It is something few broadcasters could have imagined four months ago, and yet it was the only possible response to our times.

There is news again on major-market music radio. Sometimes it is the bulletin from the news station down the hall. Sometimes it is the on-air host negotiating a new set of duties.

There are listeners again being heard on the airwaves of music radio stations. We thought they wouldn’t call a radio station anymore for anything other than the “Impossible Question.” Now we have too many impossible questions to answer, none of them trivial. And if a host says to listeners, “maybe you have something you want to talk about this afternoon,” they usually do.

Ten years ago, as PPM measurement became currency throughout the top 50 markets, and its resulting programming dogma impacted all radio, many stations asked their personalities to say less. Got a piece of useful info for listeners? Share half over an intro and tease them to the station website for the other half, they were told. Hot AC stations and R&B stations had both found a working model with personality throughout the day. After PPM, far fewer stations had a “morning show in every daypart.”

As for news on FM music stations, particularly outside mornings, it was already the exception that proved the rule by 2010. The discussion was usually the same—there’s already a News/Talk station in the cluster. There were increasingly other places to get traffic, as well, but traffic was sponsored.

None of this entirely jibed with what we were telling ourselves about radio’s future. We said that personality was the thing that broadcast radio’s competitors couldn’t duplicate. We said they’d be back from their streaming services when the hurricane came. But we always spoke of those emergencies as spot occurrences.   

It is remarkable what on-air personalities have done since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly after a decade of being trained to do the opposite. They have done it amidst radio’s own fiscal crisis, with colleagues on furlough, kids in the next room, and concern for their own well-being. We’ve urged them to share some of their own stories, but we’re still watching them like flight attendants in times of turbulence, hoping not to see too much concern in their eyes.

Listeners wanted information—the rise of all-news FMs in the March PPM and almost all news/talk outlets in April shows that. And yet, there was always a feeling that there was never quite enough information on the air, particularly on music radio. Through all of this, I have had the feeling that music radio needs regular news content again.

I’ve felt that particularly this week. Admiring the work of R&B stations from WBLS New York to 92Q Baltimore to WDAS Philadelphia to the syndicated DeDe In The Morning and The Breakfast Club has confirmed what George Floyd’s murder has proven to all, R&B radio has no choice but to be ready to respond at any time. Other stations scramble. The pre-recorded blurbs from the News/Talk station down the hall sound wrong in tone, but they also sound so four-hours-ago.  AC radio morning hosts struggle through news bulletins they never trained to deliver. And in talking about all of radio’s response, there is no intent to discuss anything as trivial as “good radio” at times like this, merely our ability to be of service.

If music radio had news directors, there would have been somebody to reflect their audience’s sensibilities.

If music radio had news directors, there would have been a resource for the music personalities suddenly having to talk about larger issues for the last six months.

If music radio had regular access to information, I can’t guarantee whether those stations would have benefited in PPM—won the punch, won the quarter-hour, won the week, won the month. I can say that the U.K.’s music radio, without PPM to contend with, is considered relatively healthy, despite the daytime news bulletins on its commercial and even younger-targeted stations.

We’ve already discussed the need for radio to regroup in these pages. When radio emerges from its budget crisis, and particularly if it does not, it can allow national radio to be national—with the Breakfast Club again confirmed as our most important talk show, we know that some content transcends geography. But the stations that choose “live and local” as a franchise need to make it more than a positioner, and they need to be “live and local” even on weekends and overnights.

Broadcasters will not be able to spend on everything, but the events of 2020 have given local news a new priority. (And some irony, since the most famous music radio news of all time is the “20/20 News” of the ‘60s and early ‘70s.) Listeners won’t just need us when the hurricane comes. They need us now.

Thanks to Scott Fybush for the opportunity to discuss this topic and others this week on his “Top Of The Tower Podcast“.