Out With The Old

The thing about moving is that, when you start the process of getting your stuff in order, you discover things you didn't know you still had in boxes from the last move. And so it was that I found myself going through things I hadn't seen in decades, boxes and crates and tubs filled with the detritus of 26 years in one place, packages unopened since the '90s, the remains of life as we once knew it.

There were receipts, lots of receipts, receipts from stores and vendors long gone, bank statements and checkbooks from forgotten, defunct financial institutions, ticket stubs from arenas that were torn down generations ago, for events I don't remember attending. (I saw the Pet Shop Boys at Irvine Meadows in 1999? I don't think that even happened.) I found what amounted to a cell phone museum, from a bulky brick in a carrying case to a Star-TAC to Treos and Windows Mobile phones with slide-out keyboards to a few generations of iPhones.

And there was evidence of our radio careers. Airchecks galore, Fran doing interviews for her college station and spinning Gospel records, me doing talk radio and my Sunday morning not-really-public affairs show. Radio yearbooks and directories from when that was a thing. Bumper stickers, keychains, random promotional items. Ratings books demonstrating my accomplishments as a PD. There was a ton of stuff.

I threw it all out.

Technically, I recycled what I could, shredded what needed to be shredded, and threw out what remained, but I discarded all the radio stuff, without regret. I'm sure some of the people who frequent those radio nostalgia groups on Facebook would be appalled by what I did, but I gotta say, I felt better after watching the last bit of it get hauled away.You know, I'm as susceptible to a nice wallow in nostalgia myself as anyone else. It's fun to remember how things used to be. But, as I've written here before, radio has a tendency to wallow in the used-to-be a little too much for a vibrant, growing business. It has the effect of stagnating the creative forces that should be pushing the medium forward. It's why the formula, for talk radio as well as music radio, hasn't evolved in decades.

Looking at the volumes of radio material I'd uncovered, what struck me is how some things haven't changed at all. The competitive reports I generated as a PD in the early '90s cited some of the same issues we still have today -- a lack of relevance to people's everyday lives and interests, decreased localism, increasing competition. It reminded me of how radio sounded in 1995, and how it sounds pretty much the same today, even as other legacy media, like television and video, have changed over the same period, or withered away, like print.

There have, however, been some changes, and not for the better, when it comes to talk radio. To be sure, political talk radio was strident then and strident now, and I found some of my own warnings that political talk was clearly heading in the direction of aging out, concentrating on a generation that was entering the geriatric phase, and would continue to shrink while ignoring younger audiences who yearned to hear conversation relevant to their lives. And there have always been hosts on the fringe. I did not expect that years later, hosts would be supporting insurrection and promulgating blatant lies and would not face any direct consequences for it (Alex Jones notwithstanding). Gotta say, that was not in the projections.

But, yeah, it all went into the trash, and maybe it was because I've always preferred to look forward. Back in 1995, at the dawn of streaming and the web, I hoped for a Golden Age of unlimited entertainment and information choices, and it came to pass, sort of (you can argue either way on how that went). In 2021, I still hope for something new to come along, new talent to change what we expect from audio. I don't want WABC or KHJ or Barry Gray to be resurrected. I don't want same-as-it-ever-was. I want new. I want different. I want to imagine the future more than I want to experience the past, even if the past is useful to inform and guide the future. I don't want to live in the past when there's life to be celebrated right here, right now.

Besides, I'm not paying to move crates of Arbitron books and Broadcasting Yearbooks across the country. The future is going to require every dollar I can scrounge up.

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For most of those years, I've been compiling stuff to talk about on the radio at All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep page, and that will continue as long as I continue, wherever I might be. Find it by clicking here, and you can also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics and find every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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And now you know what I was up to for those two weeks I wasn't around here. I'm in the process of moving across the country, to Florida (the motto of which, as many friends there have reminded me, is "Our Governor Is Trying To Kill Us"). That won't likely officially happen until sometime in January, and, no, I don't have any more details other than that I'll likely end up someplace between Miami and West Palm Beach, where our ancestors all migrated from the northeast to queue up for the Early Bird Specials. While I may discuss the reasons here at some point (and no, it's not for the Official Talk Radio Reasons People Are Leaving California), I'll probably be posting more about it on social media, because you're here for the radio and podcasting stuff. Meanwhile, those of you in South Florida have been duly warned.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon