1954 Revisited

Michael Hedges December 1, 2008

That media is going through significant transition is a given. Old media will ride off into the sunset. If history gives any clue media is entering the best of times. And it will be a wild ride.

American media, self reported, appears to be in near complete breakdown. The sorry state of American radio broadcasting got another gloomy assessment from the New York Times (November 25). US newspaper editors seem to regularly assign negative copy about radio or TV or the internet hoping readers won’t notice that newspapers are in the steepest decline of all American media.

Radio broadcasting in the US is “headed for the worst year since 1954,” wrote CL King analyst Jim Boyle, “when The Lone Ranger has its last new radio episode and Senator Joseph McCarthy was railing against hidden Communists.” 

The Lone Ranger was a popular drama broadcast on network radio from 1933. The series migrated to television in 1949 and by 1954 the radio version ended. Thus the end of radio’s ‘Golden Age’ was neigh. The television set in the living room replaced the radio.

Virtually all radio was, then, broadcast on the AM/MW band; FM broadcasting limited to experimenters. And virtually all – certainly the most profitable – was big network radio. Local content could only be found in the largest cities, newspapers having the local advantage. The big radio networks didn’t collapse immediately after “The Lone Ranger” went off the air but within a decade radio adapted to its new reality.

Radio became a local medium. Most stations, still on the AM/MW band, pumped out hometown news, weather and sports programs, often with lively hosts. Radio output remained rooted in ‘programs,’ strikingly similar to today’s general interest public radio channels in Europe. As suburbia developed in America radio found two unique and related audiences: morning listeners and listeners in automobiles.

Another milestone, with particular relevance to today’s economic woes, passed in 1954. In that year the Dow Jones Industrial Average first rose above the Crash of 1929 level. World economies fell into an abyss that lasted 25 years, according to this measure.

The Great Depression was transformative, brought to heel by massive government intervention and, of course, war. Media was also transformed. In 1929 radio was a fledgling medium. By the end of the Great Depression television was ascending. The technologies making television and, later, FM dominant consumer media were borne of investment for military application.

The two decades following those 1954 milestones saw unprecedented economic growth, largely but not exclusively in the West. So, too, medias growth was unprecedented. And media became a growth business, attracting talent and investment.

The confluent rise of new technologies – the internet and mobile devices – and the constraint of financial insecurity has opened a door to new media growth. No better example is the rise of the Apple iPod replacing radio as the medium of choice for casual music listeners. No analyst or researcher has found media usage in total falling.

“The medium isn’t as relevant, the stations aren’t as relevant to people as they were,” said analyst Jim Poh of media buyer Crispin Porter & Bogusky in the NYT article.

That new media struggles to find a business model is insignificant, just as much as old medias’ struggle to hold on to one. These are still early days in a transformative period that will last another decade.There will be no silver bullets. Relevance, in all senses of the term, requires a relationship that is built slowly.

"Hi-yo, Silver, away!"