{"id":5485,"date":"2009-09-30T12:05:17","date_gmt":"2009-09-30T17:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5485"},"modified":"2009-09-30T10:47:19","modified_gmt":"2009-09-30T15:47:19","slug":"end-of-an-epoch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5485","title":{"rendered":"End Of An Epoch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Barnard is going to retire<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Eventually:<\/p>\n

Tom Barnard, the most popular, powerful broadcaster in Twin Cities radio, announced Tuesday that he plans to quit his KQ92 morning program three years from now.”I just don’t fit into the show anymore,” Barnard said late Tuesday night. “The corporate climate is not what I signed up for.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s possible Barnard meant it as a toss-off – but it caught my attention.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tom Barnard is a veteran of the classic radio industry; the “don’t pack a lunch, you probably won’t need one” world of bouncing up and down the dial, your employment subject not only to your own talent (Barnard’ always had it) but the whims and vagaries of a group of managers who largely got where they are because <\/em>they’re deeply dysfunctional.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That’s not a group slur, by the way; the skills required to succeed in major-market radio management\u00a0 – especially among general managers and high-profile program directors – are often indistinguishable, to regular people, from personality disorders.\u00a0\u00a0Major-market radio has always – at least in my cognitive lifetime – been like working for a bunch of hyperactive\u00a0teenagers; results have to happen now<\/em>; no excuses are accepted.\u00a0 A new program director usually had a window of six months – sometimes a year, sometimes three months – to show big <\/em>results, and had absolute power to get them, and no real impetus to expend much in the way of social grace or ethnical qualms about how they got them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That was in the seventies and eighties – the world Barnard is used to.<\/p>\n

And now <\/em>it’s getting bad!<\/p>\n

(Disclosure:\u00a0 Salem Radio, for whom I do the Northern Alliance program, is broadly an exception.\u00a0 Most of the people I’ve dealt with at Salem Twin Cities have been fairly functional, complete people.\u00a0 It’s almost like not being in radio at all…).<\/p>\n

Barnard, 57, who for decades has dominated local morning radio like no other broadcaster in the country, casually mentioned retiring during Tuesday’s show, but he confirmed later in the day that it was a serious announcement.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I did kind of catch that when I had the show on in the bathroom yesterday morning.\u00a0 I’d wondered if I’d heard that right.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure what’s behind his decision.\u00a0 I’d like to think that it’s because he’ll be sixty, he’ll be coming off a quarter century <\/em>of dominating morning radio in a major market like nobody in modern radio history (not even Howard Stern has ever gotten the kind of numbers Barnard has gotten for almost a generation now), he’s socked away a ton of money, and he’s realized that big-market music radio is not just a treadmill, but these days is a treadmill on the lower decks of the Titanic, and he wants to do something he enjoys after a long, successful career.<\/p>\n

Now, what will this mean, and what does it say, about the radio market in the Twin Cities?<\/p>\n

More later this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Barnard is going to retire. Eventually: Tom Barnard, the most popular, powerful broadcaster in Twin Cities radio, announced Tuesday that he plans to quit his KQ92 morning program three years from now.”I just don’t fit into the show anymore,” Barnard said late Tuesday night. “The corporate climate is not what I signed up for.” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5485","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=5485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}