America, Raise Your Voice!
Today, RADIO is more than a $20 billion industry in America.
Radio reaches over 200 million people a week.
That means each person that listens to the radio -- free radio -- attracts more than $100 in advertising revenue.
That is POWER!
But radio has changed. It's not just what you listen to when you commute to and from work. It's not the boombox you listened to in your bedroom or with your friends as a teen 20 years ago to hear the latest song or to laugh at a crazy radio personality.
Podcasting, blogs, e-mails, video/jpeg voice mails through cell phones -- these are all examples of the modern, current world of radio, which essentially is just the broadcasting of a "message" from one location received at another distant location.
Radio is part of today's consumer-generated media.
Consumer-generated media is rapidly becoming The People's Radio and your voice matters. Blogs are just an example of the many ways consumers impact the perception we have of products, news and the world surrounding us.
No longer do you have to be just a receiver! You are a transmitter, too...where your opinion -- as long as it remains within the boundaries of law and common decency - matters and can MAKE A DIFFERENCE!
According to the recent Universal McCann/Media in Mind 2005 national media research study, just over 4 million adults kept an online journal. Simply because you are reading this now, you are part of a special club that has a special influence ability. You have an audience and that audience is growing. You also -- because you are a blogger -- are above average media users, according to Universal McCann. On average, you listen to about 12 hours of traditional radio every week. In comparison, you only play video games 51 minutes a week, read newspapers 3 hours a week and magazines 1.5 hours per week.
You are on the Internet 14.25 hours a week and are e-mailing 9.75 hours per week.
You are watching television more than 25.25 hours per week.
You are a huge media consumer!
Guess what? You matter. You matter to those who make decisions and own the media pipelines.
Make your opinion matter.
I love radio. I still do. But there is so much to fix.
The purpose of this blog is to provide a forum for YOUR VOICE. Radio is still the people's medium. It is mainly live, immediate, and a strong part of each community's personality. In the USA, there are more than 13,000 commercial radio stations and thousands more of college and other non-commercial, low-power examples. Plus, there are the thousand upon thousands of Internet "broadcasts"...and the new satellite radio universes of XMRadio and Sirius Radio.
Radio connects us all and gives each of us the power to hear and sway opinion.
Traditional radio has dramatically changed -- at least the kind we born before 1992 grew up listening to before the arrival of the Digital and Internet age. Radio companies used to be small with limited ownership. Up until the early '90s, they could only own 12 FMs and 12 AMs. With an eleventh-hour late addition buried amongst other, "more important" law changes focused mostly on the flow of entertainment and information of cable and telephone/telephony companies, the 1996 TeleCom Bill changed everything.
Ownership became consolidated from the ownership of many into the ownership of just a few.
If the '80s and early '90s brought targeted "niche formats" in a rapidly-fragmented radio spectrum, the late '90s created new power bases unimaginable by the fathers of radio broadcasting a century ago.
Ultimately, the concentration of radio into the hands of the few is nothing short of a power grab. According to the Radio Act of 1927, enacted by Congress, radio airwaves were owned by the public licensed for usage by corporate America. The Radio Act "emphasizes how oligopolistic corporate control and the reliance upon commercial advertising for support tend to undermine the media's capacity to fulfill their democratic function".
Then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover said radio provided "one of the few instances that I know of when the whole industry and country is praying for more regulation."
What a different America we live in now.
Your voice, your concern, your opinion -- up until now -- has been supressed. Radio Owners are much more closely aligned with two Masters -- Wall Street investment brokerages (which place fiscal performance ahead of content quality) and the ruling political party (which want to be cozy with the media owners and with whom the radio owners want to be cozy with for favorable rulings on license renewals and more radio station purchases).
Fortunately, the public space of modern letter to the editor writings on weblogs...or, more popularly, blogs. And now, a public space for you to be a radio critic. Express your opinions about what you hear on the radio. What you like, what you don't, what you want to keep and what you want changed.
BELIEVE IT: media owners are just right now understanding that blogs have the IMMEDIATE ability to sway public opinion and force corporate decisions. Consumer product companies like Proctor & Gamble and Ingersoll-Rand already are among the many that have made quick fixes and product recalls because of blogging. Look at how blogging impacted the presidential election in 2004 and quickened the retirement of Dan Rather.
According to the official radio ratings measurement company in America (Arbitron), traditional radio (the free kind you can hear over the air with a regular radio in your car, at home, in the office without paying a subscription fee) reaches 94% of the entire 12 and older US population every week. This has not changed much at all in the last 60 years. What has changed is the amount of time spent listening to the radio in a typical week, now that there are so many more entertainment choices today.
However, radio is still important. It still matters. Your opinions matters. And your publicly-owned, government-licensed radio airwaves matter.
SPEAK UP NOW!!!
Write your thoughts about radio. This is a free space. Consider it a form of patriotic duty...a chance for you to help right a wrong. Protest if you think something about radio needs to be protested. Make compliments, too! Any city size, any city region, urban or rural, anywhere in America. Name the station, name the city, name names. But be fair and be honest. Be real. Together, we can discipline radio the way parents sometimes have to with their own kids -- TOUGH LOVE.
Raise your voice! In this forum, your opinion matters...it just might get linked and e-mailed around the world in the blink of an eye.
