Show us your radios!

[tonyb]

...
What gets me is that our local AM station was a Sox affiliate going back to the early fifties -- until it was bought out by a corporate ownership group which immediately turned it into a Fox Sports outlet. No local programming at all -- no high school basketball, which is the only rival to baseball in the hearts of local listeners -- no nothing. They *just don't care.*

Points to a larger problem, I say.

The decline (if not the out-and-out demise) of local radio (and newspapers, alas) leaves us all less connected to our real-world communities. You know, the places our actual bodies occupy, and not our "affinity groups" (such as this one), etc. Local blogs and the like are really no substitute for what is lost, because they are mostly soapboxes for the neighborhood loudmouths, and for that reason they grow stale pretty darned quickly.

Where my dear old Ma lives, a small resort and agricultural community that's populated almost exclusively by the locals during the off-season and for many weekdays during the season, there's a local radio station that's truly at the center of that community. They have offices downtown (such as downtown is) and 100 percent local programming. Mid-mornings are given over to people calling in with items to buy or sell or give away. Folks from the local not-for-profits (Habitat for Humanity, the senior center, etc.) are featured with some regularity, the achievements of local students are mentioned, updates on road construction projects get covered.

Ain't no Fox or CBS of whatever station gonna do that.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I worked for fifteen years on stations just like that -- we started at 5 am with work announcements for the fish canneries, and signed off at midnight unless the Sox were playing out west. In between, it was local people, local news, local sports, local weather, local information, local businesses, local local local. During Hurricane Bob in '92 I was at the microphone 30 hours straight with evacuation announcements. People knew they could count on us. And we made money doing this.

But then Chimp Channel came to town, made the owners an offer they couldn't refuse, and that was the end of it. Local radio didn't die. It was murdered.

 

[jamespowers]

Let's all remember that radio stations function largely on advertising revenue based on the size of the listenership. If you like a station then go out and tell the world or no one will ever know. Help it build an audience and consequently revenue to live on.
I largely listen to news/talk, don't listen to much music on the radio and I hate most organized sports of today. The Am stations out here make plenty of money and there are plenty of them. I listen to three or four of them.

 

[Giftmacher]

Good for you, we have one radiostation on LW and one on MW here. Broadcast time of the MW radio (CRo2) is more and more shorter, they changed decades old name and they don't stop convince us to tune FM clone of the station. Thank god for the KBC!

 

[tonyb]

Perhaps those better informed in the business could weigh in here, but my understanding is that some of these once-local-centric stations have become network owned; the network management sells advertisers on their presence in X number of media markets, and they had better have a station in this or that market, carrying their programming, if they expect to sell ad time in any of the others. So, while the local coverage may indeed had been finding a substantial audience, and was making decent money, that local coverage may have been dumped to satisfy the bigger ad buyers on the Joe Jockitch or Ben Bloviator show.

And, well, it costs money to produce original content. (I once cancelled a subscription to a special-interest magazine when I discovered that a featured article had previously appeared, in slightly different form, on a website. If I'm paying for it, I expect to see something I can't get for free elsewhere.) If people will keep tuning in to programming produced in LA or NYC, and heard in all points in between, there's reduced incentive to give them anything else.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Perhaps those better informed in the business could weigh in here, but my understanding is that some of these once-local-centric stations have become network owned; the network management sells advertisers on their presence in X number of media markets, and they had better have a station in this or that market, carrying their programming, if they expect to sell ad time in any of the others. So, while the local coverage may indeed had been finding a substantial audience, and was making decent money, that local coverage may have been dumped to satisfy the bigger ad buyers on the Joe Jockitch or Ben Bloviator show.

And, well, it costs money to produce original content. (I once cancelled a subscription to a special-interest magazine when I discovered that a featured article had previously appeared, in slightly different form, on a website. If I'm paying for it, I expect to see something I can't get for free elsewhere.) If people will keep tuning in to programming produced in LA or NYC, and heard in all points in between, there's reduced incentive to give them anything else.

That's pretty much it. Once a local station is bought out by one of the giant combines, it's assimilated into the radio equivalent of the Borg -- it no longer has any value as an individual outlet, it's simply one more tick on the network traffic sheet.

The FCC used to prohibit this sort of thing. It used to require that every radio station, no matter how big or how small, devote a certain amount of its schedule to programming reflecting the issues and needs of concern to its specific community. And it prohibited any one organization from owning any more than a small number of radio stations to ensure that local ownership was protected. All that was done away with in 1996, and that was the end of the line for radio as a responsible local medium. There are a few locally-owned stations left, mostly small fry in markets too small for the big monstrosities to bother with, but they're coleacanths, fighting to survive against the tide.

 

[tonyb]

Hence the continuing health of that little station in that little town where my dear old Ma resides, to which I alluded earlier. This town has fewer than 4,000 year-round residents, with maybe twice that number in its "metropolitan" area. The nearest settlement of any size is 30 or 40 miles away, where several tens of thousands of people live. I'm confident that the stations there are now network owned and carry network programming almost exclusively.

 

[Happy Jack]

An RCA Model 117
I picked this up in 1964, age 14. Mostly hidden away, Still works fine.

 

[Futwick]

I own this model--a 1927 RCA Radiola 18 with Model 100-A loudspeaker. Everything is original including the two electrical plugs--one for European and one for American voltages. I've never plugged it in because I want to keep everything original and I'm not about to find out the hard way that it doesn't work. This photo is not my model (photos won't upload), just one I found online that looks identical.

 

[wireless man]

let's see some radios!

what do you folks have for a wireless set? let's see some pics of some 1920's-1940's sets in your possession.

 

[vitanola]

what do you folks have for a wireless set? let's see some pics of some 1920's-1940's sets in your possession.

You asked for it!

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One of my restorations, a real basket case, which I sold back in November has since been re-sold (at a much higher price, I might add) as an "Untouched original":










a few 'speakers:

 

[vitanola]

 

[Shangas]

Sorry to rain on your parade here, but we already have a radio thread.

http://www.thefedoralounge.com/showthread.php?11765-Show-us-your-radios!

 

[vitanola]

 

[vitanola]

 

[vitanola]

 

[vitanola]

 

[vitanola]

 

[vitanola]

 

[vitanola]