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AG News:
Tuesday - 8/24/2010
Has Your Content Changed?
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Exactly what is meant by the words "content is king"? Is it that a high level of quality will assure drawing an audience, or that a medium must provide programs appealing to the lowest denominator of the people it reaches?
Is the radio industry driven to delivering content that appeals to its local audience? If so, can you explain the growth of syndicated programming and voice tracking of recent years in a way that reconciles it to fewer newsrooms or live, local hosts?
We are seeing the mention of radio delivering content during emergencies as justification for imposing an FM chip in all cell phones - a "proposed" aspect of the NAB accepting a performance royalty for the industry. Yet we've all heard many stories about scant information being available when local residents are in need during electric outages and bad weather. One example is here. Details from a personal experience revolving around radio reports during another bout with bad weather are here. I'm sure you have your own story to tell.
Radio may respond in major catastrophes, along with other media, but its boasting of reporting during emergency times is repetitive using the World Trade Tower attack or Katrina blasting the Gulf.
Let's not limit ourselves to emergency content, though.
The question is "has your content changed?" Has the way the radio industry constructs programming been altered since the 1970s? Besides the mentioned fewer newsrooms, increased voice tracking, and syndicated programs, what quantity of content has been introduced on your local station that's different?
Jocks may now pull five and six-hour shifts, as opposed to the four-hour spans of the past; that's a result of employee cutbacks, not attempts at improving content. Talk radio hosts have become meaner, malicious, more long-winded against anything that challenges their point of view. But a changed construction of program content is not something we hear.
Vignettes? Short-form programs that would pop in and out of a radio show (dare they be called a "show" anymore) are non-existent, even in a day when attention spans have become so brief as to have younger demos barely finishing a full song before they hit the shuffle button on their MP3 players. (MP3 players are not radio, but youth are an indication of what style content is needed in the radio industry today - i.e., brief, straight to the point, with instructions on where more information is found online if the audience wants to pursue details.)
Changed content does not necessarily mean a shift in what is delivered; it has more to do with "how" that delivery is made. The radio industry, online and off, needs to reconsider the one-song-after-another presentations currently used. The length of time a personality is present is not as important as what that person does with an open mike. And, in this case, we haven't heard anything different since consolidation shortened that open mike time allowing only station-related positioning statements or mentions of celebrity antics in a brief 15-30 seconds.
It's difficult to reconstruct content, not impossible. But, if content is king, the time is ripe to start hearing a variety of new approaches to presenting what the stations hail as their leverage against new media - local content.
At a time when all forms of media are going through change, you'd expect changed content to be at the leading edge, to hear a different style of presentation, or variety in the topics discussed.
Creatively, the radio industry has been asleep when it comes to offering "new," yet it should not be this way if content is king - especially when content is also omnipresent across a much wider array of media. How has your content changed?
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