XM, iPod can't touch that dial
Good old 'terrestrial radio' still reaches more than 90 percent of Americans age 12 and older, year after year.
from the February 23, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
"[It's] the 'Jack' format," says Todd Spencer, a writer and former managing editor of the renowned radio trade journal Gavin.
Hark, say some, the tinny ring of automation. "A person might recognize good local radio if they heard it, but they won't recognize what's wrong with the bad radio they do hear," Mr. Spencer says. "That's what big radio has been banking on since 1996 and the Telecom Act, as they've taken it from an art form and a conduit for community service and turned it into an ATM."
Not that freewheeling local content is consistently brilliant. Some stations ramp up their antics, perhaps in an effort to compete with less-regulated satellite. Consider the much- publicized episode last month at a Sacramento, Calif., station in which a woman died after participating in a contest for a video-game system that involved drinking copious amounts of water. (A lawsuit is pending.)
Still, say proponents of independent radio, a lot of promising, low-profile talent – the type that is today more likely to be self-promoted on YouTube or MySpace – increasingly finds itself blocked from an old favorite avenue.
"As you get consolidation on the national level seeping down to the local level, what you get is a loss of local content," says Derek Turner, research director at Free Press, a Washington-based organization that advocates public participation in media-policy debates. "You don't have local artists being able to break through anymore because these stations are dictated a format and a playlist from the top down."
Phoenix-area band manager Nancy Stevens was a program director in 2001 when Hispanic Broadcasting Company bought out the indie station at which she worked and changed its format.
"Everyone was out," she says. "We were such a great family at that point and making a true name for the Edge, I couldn't let the brand die."
Ms. Stevens found a 50,000-watt station called Party 103.9. "[They were] playing anything they could get their hands on," she recalls. She met with the owner and was able to find work for her staff.
But four years later, when she was operations manager, came another buyout. Riviera Broadcasting moved in. (It would later pick up another Phoenix station.)
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