Voiceover Blog

More signs of radio consolidation reaching critical mass:

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin basically gives Congress the middle digit in his attitude of  ’I don’t care what is good for the public interest, ‘coz I have friends in high places’ and vows to press on with a vote on media cross-ownership.

The National Association (yeah, right!) of Broadcasters agrees with Chairman Martin, citing the FCC’s research that “consolidation has no statistical effect on advertising rates” Which is kind of like asking a barber if you need a haircut.

Many large radio groups, seeing dwindling sales and dwindling stock prices reward more employees with pink slips in the days before Christmas.

Citadel starts sorting thru it’s stations to see which ones are ripe for a sell-off. And the Clear Channel go-private venture looks like it’s in trouble again.

Consolidation has clearly failed, yet the FCC and the NAB continue to kowtow to a handful of idiots bent on trying to improve their fortunes while the public trust evaporates around them.

–Thanks for reading.

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Elsewhere in this blog I made reference to the private equity firms and their wholesale destruction of the radio industry.  Today I was pointed to this excerpt from Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s online bio.

From 1978 to 1984, Mr. Romney was a Vice President at Bain & Company, Inc., a leading management consulting firm. In 1984, Romney founded Bain Capital, one of the nation’s most successful venture capital and investment companies. Bain Capital helped guide hundreds of companies on a successful course.

Bain is the money behind both the Clear Channel sale and Cumulus Media, not to mention anything else thay can get their hands on.  Their “successful course” has included mass firings, little local control, and a general dumbing down of key facets of what made radio a successful mass medium.

Guess what?  It’s not that successful anymore.  As a matter of fact, online ad spending has surpassed radio for the first time ever. And we’ve reached a point where radio is not worth a  (insert word that rhymes with Mitt)

–Thanks for reading

Someone had the foresight not to let a talent like Don Imus go to waste.  WABC out him back on the air in New York where he belongs. And in the resulting media coverage of his return, more people heard and read the words he said at WNBC that had heard them when he actually SAID them.

I’ve been a Don Imus fan since 1970.  I got to meet him at a rare radio convention appearance, where he packed the ballroom just because he was there. I have his two novels, which are an absolute scream.

I hope his run at WABC lasts as long as his previous gig.

But Imus is under the microscope now.  I think everything he does or says will be looked at twice. Whether he thinks so or not, he is now stealthily saddled with constraints. No matter what the media reports, it won’t be the same.  And that’s too bad.

–Thanks for reading