“Radio Wars”: How Far We’ve Come
Media isn’t magic.
Oh, it used to be. Magazines, television, movies – these were immensely complicated endeavors crafted by brilliant alchemists in Hollywood and New York.
Today, the product is still great, but the magic is gone. A program about LA doctors may be shot in Vancouver, edited in Korea, promoted on MySpace, and distributed over Hulu. We don’t watch the news; we watch Jon Stewart complain about the news. And because seeming half of all media is dedicated to reporting on the half, we know there’s always a man (or Oprah) behind the curtain, even if we can’t see them.
It wasn’t always such. Check out this clip from WCIX (Miami’s channel 6) in 1984.
Besides the quaintness of the reportage and the nostalgia for radio’s not-quite-golden age, what’s most astonishing is the assumed naivete of the audience about the media business:
“Your ratings are what determine the amount of money you can charge an advertiser for being on your radio station. Obviously the more popular your station is, the more expensive it’s going to be for the advertiser.”
Got that?
Today’s teenager is probably more media savvy than 1984’s college graduate. And that savvy, compounded with an unfathomable choice of media platforms -– from YouTube to IMAX to On Demand to NetFlix to Xbox Live to… um, books? –- has made all of us more demanding, less loyal, and more skeptical. After all, if we don’t like what’s on the screen, we can make our own show. The long tail isn’t just getting longer, but it’s getting hard to distinguish the head.
And now, we’re all in on the joke.