-four-stations-who-doesn’t-listen-to-music-at-all. Whatever radio’s problem may be, it’s not a surplus of great-sounding “old school” content that just happens to be wrong for the next generation of listeners.
There is plenty that is stale in today’s broadcasting, but you’d have a hard time tracing it back any further than the “great liners, less content” radio of the ‘80s and ‘90s. The only way you could possibly pin that one on KHJ maestro Bill Drake is because those who followed in his “stripping radio down to the essentials” strategy kept going for another 25 years until there was nothing left to further codify. There were also a lot of personalities who weren’t particularly appropriate for a PPM era; they, too, came of age in the ‘80s and ‘90s, or they received the decidedly anti-Drake training of the last decade that held that almost any content was more compelling than just another hit song.
And while I do not attribute these motives to either Bill Figenshu or Fred Jacobs, I am also a little uncomfortable with how similar verbiage has been used in recent years as a way of reinforcing radio’s status quo. Nearly two years ago, when Clear Channel’s presentational austerity took hold across the group, the message-board strategy of many of its defenders was to accuse those who disagreed, or who didn’t like the state of the industry overall, of pathetically clinging to their old airchecks. A “dinosaur” is one of the worst things you can be called in our business, and some of the 52-year-olds who are lucky enough to still be working in radio have no problem dismissing an exiled 55-year-old as a bitter old has-been.
In fact, this is largely a debate among broadcasters of a certain age. Those 25-year-olds who have made it into our business are happily unencumbered by the Drake legacy, since few seem to have heard of him, Buzz Bennett, or even Mike Joseph during his “Hot Hits” era. Joseph’s 1981 WCAU-FM Philadelphia is as distant and abstract a memory as “Fibber McGee & Molly” was for the kids of ‘70s and ‘80s CHR. What we’re seeing instead is a continued sibling rivalry between those Drake- and Bennett-era broadcasters and those who got into the business slightly later: it’s 30 years of rankling at every teacher who ever commented on what a good student their older brother or sister was.
For better and worse, a 20-year-old broadcaster doesn’t have much from radio’s recent past to cling to or build on. And in the spirit of Tom Webster’s column, maybe that’s a plus when it comes to creating a new paradigm. But it also explains why there’s relatively little interest in creating that new paradigm within or on behalf of the broadcast industry. A radio station that offers companionship, new music discovery, and a shared experience might be more than a match for a jockless, interactive music widget. But how would a 20-year-old know that when what we’re offering them, if anything, is often the same jockless music widget with no interactivity and more commercials?
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