Do what you need to do, radio.

You’re more needed than ever. You’re more challenged than ever.

Layoffs and furloughs have shaken the radio business on an almost daily basis for the last two weeks. Any smidgen of equilibrium not shattered by the crisis outside is quickly dispatched by a former colleague’s Facebook posting.

Get through the crisis any way you can with the staffers that you’ve got, radio. Listeners need you.

When the COVID-19 pandemic is over, you will have the world’s thanks, and its renewed attention.

You will also have a radio landscape to remake. iHeart’s layoffs and consolidations had already ensured that in January.

And then it will be time to have a different discussion about local radio and national radio.

For nearly 30 years, the predominant discussion has been “better local radio through national resources.” Some of its proponents are sincere. Some are merely expedient. Whatever their motivation, many in the “better local through national” camp like to dismiss local as a dated, romantic notion of radio, discredited the moment that Howard Stern beat John DeBella on his own Philly turf.

When “better local through national” is being done right, and it certainly happens, you don’t know it. When it’s not, it’s pretty obvious by being clunky, canned, devoid of the slickness that was its justification. Even before radio began scrambling to cover its shifts in these times of physical and financial challenges, the seams were often very visible.

Where “better local through national” is wrong is in that oft-condescending dismissal of local, because local has its stories too. KXNO Des Moines, Iowa, the sports AM that couldn’t fire its local hosts, but ended up moving to FM instead after an almost simultaneous social-media firestorm. WGTS Washington, D.C., and WFSH (The Fish) Atlanta, two Christian AC stations that remain strong, even with K-Love, the first great national FM brand, now in their markets.

When America can step outside again on a regular basis, radio will still have its other issues to deal with. The rise of Pandora, then Spotify, then podcasting, meant that radio never really got to enjoy the economic rebound of the early ‘10s. No matter how many of radio’s furloughed broadcasters return, the work force will almost likely be considerably less than it was before iHeart Media’s January cuts, its most fervent assertion of “better local through national” to date.

What we have now is what broadcasters feel they can manage. Fewer people. Extended shifts. Sponsored traffic reports with no major delays to report, but less news you can use because there aren’t enough people who can report it at music stations. What we can do in crisis mode is not ideal, but we’re doing it under heroic conditions, and I’m grateful for it. It won’t stop listeners from spending more time with radio, because they want whatever we can offer. But after the crisis, we need to start over, not institutionalize a compromise that isn’t making anybody happy.

Here’s what the landscape should look like, when we can take control of it.

Rather than a weakened version of 15,000 different brands, deploy a lesser number of brands — some local, some proudly national, some a hybrid, but none of them readily identifiable to the naked ear as faux local. Redeploy the broadcasters and resources that we have to make sure that whatever we do we do well. If a station’s franchise is local, let that mean “even in overnights” and “even if the extreme weather hits on Saturday afternoon.” Let brands that are effectively national now dispense with the repurposing of yesterday’s morning show. (Yes. there are listeners who don’t care if great content is in real time — for them we have podcasts.)

It’s also time to start thinking about “better national through local” — the realization that local stations done right have national and worldwide cachet. If Liberty Media ever brings Pandora, Sirius XM, and iHeartRadio into one entity, it will already have “more music, less talk” in its portfolio and hundreds of great hosted national music stations with no spotload. What iHeart will offer is great local brands —WDAS Philadelphia, KTCL Denver, KSSK Honolulu. It’s telling that when iHeart culled its offerings on SiriusXM, it was the big national brands, KIIS Los Angeles and WHTZ (Z100) New York, that stayed.

Earlier this year, after the first round of consolidations and layoffs, I asked readers who did radio right. One of the resounding choices was non-comm Triple-A WXPN Philadelphia. WXPN is anybody’s definition of great local radio. But it’s also heard from Baltimore to the Poconos on a network of two additional full signal stations and two translators. If a frequency is not going to be local, WXPN is a pretty undeniable choice. Readers had scores of others that could be just as compelling in a similar scenario.

Deploying a smaller number of better-executed brands would make it easier for broadcasters to organize the infinite dial of audio options, without the redundancies of hundreds of similarly branded but minimally different (and often minimally local) choices.

Deploying a smaller number of better-executed brands will make it easier for radio stations to deliver information. “Newscasts” were the first thing that music stations decided they could live without. But information is now radio’s point of differentiation.

Nothing here should be misconstrued as enthusiasm about doing radio with fewer people. The “better local through national” narrative doesn’t just needlessly dismiss local radio, it often disrespects the people forced out. A smaller number of well-resourced radio brands allows those people who remain to do their best work, and really show the power of the product. Because it’s not the people left to execute radio who act like they don’t want to be in the business. Often, it’s the stations themselves.