Not many people are writing positive things about the radio industry these days. Oh sure, Pierre Bouvard is releasing lots of great material from Westwood One showing the power of the medium and as I’ve mentioned here before, he’s right.
Occasionally, someone else in the industry writes something positive that doesn’t have to do with the “good old days” when everyone listened to radio and even small markets had a local radio star or two.
Radio played the songs that became hits, let us know what was cool, and even informed us about what was going on in the world. That last one didn’t refer to which stars are getting divorced or the latest rapper to be arrested, but rather real news stories about matters of importance such as elections versus a steady diet of pop culture. Are you old enough to remember when the FCC mandated a percentage of programming for news and public affairs as part of the license obligation?
It could be worse. If you haven’t heard about the travails of The Washington Post, you should take a look. The word is that the newspaper lost $77 million last year. While that is equivalent to loose change in the sofa cushions for Jeff Bezos, who owns The Post, it’s a serious number. The losses have led to changes in top management at The Post, but now the employees are upset with the proposed changes. Bezos purchased The Post for $250 million in 2013. What do you think it’s worth today?
I recently re-read a column from TVNewsCheck by Hank Price, who spent thirty years running local TV stations. He was opining about the sale of Paramount, which as this column is being written, looks like it will now be sold to Skydance. However this is the second time we’ve heard that announcement.
His thoughts were not only about the decline in the value of Paramount, from about $30 billion when Sumner Redstone passed away to perhaps $8 billion now. Price’s real interest was the CBS Television Network and the O&O’s. The network itself, which while greatly diminished, still has the most overall viewers (and they’re happy to let you know that), and in the past, the O&Os would be diamonds. Beyond political campaigns causing millions of dollars to flow into local stations in presidential battleground states as well as some nasty gubernatorial and Senate races, how’s the local TV business doing these days?
Let’s consider magazines. How many print magazines do you subscribe to, that is, pay some amount of money per year to receive a printed version in the mail regularly? I’m down to one, Car and Driver, to satisfy both my interest in cars and because the writing is great. When I started getting C&D, it was a monthly, then dropped to ten issues per year. As of 2024, it is down to bi-monthly, but has more pages (not double, but more) and is printed on nicer stock. They’ve also increased the font size, which is a blessing to all of their elderly readers who have complained about the small font for some time. Is C&D growing? Probably online, but my bet is that the print version is losing readers at a steady pace.
Two recent statistics jumped out at me. One was the audience for last month’s presidential debate. According to Nielsen, just over 51 million people watched it across 22 networks. That’s a lot of people, but the first Biden-Trump debate in 2020 pulled in over 73 million viewers. That’s below the 84 million that viewed the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016. The decline from 2016 to 2024 is nearly 39 percent. You can argue that the 2024 debate was far earlier than usual and the American electorate wasn’t ready to watch just yet. Still…
The other statistic came from the Pew Research Center. As of 2023, 32 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 regularly get their news from TikTok, up from nine percent in 2020. In terms of the percentage of platform users who regularly get news from a social media site, TikTok was tied with Facebook at 43 percent, in other words, 43 percent of TikTok users regularly get news from it.
Beyond the obvious questions about our future generations that should arise from seeing those statistics, this shows the existential problems that “traditional” media are facing. At this point, radio may be in the best position of all. Something positive for radio…makes me feel good all over.
Let’s meet again next week.
