It has been some time since Bomani Jones hosted a sports radio talk show, as he has grown leaps and bounds through his work on ESPN, HBO, and now his podcast The Right Time. Recently, Jones was a guest on Jon “Stugotz” Weiner’s podcast and got into a discussion about how working in digital media has, in some ways, hurt the effort of bringing people closer together—something that sports talk radio, conversely, excels at.
“I do miss it,” said Jones about working in sports talk radio. “The coolest thing about radio to me, and why I enjoy it over every other medium, is that the community that surrounds it is always so much more intimate, and always like much closer.”
Furthermore, Jones referenced a book he read which discussed how more communication doesn’t necessarily bring people closer—something the book argues has never been proven by any concrete evidence. He then used that thought to emphasize that what makes sports talk radio unique is its ability to allow people to communicate and respond in real time, ultimately bridging the gap between voices.
“Doing the jobs that we do, especially like in the face of social media. You talk more and more, and you’re going to reach a point where you say something, or you’ve evolved and changed in such ways that somebody is not going to like it,” said Jones. “In radio, it was calls. People would call up to the radio station, and maybe they want to get one off on you because they’re upset with whatever it is that you’ve done… Where we all are now is the longer you do this and there’s no feedback mechanism. Radio creates the possibility of feedback mechanism.”
Moreover, the former ESPN radio host believes that the recorded nature of podcasting—and what the medium has become—has affected how much talent can truly connect with the listener, mainly due to its non-live format.
“You record it and you put it up, people are now more likely just to go b***h about it on their own little platform than engage the person. Then the engagement is tough as the person now, because you get so much bulls**t along the way that you can’t even tell who a real person is,” said Jones. “I miss what I did daily radio. There were five or six people that I knew I would talk to every day. They call in. They were happy to talk to me. I was happy to talk to them. We would hang out. In your life, you got no five people that are going to call you every day that you want to talk to.”
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