Someday News

A lot is being written about what radio should be doing now to respond to the coronavirus crisis. Not a lot is being written about what radio should be doing now to prepare for what comes after the crisis. Let's fix that now.

We've talked ad nauseam about emergency preparedness, and we'll do that soon enough again, but this week, let's talk about news. You may have seen the story about how the NAB joined organizations representing newspaper and television news interests in asking Congress to give the news media some love in the next CARES Act, at least in the form of federally-funded advertising on local media, helping those stations and papers deliver news coverage, and that's a good idea. It also serves as a reminder that a lot of those outlets have furloughed or fired a lot of reporters, just in time for the public need and demand for credible news coverage to peak. If that advertising is tied to rehiring reporters and expanding coverage, the plan makes sense. If it's just going to go to the shareholders....

The NAB's move got me thinking about radio's revenue model, which is presently broken due to the radical decrease in advertising. We don't know that advertising will come back to the levels the media has become accustomed to earning. We don't really know anything about what the media business will look like once we've emerged from this, or what the best business model will be for radio, for TV, for podcasts, for digital and newspapers and entertainment and anything else. But demand? High and getting higher. Even radio, dogged by "radio is dead" pronouncements for years, has a place in the media future for several reasons: it's free, it's ubiquitous, it's easy, it can be delivered via streaming and on-demand through any device as well as over the air, it still has extensive reach. The biggest problem has been, and will continue to be, crushing debt. (Private equity doesn't seem like as good an idea now as it did back when... wait, it never seemed like a good idea except to the C-suite folks. Never mind.) But radio's going to exist, podcasts are going to continue to grow, audio will be part of the mix.

I'm going through all this to get to a point about news. The pandemic has proven that there is a massive public desire for information, and not just reading official statements. National networks are providing great content in that regard, but local commercial radio news has been devastated over the years by cost-cutting, and now, when we need it, too many markets have nobody on the radio asking the questions of local officials that the audience needs answered. Newspapers are in the same boat, TV news is reeling, and radio has an opportunity... and no money to do it right, not at the moment. What to do?

Maybe there's another way to look at the problem. You may have noticed that some of the strongest coverage of the crisis has come from people like ProPublica, nonprofit consortiums that are not in and of themselves newspapers or radio or TV stations but instead either do their own reporting or work in conjunction with newspapers or other outlets. Public radio has discovered this model as well with collaboratives formed by separately-operated stations in Texas, California, and several other states, nonprofits funded by grants and providing independent investigative journalism carried by traditional media outlets and digital media alike. With this model, stations that could not fund or staff that kind of larger project on their own, or at all, can get the coverage the public needs.

Commercial radio can do that, too. Outsourcing is not always a bad thing. If commercial radio is facing further economic hardship and contraction, perhaps the way to do it is to create separate nonprofit consortia of resources, generating content for commercial operations (sure they can -- ProPublica, for example, reports in conjunction with papers like the New York Times, a commercial business) and funded by donations, private and public grants, and underwriting of some sort. The concern over turning local or regional news coverage over to third parties would be offset by the knowledge that the alternative is no coverage at all, because those radio news jobs aren't coming back.

Perhaps this is idiotic, a pipe dream, never gonna happen. But it's just one idea. It's... well, it's a clichÈ, "thinking outside the box." We're going to need to think way, way outside the box to get radio, and, indeed, all media back on solid footing. The light at the end of the tunnel is probably a long way away, longer than we'd like, too far away for some businesses, but it's not too early to plan. Do you have a totally insane, outrageous, off-the-wall idea for what to do in the next stage? Let's kick it around. If the territory is uncharted, someone's gotta chart it.

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While you may have thought that all you need to do right now is open the mic and say "coronavirus" and that's a radio show right there, you've learned that it isn't enough. You need more material than that. And you can still find things to talk about at Talk Topics, the show prep column at All Access News-Talk-Sports, which you can find by clicking here and/or following the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item. Also back this week is our interview column, "10 Questions With..." podcast producer and host Cherie Louise Turner, who has a brand new podcast about women and running, "Strides Forward," that is well worth your attention, and the interview includes interesting talk about how she went from athlete and writer to podcaster and ultra-marathoner. Go read it now!

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You can follow my personal Twitter account at @pmsimon, and my Instagram account (same handle, @pmsimon) as well. And you can find me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pmsimon, and at pmsimon.com.

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It should go without saying that I hope you're all safe and healthy and doing what you can to remain that way. But I said it anyway, so there's that. Be well and we'll talk next week, if I can come up with something to write about. That's always an adventure.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
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