My wife, the lovely and feisty CarolAnn Williams, loves to read history articles and human interest stories online. She has recently taken advantage of the increasing number of publications offering audio narration for these tales. Several times in the past couple of weeks she’s commented, “I hate these AI voices.” I smile and suggest she go back to reading and hearing the words in her voice or whatever voice she chooses to imagine.
AI is getting better all the time, of course, but I agree with CarolAnn – at this point, artificial voices don’t sound like real people but they’re getting closer frighteningly fast. Meanwhile, news and talk radio stations also sound less like the real people and more like AI voices that don’t know how to pronounce local names and mispronounce or misuse even common words most of us learn by middle school. Raw “talents” today often can’t be bothered to breathe life into live commercial reads nor understand why they should. While AI is gradually improving its ability to sound humanly professional radio is going in the opposite direction.
personality
noun
- The collection of distinctive qualities of a person, especially those distinguishing personal characteristics that make one socially appealing.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
I’m at a point in life where I often question my judgment because as we age, we judge matters by comparison to our previous experiences and our personal good old days. I don’t compare music or movies today with those of the past, but I can’t stop regretting that live and local personality-driven radio has become harder to find than it used to be.
Here’s my standard disclaimer: I’m not referring to everybody on every station. There are still some fine talents on the air but they’re fewer in number and harder to find, largely because networks and syndication make live people talking in real time increasingly scarce. Even the good ones are short on creativity, working from the same playbook instead of expressing their unique personalities. That comes from people hearing what everyone else is doing and copying the patterns.
A lot of the lack of creativity can be laid at the feet of overworked program directors who are too busy with corporate meetings and online paperwork to find time to actually direct their programming. Plus, many PD’s today don’t have the training and experience necessary to help the staff sharpen their skills and create their station’s identity.
And that’s another thing killing news and talk radio: the nearly total lack of branding and sense of family. I know this from my recent experience at KLIF in Dallas where my partner Amy Chodroff and I did the only live and local show on the station – the only one. The other twenty hours of each weekday were (and still are) filled with syndicated voices emanating from who knows where talking national politics and international affairs, which are as far from locally relatable topics as you can get. Amy and I couldn’t talk about other hosts on the station because there weren’t any. We couldn’t even promote other shows because we had no earthly idea what the syndicators had planned. And here is an embarrassing admission to drive home my point: I worked there for twelve years and couldn’t even tell you the Monday through Friday KLIF lineup without reading our website. Why should I? It was irrelevant.
That’s just one station among hundreds today with little to no live talent and no station identity.
What has always made radio special among all media? Everybody in the business will answer the question correctly. Radio is unique because it can provide immediate information and entertainment by people with the special ability to connect with listeners. We all know that, so why have we largely abandoned it?
Radio has always been about personality, but it is surely fading away.
Here come the age-related comparisons.
Radio stations used to develop raw talent into professional personalities over time with positive personal guidance. We had farm teams, small markets in which every station needed to provide live content 24/7. These farm teams were managed by program directors who were often also in training but experienced enough to offer direction to us new kids. As we matured with our managers, we all moved into larger markets for better money and more advanced schooling. We arrived in the big leagues when we were finally ready.
I know people now who started their on-air careers in major markets, some on heritage stations. Nothing wrong with that in itself but while they are smart and pretty good at reading and speaking well, they lack experience, and it shows. More than radio experience they frequently lack life experience as well.
All together now, Gen Zers, “OKAY, BOOMER!”
A final, gentle note on this point: if your, ahem, life experience doesn’t allow you to remember when virtually all radio was live and local you’ll just have to grant my point. It was better and by the way, small-town radio was a lot more fun to listen to because you could always hear people relating to their community and learning by making mistakes. It beat the heck out of just another dial position for Sean Hannity.
Time marches on. Technological progress is creating new opportunities daily and if radio as we’ve known it can’t or won’t adapt, we’ll soon be the street lamplighters of the 21st century. Sad but so be it. The competition from streaming platforms is getting better all the time while radio continues to forget what it still does better than any of them:
Live and local.
If we have any hope of competing with today’s digital innovators we have to talk with authority about weather and traffic, local events, local people, and mom-and-pop businesses live in real-time. And we have to train people to do it if we can find some trainers who still remember how.
Don’t believe me. Here’s what radio research master Fred Jacobs said about it in his excellent column just over a week ago:
“Personality is, was, and likely will be the elixir that keeps consumers, advertisers, and marketers coming back for more. Or coming in the first place. And if the radio broadcasting industry doesn’t develop a system that not only perpetuates and maintains its current crop of stars, but also builds mechanisms for discovering and recruiting future talent, it is indeed screwed.”
