Just over a week after Rush Limbaugh’s widow announced the death of one of talk radio’s most formative voices, the industry is just beginning to answer the question of what to do with the midday time slot he dominated from three decades.

On Monday, Berkshire Broadcasting’s News/Talk 800 WLAD/94.1 W231DJ Danbury CT will replace the “best-of” Limbaugh shows now in the noon-3 PM ET slot with Compass Media Networks’ “Markley, VanCamp and Robbins,” based at Alpha Media’s KTSA San Antonio. The show had been airing in delay at 6 PM on WLAD, in a move Berkshire CEO/president Irv Goldstein says was part of a long-term plan to prepare for Limbaugh’s eventual exit.

“We’ve been preparing for this eventuality since last April, when we introduced MVR to the market in the evening time period,” Goldstein said. “They’re basically three smart asses who are squarely on the conservative side of things.” In why they made the move now, Goldstein stated, “We are opting instead to talk about today’s news, not yesterday’s.”

But WLAD’s long-term planning appears to be the exception, leaving most of the rest of the industry still struggling with what is, admittedly, an existential challenge – but one that shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

What Limbaugh accomplished a generation ago was unprecedented, of course – syndicated daytime talk radio in the 1980s was mostly a filler format for small-market AMs, until Limbaugh’s success made his show a central fixture at stations as big as New York’s WABC, Chicago’s WLS and Boston’s WRKO.

That was then. And for all the articles claiming “15 million listeners,” the reality was that even Limbaugh at his end was a far cry from Limbaugh at his start. Instead of being the sole national brand for right-leaning talk, he was one voice in an ever-growing chorus in which the only way to keep ahead of the pack was to grow ever louder and more extreme. (It’s the same problem afflicting Fox News in the era of Newsmax and OAN.)

Left unsaid in many of the more fawning Limbaugh obituaries was the falloff in recent years of Limbaugh’s affiliate base – in Boston, iHeart passed on the opportunity to move him back to WRKO from low-rated WXKS (1200) a couple of years ago, while in Los Angeles he was relegated to another low-rated signal high on the dial, KEIB (1150). In Pittsburgh, Premiere probably would have leapt at the chance to return Limbaugh to KDKA from second-tier WJAS, but Entercom instead kept KDKA local.

So what do other Rush affiliates do now? We know what listeners in one corner of Connecticut will hear in the Limbaugh slot next week, but WLAD, so far, is the exception. While NorthEast Radio Watch has learned that Premiere has dropped the cash fees it charged for Limbaugh’s show when he was alive, few other Limbaugh affiliates other than WLAD have made any public statements about how long they’ll continue with the “best of” shows – but there’s little clarity about how long they’ll actually last, what might replace them from Premiere, or what other shows might be under consideration for Limbaugh’s three daily hours.

One group of stations may not have much choice, of course. The Limbaugh outlets owned by iHeart in markets such as New York City, Los Angeles, Miami and Houston will carry whatever iHeart’s Premiere syndication arm offers in his timeslot, and for now that seems to mean the path of very least resistance, with guest hosts interspersed with “best of” segments somehow meant to reflect the news of the current day, which Premiere says will continue for as long as Limbaugh listeners demand it.

While a less timely show (think “Car Talk”) might be able to keep that strategy going for years, there’s no way that strategy will buy Premiere more than a few months, and there’s no indication that Premiere has a solid plan in place for the next chapter at noon. It probably won’t be a move of the network’s #2 personality, Sean Hannity; beyond the bad timing of a day that would start with a noon show and not end until late at night on Fox, he’s unlikely to want to risk disrupting his established radio affiliate base in afternoon drive. Could Fox Sports host Clay Travis make a move from sports to political talk? Would it attract any affiliate base beyond the captive iHeart stations? (Remember when Mike Huckabee tried to become the “next Paul Harvey”?)

Did we say “a few months”? At WLAD, Goldstein believes listeners’ patience with “best of” Limbaugh segments won’t last beyond this week.

“We are opting instead to talk about today’s news, not yesterday’s,” he said.

So if this wasn’t a surprise – where are the plans? If iHeart stations could fall back on “we’ll see what the network sends us,” you’d expect that other companies besides Berkshire might have started some intensive planning for the next step as soon as Limbaugh disclosed to listeners how close he was to death late last year.

Several of the biggest companies in radio also depended on Limbaugh to anchor middays in big markets: Cumulus in Dallas, Chicago, Detroit and San Francisco; Entercom in Philadelphia, Hartford and St. Louis; Bonneville in Seattle; Cox in Atlanta and Dayton among others.

At least one of those big groups, we’re told, still had no plan in place at all when the news of Limbaugh’s death broke a week ago, which may reflect a state of denial in some corners of the talk format about the reality that an era was quickly coming to an end.

As those groups begin to sort out their next steps – and, no doubt, get their phones and email blown up by rival syndicators eager to fill the noontime void – they’ll at least find one budgetary upside to the end of the Limbaugh era. One of the other ways in which Limbaugh won’t be replaced is the nature of his affiliation contracts, which reportedly included hefty cash payments to Premiere, not just the barter that now dominates the industry.

Just how hefty? That’s been a well-kept secret – but we’re hearing it’s been enough, in some cases, to equal or exceed the salary a local talent might draw in the market. (Somehow, it all had to add up to the $20 million Premiere reportedly paid Limbaugh each year, after all.)

Tantalizingly, we’re hearing that at least one of those big groups is considering allowing some local clusters to take the cash that was being paid for Rush and instead use it for local talent, though not necessarily at noon and not even necessarily on the same station in the cluster that was carrying Limbaugh. (At many others, we’re sure, the cash that doesn’t need to go to Limbaugh will simply go back to the bottom line as an unexpected windfall in another difficult year.)

The Way Things Ought To Be. And so we come back around to the sage advice from our friend and colleague Perry Michael Simon (though he admits few will likely listen): don’t look for the next Rush Limbaugh, but rather for the first of something new.

Whatever legacy Limbaugh leaves behind in the larger world of politics and society, there’s no question what his legacy is in the world of conservative talk radio, where there’s a uniformity of thought and voice that’s both drawn directly from what Limbaugh pioneered in the 1990s and which has also long since moved beyond its creator. (Fox News may have dropped everything Wednesday to spend several hours mourning Rush, but Limbaugh’s own voice was rarely heard on the cable news channels in his later years, nor in the social media channels where Limbaugh rarely trod.)

Sure, Ben Shapiro is younger, and Dana Loesch is female, and Seb Gorka has an accent, and John Batchelor adds a veneer of academia, but there’s a sameness to so much of present-day talk radio that attracts just a large enough audience to continue to make the format lucrative – and also may limit its ability to grow post-Rush, or even to prevent the inevitable aging-out of an already very old audience.

Some “next Rush” will find a certain limited amount of success by going even more extreme in a search for attention or affiliates. Some “next Rush” may try to learn at least some of the original Rush’s lessons about how effectively an audience can be attracted with the skills Limbaugh learned as a top-40 jock, leaning more heavily on the entertainment than on the politics.

None of them, however, will or could have the concentrated impact Limbaugh himself had. Instead, this is the moment when talk radio should be pivoting to find the new voices that are breathing exciting life into spoken-word audio away from the commercial talk universe. Podcasts, yes – but Twitch streams and Clubhouse and whatever’s coming after those, too. The voices are out there, and they’ll increasingly be doing their thing in venues that aren’t radio if radio doesn’t open more doors to them at a moment when change is inevitable anyway.