RadioBanter - View Single Post

March 30th 04, 04:06 PM

(Shannon) writes:

With news updates on cell phones and watches, and immediate Internet
news coverage, will listening to news on the radio become something of
the past?

Maybe, but I don't think so.

My experience of news on the Internet is that it is rarely as immediate
as radio. I have little experience of watches and phones as news media,
but I can't imagine them as anything but subscription services. Radio
is free and, moreover, something one can leave on as one goes about
one's daily routine. It is always likely to be the first choice,
except for CNN and its ilk.

Unless, of course, the broadcasters blow it.

Here in Boston there is very little news of value on the radio any
more except on WBUR. That's sad, and presents a possible scenario
by which radio might lose out to new media as a news source.

Broadcasters have to wake up, I think, and see what's happening to
radio. At a time when XM and Sirius and establishing their beachheads
like the Allies on D-Day, too many broadcasters are withholding their
Panzers from the fight, perhaps because they think the expense wouldn't
look good on Wall Street.

Radio isn't nearly as exciting as it used to be. The creative experiments
and colorful rivalries of past decades have given way to a Borg-like
uniformity of sound. The glamour and excitement are gone, and
announcers seem more assembly line workers than entertainers. The
whole industry seems asleep at the wheel. Science has eclipsed art,
and that may be radio's downfall.

Unless, of course, I am wrong.

umar
--
"...limerick writers everywhere will rejoice at an application for the
first AM [radio station] on Nantucket, with 250 watts on 1550."
--_The M Street Journal_, 24 March 2004
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