Commentary

The Future Of Media: Radio

Radio

I've got silence on my radio, (Let the airwaves flow)

When I was asked to write about the future of radio, I felt I was being asked to step into, chronicle, and pay homage to a house I once lived in that has been renovated beyond recognition. Rather than give voice to the rising tides, the glorious future, the spectacular new delivery systems and the consolidation of mono-media into media stations, since it's my turn to speak, I am going to tell you first what radio was. All the futurists, modernists and media developers can wait. It's their world and their future. But a writer is permitted to go into the past, to preserve, to lament lost worlds, and, ultimately, to violate the direction of traffic. I am even permitted to ignore every single element of success, commerce and burgeoning markets - to waste your time, in other words.

I come from a "radio family," if you can imagine such a thing.

In 1960, my father - Barry Farber - started broadcasting on WINS, having worked his way up after several years of being the producer of the "Tex and Jinx" show, starring the impossibly glamorous and complex couple Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenberg, who twice graced the covers of Life magazine, and who set the gold standard for what I wrongly grew up thinking was journalism's ethos. Named by Talkers magazine among the Top 10 radio talk hosts of all time, he is still on the air today, almost 50 years later. In that time, conservative talk radio has grown into a multimillion-dollar industry. Like all things that grow explosively, there are cherished qualities that were vanquished along the way.

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Radio used to be strange, free, intimate, mossy - like an enchanted forest, dominated by a few heavy trees that seemed to have sprung from a soil of eccentricity and showmanship. Anything could happen there. It was a medium for the ever wandering minds, the insomniacs, the history buffs, the truth-seekers. Talking meant talking - which entailed listening, combing the ocean's floor for that which might surprise or delight. It was not, or did not seem, all that connected to money, power or politics - until the mid 1990s. It was around that time I started to truly lose sight of the medium that honors my father as one of its shapers.

When talk is free, when nobody has harnessed it, it is closer to music than speech. Not what is said, but the way it is said.

I thought about Tex McCrary as I wrote this piece, or rather, as I didn't, night after night. I remembered how he loved words and their resonances. So much so that he once gave me an assignment: In late 1998, he contacted me out of the blue - he was then in his late 80s - and asked me to think about my favorite word: the word, the meaning, the sound, and what the word invoked for me. We went for a walk near his home, down by what is now Ground Zero, by the river, and it was drizzling. Tex had joined the Canadian Air Force to get into World War II and fight, rather than sit around and wait for America to join. He had coined the phrase "I Like Ike," as well as Reagan's thumbs-up and Nixon's waving peace signs. He had trained, in his media school, the likes of Barbara Walters, Mike Wallace, Bill Safire, Liz Smith and my father. He had brought the first American photographers into Hiroshima after the atomic bomb, and what they saw caused each of them to unspool their film before returning. (One spool survived.)

Nobody could get Tex to talk about the past. With me, he only wanted to talk about words. I couldn't settle on my word. Those who remember Tex know what his chosen word was: yonder.

Tex told me he would call me at noon the next day to find out what my word choice was. I happened to be recording an album at that time, at noon the next day. The call came exactly at noon. I left my drum set, went into the engineering room and picked up the phone.

"I thought of it carefully, Tex," I said. "Both in terms of what it means to me and what it means objectively, all the meaning enveloped in it. ... I think my favorite word is father."

Tex was a father: to American broadcast journalism, to my father, to me and to countless others who followed his spirit of intrepid, tough, yet humane reportage. When the planes hit the towers on 9/11, his son Kevin was with him in the apartment, and started to follow procedures to evacuate them. With three cameras hanging from his neck, Tex, age 90, grew impatient (again) and disappeared. He turned up three days later at a hospital in New Jersey. He had gone into the dust ball, to photograph it, know it, and in the end, be knocked unconscious by it.

His son Kevin, who, for his part, spent the next six months working as a relief worker at Ground Zero, explained dryly: "Tex was never quite the same after that."

He died in 2003.

I imagined calling him for this article - what he might say.

I am fotunate that I was able to call my father. How would we get through this?

"I have to talk to you about radio," I said. "The future of radio."

If only, I felt, childishly, the future of radio was Tex, Jinx, my father, Gene Shepard, Long John Nebel, Barry Grey and all the others. If there was a pain present it was mine, not my father's. He - as he always reminds me - had a great life in radio; he has been on the air since 1960, although the last 10 years have entailed an amorphous struggle, as radio changed from a funky but fascinating house next door to a gleaming skyscraper.

"You need to talk to Mike Harrison, editor of Talkers," he said. "Mike says terrestrial radio will be extinct in 10 years."

That was the first time I ever heard the term "terrestrial radio."

"I don't want to talk about technology," I said. "I want to know what the hell is going on."


This is not a nostalgia tour. Rather, the past illuminates the present. What the medium has been is relevant to what it is becoming in the sense, only, that it gives us a context through which to discuss what we even mean by the word radio.

RadioOnly days later Rush Limbaugh was reported to be signing a new contract for $400 million, while Howard Stern would be signing one for $500 million.

In his legendary New Yorker essay, "Within The Context of No Context," media critic George Trow wrote: "In the New History, nothing was judged - only counted." I braced myself to have to talk about one thing and one thing only: money.

"My cousin Gurney," said my father (cousin Gurney is an imaginary figure who is often quoted) "said, 'Barry, you were big in the old days and now you're old in the big days.' "

I watched him on a panel at a recent "new media" convention, which may or may not have been a radio convention. The panelists were radio "legends," and were asked, naturally, to talk about how radio had changed. It was once a medium of exchange, of conversation, of man-on-the-street guests, of local and international politics, and above all, of innocence. It was a medium of intimacy - and it was a local medium. The panel of legends, which included Joey Reynolds, Bruce Williams, Bob Grant, Joe Franklin and my father, exchanged funny stories and tried their best to offer the wisdom of legends. Each of them seemed to radiate an innocence one cannot imagine as being central to "radio" today. They were funny, quirky, charming, but did not radiate the sense that they would, or could, hurt anybody - and that is a critical component of today's radio ethos. It is gladiatorial. It is the voice of the bully.

I walked around with my father, and all day, people stopped him, hugged him, told him how much they missed his voice and gentlemanly manner on the radio - his long and winding tales of a long-lost America, of WW2, the Hungarian Revolution, and obscure freedom fighters of all stripes, who all came to the microphones provided they were still alive.

At the conference reception I spoke to Sean Hannity, who stood at the center of a huge and buzzing entourage that surged toward him when he entered the room. Very friendly and warm - he told the same story he told me the last time I met him. "I used to listen to your father late at night, under the covers," he said. "He would say, 'Now get up, and go get a map, because you're gonna learn something.' I didn't have a map but I had a globe, so I went and got the globe and brought it back to the bed. I looked up whatever country he was talking about - Albania, Hungary - and I tried to remember the stories he told, always about history, and always in some way that I had never heard before."

He stood with his arm around my father, and the crowd hung on his every word. "Every time I am a jerk on the air it's because of me, and every time I am a gentleman, it's because of him."

"It used to be a very fun business," said Vince Gardino, executive director of underwriting, radio and digital media at WNYC, with genuine grief in his voice. "When I first started, it used to be a joy to go to work. Now it's drudgery. Clear Channel and, to a lesser extent, Infinity Radio really changed radio for the worse by introducing Wall Street to radio, and really homogenizing it, taking the local aspect out of it. Radio is basically a local medium, and now it's all these national shows. That's why the listenership for radio has declined so precipitously."

"Do you feel the soul of radio is gone?" I asked.

"Absolutely. Without question. They killed it. There is no doubt. It's just a business now. Cutthroat. They shifted the focus of radio from programming to pure sales. All they did was put things on the air that benefited sales."

"Like what?" I asked.

"They did stories on their clients. If there was a client that had something big going on, it would become a news story. They cut back the news departments. They cut back the emphasis on the local community. Radio has lost its way because it has become purely a sales-driven vehicle, as opposed to programming. All the people making the decisions are not broadcasters, they're financial people. And they're selling the cheapest avenue of entertainment they can."

"When did this happen?" I asked.

"In the mid-1990s."

"But," I protested, "can't they use a model whereby, as in all pop culture, talent generates sales?"

"No," he says. "These people just don't get it. They don't know what a broadcaster is. They make purely financial decisions. Radio is a powerful medium. It's not dead but ... it has lost its soul. Radio is a companion. It's a very personal medium, and they've taken the personal aspect out of it."

"The media today does not seek truth, it seeks success," say Harrison of Talkers. "It seeks victory. Nobody is hired to do a talk show because they are going to save the world or educate people or benefit humanity. Radio historically has been a street medium - a mass medium of popular culture. That's what radio is. Radio is not dead. It just doesn't have much of a future, because of monumental changes that are unfolding as we speak. Radio in the future will be very street, it will just be less magical."


I have on my desk printouts of articles that describe the future of radio's technologies: satellite, podcasting, streaming, HD radio, iRadio, PC-to-mobile radio, cell phone radio and more. I don't know how to write about it because it seems to be that it is all about delivery systems, not the soul and ethos of radio - the needs it serves.

I don't really want to listen to the radio on my cell phone, nor make phone calls from my radio, nor toast bread on my television set. I am just fine with "mono-media" the way it is. Tough luck. Harrison drags me reluctantly on his dizzying tour of the future, and it becomes clear that the future of "radio" is dissolving into the future of all media, which is to say, the dissolution of one medium being one medium. Harrison says that I am "caught up in the 20th century," but he is very patient, because I am not alone.

"What I call mono-media," he says, "that is to say, radio, television, newspapers, film - all of these different institutions of the 20th century - will no longer exist on separate venues. Looking at McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' - the venue of radio being an appliance that has AM and FM, the venue of TV that is an appliance, the venue of film that you watch on a disk or you go to a movie theater, the venue of a book that you put on a shelf and hold in your hand, a magazine on the stand - these venues will no longer exist as entities separate from each other. Thus, the culture of creating programming for them will become different because culture is so impacted by the venue, meaning, the medium is the message. When the medium changes, so will the message. So will the culture. And the medium now is a medium that combines all of those hitherto separate concepts. The idea of a radio station coming in on an appliance that is specific to radio, that is an audio-only medium, the theater of the mind, if you will, is, in fact, going to be obsolete. This is happening right before our eyes, and it is accelerating so quickly. Will there still be radio stations on AM and FM in five years? Yes. But they will seem weaker and far less important than they do today.

"Your typical radio station will become a production company as opposed to a broadcast facility. Everybody will be a production company."

Harrison's prophecy is borne out in a conversation I have with Charles Kireker, the new owner of Air America.

"It's definitely a new frontier situation, a listener, a viewer, a reader, they are all doubling back on each other with all the new technologies ... PDA, the cell phone, Internet and so forth."

I asked an old-fashioned question, using my limited vocabulary. "What made you decide to buy a radio network?"

"We're a media company," he says. "We're not a radio company."

Explain, I plead.

"Delivery of audio communications that originates in a radio platform. To me, that's radio, still. Radio repackaged, sliced and diced.

"Take a radio host like Rachel Maddow. If she has a really pithy three-minute exchange with some prominent guest, having that delivered to people in podcasts by subscriptions or e-mail alerts. ... If you want to hear the latest thing Rachel said about Obama, hit star 729, then you hear Rachel for two minutes while driving in your car. Is that radio? Not as we think of it traditionally, but it's derived from the radio medium."

I'm not going. I'm one of those old peasants who is going to stay behind and miss out on the future. And it's all because I am technologically compromised. I can't manage gizmos. It's lucky that I can talk to my father over the dinner table or on the phone, because I could never find him on the radio in the future.

"Are you ... optimistic about the future of radio?" I say somewhat weakly.

"I am optimistic," says Kireker, "that there is going to be a significant role for both terrestrial radio and audio content delivered to people through computers and other interactive devices."

He continues: "I have always loved radio, but I wouldn't have done this if I didn't believe that the opportunity is to build on the radio platform and create a true media company that thinks of itself as producing high quality content for delivery to lots of audiences in lots of different packages."

I am, at this point, comforted by the presence of the very term I started out being intimidated by: "terrestrial radio." Something to do with the ground.

I am almost holding on to my desk, wondering how to talk about radio simply as a medium that enables us to hear people talk. And here is where I simply have to surrender and admit total defeat. I don't listen to the radio. I listen to my father, because I always learn things when I listen to him. His regular show - on Saturday afternoons - is on a network, TRN, I can't get on my radio, and I don't know how to listen to the radio from my computer. It makes you sign up, choose passwords, et cetera, and it never works. When he broadcasts on WABC periodically, filling in for Sean Hannity or Bob Grant, I am able to listen in on the plain old-fashioned AM dial.

Michael Harrison promises me that the future is bright. Not only that, he says, he is counseling my father about how to build a new career from podcasting and ... whatever else.

"The next step in the evolution is toward a future," says Harrison, "that nobody can fully imagine because it is going to be so profoundly different. It is going to be the emergence of the media station. The media station is going to be the equivalent of today's television, radio, magazine and newspaper all in one. This is coming, no matter what. The technology can't be stopped. The businesspeople have to, as we say, monetize it. You can be sure they will. "

"Okay, but ... can I still listen to the radio while I am doing my dishes?" I ask.

"Of course! Your dishes will be done in an environment where you will have constant access to media stations, wherever you go. You'll have it on your wrist, on your wall. Wherever you go there will be monitors and plugs. You'll be able to do PowerPoint presentations in the park. The future of radio is going to be from the building block of the radio station, which is an AM- and FM-licensed entity. It is going to leapfrog past satellite radio, it is going to all be on the Internet, and radio shows and radio talent will aggregate in groups called media stations, which will really be Web sites with stationality."

I can't imagine having my radio on my wrist while I do my dishes, but I understand what he means.


I look at a photograph of my parents in my father's radio studio, circa 1962. My mother is elegantly dressed, my father in a suit and tie. He used to broadcast his show - in the '60s - from a restaurant called Mama Leone's. My mother would wear heavy ankle-length gowns. They adopted a spider monkey who lived in a cage at the station, and brought him home, where he used to sit on my father's shoulder as he worked. All the stories I wanted to tell you now seem impossibly long and irrelevant. The censor within says: You just can't accept the world as it is.

Of course I can - I just seek out that which I can make my own, remember, feel. Don't we all?

When I think of the medium of radio, I think of it as having to do with time. Time slowing down. My father is a Southerner, and what he brought to radio was precisely this - a slowing-down of the rush of life, as before a campfire, when a long story is about to be told, inside of a spell cast by the slowing-down. Just like Hannity said - listening late at night, under the covers, and feeling, as so many people have always told my father, that they knew him, that he was talking to them.

I see his back in the broadcast chair, his arms spread out as he talks, his thumbs pressing against his ring finger like a jazz musician marking time. His stories would dip and wind, characters acted out, drama infused at all the right moments. History made into entertainment. He always brought it back right on the beat, right on the clock, or rather, like a great drummer, right behind it.

I asked my father to bring me back to the beginning. I asked him, even, to write this piece for me. He sat down and wrote, at length, and sent me what he had written. And now I don't know what to do with those stories, except take them to a place where people document lost worlds and preserve their secret histories.

My father's first-ever interview subject was a young, popular preacher: Martin Luther King Jr., whom he described as "soft-spoken." He has interviewed everybody who was anybody in the '60s, '70s and '80s, but perhaps more important, thousands of people who weren't. What he calls "the bird lady, the chocolate lady, the UFO man ..."

I asked him once, at the age of 9, to repeat for me the story of how John Lennon once told him that he was a die-hard fan and listened every night. It was the one time in my life my father ever admonished me. He turned around in the car, looked at me sternly, and said: "Celia, don't be impressed by celebrity."


Michael Harrison is much more than optimistic about the future of radio: He is ecstatic. It isn't "the future of radio" that excites him so much, it is the future of media. "The world that we're going into," he says, "will be a far better world from a standpoint of media and freedom. It is going to be a monumentally democratic media. The Internet is going to change us as a species. It is the most important invention since the wheel. Changes in technology create changes in society. As regards radio, the notion that you get audio from a box that is licensed by the government will seem ancient."

Harrison believes the Internet is going to raise the "collective intelligence" of the human race, "significantly." Traditional radio, satellite radio, HD radio - it will all be battled out by competing industries, but Harrison thinks the ultimate equalizer will be the Internet, which he calls the new "street." Which brings us back to radio.

"Radio historically has always been a street medium, a mass medium of popular culture. That's what radio is," says Harrison, himself a former rock-and-roll deejay.

"Rock and roll was born through radio. The big-band era. Theater. Journalism was huge in radio before television. Radio has always evolved with popular culture. It is a medium that requires its own special qualities, traits and magic to succeed. The mistake with Talk America, for example, was they thought radio was political. It is not - it is a medium of popular culture, of magic. Many people today don't even believe in the medium that they own. I can usually tell what is going to fail. Radio will explode."

Says Kireker, "We're just living in such a fragmentary, attention-deficit-disorder world that people are gravitating toward shorter pieces of content. I am optimistic that Air America can be in the forefront of responding to the changing tastes and habits of the American public." He agrees with the common criticism that Air America misjudged radio for a political animal. "I totally agree with that," he says. "We need to make Air America much more entertaining, even as we retain the emphasis on being an independent voice with a progressive point of view. Liberal radio has a long way to go. Conservative talkers got a 25-year head start on us."

That people think of radio as a conservative medium is only a recent phenomenon. And why do they? Its biggest star - Howard Stern - is a left-leaning libertarian.

My father commented, via e-mail: "Contrary to liberal vexation, talk radio is not some 'Peck's bad boy' that went astray. It's simple. Insofar as a medium in today's America is open to public participation, it will be conservative."

Maybe all these arguments are becoming arcane. I returned to what my father had written down for me when I asked him to write an essay about the past and future of radio.

Radio, he wrote, is "like a criminal whose death sentence is repeatedly upheld but never actually carried out." I was reminded that it was supposed to bite the dust immediately when television was invented; it only grew, explosively.

Oxford professor Erasmus Wilson predicted: "When the Paris Exhibition of 1878 closes, electric will close with it and no more will be heard of it." In 1927, when Hollywood was presented with the technology that would allow movies to have sound, H.M. Warner, head of Warner Bros. Studios, wrote in a rejection letter, "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" And when television arrived in ordinary American homes in 1947, everybody said it was the end of radio. And they didn't mean the end of radio's dominance of American culture. They meant the end, period, no more.

And here is how he concluded, answering a question he has probably been answering all throughout his life in radio - namely, what does its future look like:

A glorious past is no guarantee of a glorious future, or any future at all. The challenges besetting terrestrial radio are so many and so formidable, one is reminded of Marine Gen. Chesty Puller's comment during a particularly difficult moment in the Korean War. "They've got us surrounded, men," said Gen. Puller. "Don't let any of them get away!" It's hard to catalog, much less remember, all the various and dire threats to the very existence of terrestrial radio.

Whether the radio that survives is terrestrial or alternative or a mix, it's radio and it will endure. Why? Let the 6-year-old boy explain - the one who was asked by his uncle in the third year of television, "Do you prefer radio or television?"

"I prefer radio," said the young boy.

"Why?" asked his uncle.

"Because," said the lad, "the pictures are so much clearer."

1 comment about "The Future Of Media: Radio".
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  1. James Bollella from Brown Bag Productions/Premiere Radio Networks, February 7, 2010 at 12:43 a.m.

    I loved this article. It was personal and passionate without being preachy or negative. Some of the best writing about radio I've seen on the web. Thanks to the author for writing something so enjoyable to read, I didn't want it to end.

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