{"id":1230,"date":"2007-08-23T07:28:02","date_gmt":"2007-08-23T12:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1230"},"modified":"2009-01-13T19:04:28","modified_gmt":"2009-01-14T00:04:28","slug":"eating-the-seed-corn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1230","title":{"rendered":"Eating The Seed Corn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brian Maloney – talk host, Cap’n Ed’s golf buddy and one-time NARN guest – notes that talk-radio legend Bob Grant is returning to WOR<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Grant was one of the few conservative talkers who got his start back during the days of the original “Fairness Doctrine”.\u00a0 Of course, he worked in New York, a market that was big enough that a big-enough station could actually afford to air overtly partisan programming in absolute, “Doctrine”-kosher balance.\u00a0 Medium-to-smaller stations avoided the hassle and kept their programming straight down the boring middle; as I’ve related, my own talk alma mater, KSTP-AM, only aired me because I convinced my boss, Scott Meier,<\/a> that putting a conservative on the air could help head off complaints about Geoff Charles’ left-leaning style come renewal time.<\/p>\n

Oh, yeah – he’s 78.\u00a0<\/p>\n

About which Maloney wrote the best point in his piece on the subject:<\/p>\n

In the big picture<\/strong>, talk radio is still failing terribly at building the next generation of talkers who can move it forward. As it now stands, the medium appears to be milking its oldest hosts until their final days.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, I blame Limbaugh.<\/p>\n

Back when I got into the biz, talk hosts progressed through the business more or less like everyone else in radio – disc jockeys, play-by-play guys, programmers, news reporters – did; they started in small markets, worked their way up through larger and larger markets, and if they had the talent and the drive and maybe were just-plain dysfunctional enough, they might eventually make it to the Bigs.<\/p>\n

Then – simultaneously with the death of the “Fairness” Doctrine – came the proliferation of relatively cheap satellite technology and bandwidth.\u00a0\u00a0And with that\u00a0 came programming – also prolific, and cheap.<\/p>\n

Like, free.\u00a0 Rush Limbaugh didn’t charge his affiliates to air his program; he reserved a spot or two in each commercial break for his own advertising, which his own sales staff sold.\u00a0 Limbaugh lived off the ad revenue; the affiliates got a major-market mid-day host, and a damn good one, for free.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Which meant that small talk stations in New Bedford, Framingham and Fall\u00a0River\u00a0Massachussets and Aurora Illinois and Santa Rosa California and Hammond Indiana didn’t have to spend $20K a year to hire (to pick a random example)\u00a0a 25 year old kid with a graveyard shift show under his belt to run the mid-day show anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most of the big local hosts – the Jason Lewises and Joe Soucherays and even Tom Mischkes, in Twin Cities’ terms – had at least a toe-hold in the business before the onslaught of free satellite programming.\u00a0 The few excecptions – Dan Conry, for example – are exceptions precisely because <\/em>of this phenomenon.\u00a0 There really is <\/em>no “talent pipeline” in talk radio anymore.\u00a0 Seriously – if I got a wild hair and decided to try to get back into the business, even assuming I could <\/em>get hired somewhere, I have no idea what station out there could<\/em> anymore.<\/p>\n

It’s that way pretty much throughout the business.<\/p>\n

So Maloney is right to ask:<\/p>\n

When they are gone, does radio’s most important format simply shut down?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, money will find a way – and talk radio is nothing if not a money machine.<\/p>\n

But it’s kinda sad to realize that the closest we’ve seen to a “talent pipeline” in talk radio in the last decade involved Kris Krok going from KSTP (Twin Cities) to WSB (Atlanta).\u00a0<\/p>\n

That’s a pipeline of a different sort altogether.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brian Maloney – talk host, Cap’n Ed’s golf buddy and one-time NARN guest – notes that talk-radio legend Bob Grant is returning to WOR. Grant was one of the few conservative talkers who got his start back during the days of the original “Fairness Doctrine”.\u00a0 Of course, he worked in New York, a market that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-talk-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}