(By Deborah Parenti) You may be familiar with the quote, “A year from now, you will wish you started today.” As the door closes on 2024, three critical radio issues remain unfulfilled. Moving into the new year, I fear there’s not too much longer we can “kick the can” before we all pay the price.
The AM Radio in Every Vehicle Act
The hourglass has already run out on the AM Radio in Every Vehicle Act in the current Congress. I am usually an optimist, but the odds of winning a second-round fight on Capitol Hill are slim. As we take up the fight again, momentum is now on the side of the automakers – who are already prepared to make AM a thing of the past on the automotive dash. Could FM be close behind? With approximately half of radio listening occurring in cars, this would be a devastating blow.
Journalism Competition and Preservation Act
The decline of local news outlets has created an environment where disinformation can thrive. The Local Journalism Act seeks to bolster local newsrooms, which could help arrest or even reverse these trends. And there is support from Stagwell Global’s “The Future of News” initiative designed to encourage brands to advertise in news products. At Forecast 2025, Stagwell Vice Chair David Sable shared, “When a brand pauses advertising, it is defunding news. Think about the uncertainty of that.”
Reinstatement of the Minority Tax Certificate
The potential reinstatement of the minority tax certificate program is crucial for promoting diversity in both radio and television ownership. Currently, women comprise around 7% of radio station owners and people of color represent less than 3%. That’s dismal if we truly desire ownership to reflect this country’s rich and diverse palette. And at a time when many major groups might do everyone a favor by shedding stations in smaller markets that are receiving little or no attention in favor of larger-market properties, it could prove a boon to the industry overall.
New years are thought to provide fresh starts, even for lingering challenges. But these challenges won’t wait for us much longer as the world – our competitors included – moves ahead. Now is the time to fully recommit, because by December 2025, it may be too late.
We’ll wish we’d started today.
Deborah Parenti is President and Publisher of Radio Ink. Reach Deborah at [email protected]. Read her Radio Ink digital archives here or get her latest Publisher’s Beat each month with a digital or print subscription here.
Radio has forgotten that people create an affinity with products (programming) and personalities that they like. Why does someone stick with a baseball or football team even when they aren’t winning? Or a NASCAR driver who is having an off-season or two?
It is because They develop a relationship and even define their own personality by who they root for and consider “their” team or driver.
By getting rid of shows and dehumanizing radio, companies are throwing away that bond that ties listeners to the station through thick and thin.
Personalities are the brand and without them there is no affinity or bond.
Go back to listener requests.
Make it more local.
Train new reps better
Stop with all the meetings that pull reps out of the field.
Let sales people sell, not fill out reports and paperwork.
If not, traditional radio will go the way if the yellow pages.
Doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results……you know the rest of the story.
As usual — the ‘business’ misses the point. It’s the PROGRAMMING that matters.
Why exactly do you think ‘youth’ don’t listen? The programming doesn’t ‘speak’ to them!
You can bleat about AM in cars, minority ownership and journalism in the abstract until the cows come home, but unless and until the bean counters figure out that content matters (and yes, good journalism is ‘content’ so to the extent that is what you mean — good for you!) and stop worrying only about money you are aiming too low.
Get people to WANT to listen. Out ‘pandora’ pandora and out ‘podcast’ the podcasts. Demonstrate the ADVANTAGES of edited and curated content and stop pushing people into YouTube and streaming by focusing on compelling local content.
Everything old can be new again. If and only if you focus on quality.
Very good point imo. Content! But the reality is, the radio corporate owners like iHeart, Audacy, Cumulus, and to a lesser extent Beasley, are focused on debt serving and executive compensation. The attention to the quality of their content is a much much lesser focus.
Pedigree broadcasters are long gone. The above companies are beholden to their banks and lenders, who have zero comprehension or appreciation of strong audio “content quality.”
So in a sense, you’re whistling past the graveyard.
“DEI”’is not working. Ask big companies like Toyota, who are moving away from that.
Business should be about hiring the best people, regardless of ethnicity or age.
And radio station licensees are public licenses. Not meant to be used as trading chips to promote social agendas.
What is in the best public interest, is that stations are licensed to the operator most committed to their employees, and to their community and their listeners. The ethnicity or gender of the station operator is not relevant to that.
You aren’t wrong, but “DEI” gets a bad name these days because people forget the point.
Martin Luther King didn’t say ‘don’t judge people’. He rather famously said he longed for a world where people were judged on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Bad programming and owners who care more about the money than the product come in all colors. Focus on local programming that serves the audience and the color of the owners will begin to represent the audience naturally enough so no ‘special programs’ are needed.
The problem of course is breaking that ‘glass ceiling’ and how to do that is not something I have a magic wand to make happen. DEI was supposed to help. If done right it might help but as you observe — when done wrong it only hurts.
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