If you read last week's story in the New York Times about how satellite radio has terrestrial radio on the ropes, you may share the views of this broadcaster.
To the Editorial Board of the NY Times:
When did it become permissible to do reporting without doing accurate field work? To cite an urban myth and pass it off as fact? Yet another reporter from yet another "prestige" publication has leapt onto the "bash radio" bandwagon wielding impressions rather than facts. They are entitled to their opinions - - if they would just call them that: personal opinions.
Lorne Manly wrote (NY Times April 5, 2005, "Satellite Radio Takes Off"):"To satisfy Wall Street, station owners cut costs by combining station operations in a given market and pumping up the number of advertisements per hour; meanwhile, programming formats became narrower and more uniform. All these moves nearly doubled the industry's revenue in five years, but they also gave satellite radio its opening."
Let's look at some historical facts. Okay, it's not as titillating, from a journalistic perspective, but it might help explain why, as Mr. Manly noted, 230 million people (a number that has grown every year according to Arbitron, Inc. research) listen to their favorite radio stations every week.
Check out the MStreet Radio Directory 2004-2005 and Duncan's "An American Radio Trilogy 1975 to 2004". If formats are "narrower", it doesn't mean we've taken the same 5 original major formats and simply cut the playlists or subject matter back. What we have done is to create many, many more formats from which to choose. In the 70s and 80s there were often just 3 to 4 formats (e.g. Adult Contemporary, Country) that accounted for 70 to 80% of the listening. Today the average market has myriad formats, and it's unusual for one format to account for even as much as 15% of the listening. The format selections and classifications now are so varied and diverse that it takes MStreet 2-1/2 pages to list them. And that list doesn't begin to take into account the nuanced differences each individual station offers.
As to uniformity, most stations playlists rely largely on what their listeners request or respond to in call out testing, auditorium testing , database exploration and other research, and the banter, discussions or talk topics are determined as much by those who call into the stations as by the personalities or programmers. And the listeners do call in. In fact, one of every five people who use cell phones in cars has used that phone to call a radio station. Over 30% of Men 18-34 have done so. (Edison Research "In Car Study" Oct 2003).
It's pretty difficult to be "uniform in every market" when local participants determine much of the flavor of what's on the air. Listeners also communicate through ratings and they only care about what they like. If they are not engaged or emotionally connected to a station, they turn elsewhere. Those are pretty compelling reasons to please listeners, not to disappoint or, even worse, to bore them. A station programmed by a nationwide corporate dictate and without regard to its listeners would have a difficult time building and holding reasonable ratings in any market. Perhaps that's why we haven't seen any satellite radio ratings for any specific markets in the country.
So, go ahead and praise satellite radio (it's great that some orphan formats and four-letter-word comedy have an outlet now). And do continue to recognize the marvelous innovations, even the bold corrections or re-directions being taken by companies that own and run radio stations today.
Just don't do it by ignoring, trivializing or misrepresenting the increasing, vital role free local radio plays in people's lives (Veronis Suhler's 2004 Communications Forecast projects that radio's already 32.5% of people's commercial media time will continue to increase over the coming years).
Radio is a growing, vibrant business, full of new ideas, nurturing of old ones that still have life in them. Fortunately it's also a business that now has pockets deep enough and a panoply of advertisers vast enough to fund an array of non-competing formats and platforms that keep attracting new listeners.
Mary Beth Garber, President
Southern California Broadcasters Assn.
Los Angeles
Are you reading this from a forwarded email?
