The sorry state of local radio

Don't get me wrong.  I love radio.  I cut my teeth on radio. In high school when others were toiling away at mundane office jobs, I was an afternoon radio Deejay on my family's radio station WZND in Zeeland, MI. It was a "co-op" job whereby I receved high school credit for garduation and was paid something like $2.50 per hour. I attended classes from 8-noon, then did a radio show from 2-6 p.m. That led to a 5-9 a.m. morning drive gig after high school graduation, which lasted until the station was sold 15 years later. During that time I served also as program director, music director and news director.

Looking back, I am happy to have escaped before the whole "corporate" thing happened.  Consolidation and buyouts created situations where one owner or group had perhaps a half-dozen stations in the same market. Competion for excellence in news, traffic and other services withered away.  The emergence of computer generated playlists programmed by "consultants" soon made every station sound the same. "Bob & Tom" type syndication even killed market personality.  Atlanta sounds just like Chicago which sounds just like Boston. Talk radio was a boon to AM, but again, sounds exactly the same in hundreds of makets across the nation. The advent of satellite radio means you can drive 2,500 miles and never experience the "local" flavor of radio.

Now, with the current recession killing off local ad budgets everywhere, radio is being overtaken by faceless advertising for investments and medical cures. I assume many of these are what we used to call "PI's" - ads that the station gets paid for only if they generate a call (Per Inquiry). Personally, I immediately switch stations every time I hear an ad selling "gold" as an investment.  If I have to sit through one more Beta Prostate ad, I just might crap my pants (ironically). I don't have a sleep number, thank you very much. I don't want to hear about your colon cleanser - especially around my lunch hour. I am quite comfortable with my hair loss and do not need your stupid Avacor. And any ad that features someone repeating their phone number four or five times in an ad earns my lifelong disdain. Again, the real downside to these network-fed or syndicate-mandated commercials is that they are exactly the same in every market.

Sure, we used to run Slim Whitman record album (and 8 track tape!) PIs during the overnights to fill un-sellable time. Those were bad enough. But these trashy commercials for faceless products having nothing to do with my community are actually running inside the most popular programs in the middle of the day--some even voiced by the "star" who, of course, is an avid user of the product. Some of them run two to three times per hour.

Maybe when the economy shapes up we'll get back to those good old local car dealer commercials where the owner screams really loud and... Oh. Wait.  Never mind