This week's All Access newsletter is about need and radio and the nexus between... okay, I'm not sure WHAT it's about. But here it is:
Everybody's cutting back these days, and I'm no exception. Today, for example, I walked out to the driveway in the morning to retrieve the local papers and I thought... do I need this? It's on the web for free, I have less and less time to sit there and read the hard copy version... do I really NEED this, as in do I really want to pay for it? What would I miss if it wasn't there at the end of the driveway every morning?
And I thought about my cable service, too. We get HBO and Showtime. Do we need both? HBO, we watch. Showtime, not so much. In fact, I can't remember the last time we sat and watched something on Showtime. It's nice to have it as an option, but do we NEED it?
That exercise is being conducted all the time now. Do I NEED the Starbucks every day? Do I NEED to buy tickets for that basketball game? Do I NEED a new jacket, a weekend in Vegas, a magazine, the expensive olive oil, a new cell phone?
If you're involved on the other end, you hope the answer is yes. Your barista, the team owner, the clothing store, the casino, the publisher, the grocery, the cell phone company... they need you to need them. Or, more precisely, they need you to think you need those things, and with the economy how it is, they know that you're not going to be as quick to drop a few bucks on their products or services without thinking long and hard about it first.
That brings us to radio. I had a couple of conversations in the past few days in which the subject of radio's future came up. It comes up a lot, especially as times have gotten tougher. The words "dead" and "dying" did come up, and I thought about the hard times and the cutbacks and a lot of the bad-news stories about the industry in recent weeks and days. I've said here before that I don't think that the present woes mean that radio's going to go away anytime soon, yet if you talk long enough about the negative stuff, yeah, it seems bleak. But then you see the stories about 235 million listeners, and you consider radio's ubiquity, and you realize that killing all that off is going to be a tall order, even with all the new technology. Yes, streaming and downloads and technology we may not even know about yet will be in the mix, and so will cell phones, but, at heart, it's still audio entertainment, and unless you own the transmitter, that's the business you're in. Talk and personality radio, of course, has its own protection -- it's not easily replicated as is music programming -- but you know that.
So, how does that "need" thing play into this? Two ways:
1. On a programming level, you want to be indispensable. You want people to feel that they need what you're offering. In this climate, you want to offer them talk and information and entertainment that truly helps them cope with life, because that's what people feel they need. Tell them how the political dealings in Washington and at the state and local level will impact them. Help them find jobs. Make them laugh. Be indispensable; be something they value more than just listening to the same old songs on their iPods.
2. On a more general level, "need" isn't an issue, and that's the point. We're in cutback mode now as a society, and people are holding back on purchases and dropping services. They'll cut back on the cable packages. They'll go to fewer movies. They'll cancel the papers. But radio isn't likely to be on that cutback list, because it's free, everyone already has one, and, if you're doing it right, they'll know they're getting something of value for the low, low price of nothing. And that's a price everyone can afford right now.
Your mission is to make your station and/or your show a "need." Of course, your corporate overlords aren't going to make that easy; we've seen entire news departments go away, and we might see more of that before things change. But at some point, someone is going to see the opportunity in radio again, whether it gets delivered to listeners through an antenna on a tall tower with a blinking light or over the Net or through a megaphone out the window. If people need what you have to offer, you have a future.
Speaking of "need," if you talk on the radio, you need (oh, brother, what an embarrassingly obvious segue into the plug) All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics column for material lovingly hand-picked at the peak of flavor, giving you loads of topics with which to make the magic. Examples? Why, there's the saga of Fake Joba Chamberlain, cat punching, school yearbooks for homeless kids, a crackdown on "cool parents," guns in churches, new jobs for the politically disgraced, an unusual job application, why Carlos Mencia isn't going to Mardi Gras, bag bans, getting dumped on Facebook, why California taxpayers are nervous right now, places you don't want to drive, a Fake Foreigner Drummer, Brett Favre's annual retirement, the Further Adventures of Octomom, why you want a girl just like the girl who married dear old dad, why restaurants aren't pleased with the scheduling of Valentine's Day this year, and a story about human hair found in prehistoric hyena poop, among many other stories, including a lot of items about the economy you might not see elsewhere. Then, read "10 Questions With..." NRANews.com Executive Producer and veteran talk producer Cameron Gray, plus the rest of All Access, where you get the news and columns and job listings and resources you need, all free. Don't forget to follow All Access on Twitter (twitter.com/allaccess) and Facebook and sign up for text alerts powered by HipCricket, too.
Oh, and happy Valentine's Day to you and yours. As the song says, all you need is love. But chocolate doesn't hurt, either.
