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Let's hear it - for a resurgent medium

Thursday, October 1, 2009

LIKE MOST MEDIA JUNKIES I scan reports on media usage like a hawk. Taken as a whole, they usually confirm a general truth, about online digital communication constantly advancing among the great American public, and traditional media getting seriously undermined. 

But every now and again I see some combination of factors in a report – call it maybe a coalescence of persuasive information well-interpreted in its presentation, plus a trustworthy source to begin with - that gives me pause and want to pass on the salient points.

 

At the weekend,  the long-established polling company Opinion Research Corporation presented a media survey that didn’t claim a lot of attention – maybe because it was commissioned by a not-very-prominent marketing company, ARAnet.

 

I've known ORC well, originally from when they were favored pollsters of mine on the Sunday morning political TV program, called Weekend World, that I produced in Britain (ORC is thoroughly international) and they have since come to be CNN’s tried-and trusted polling partners for its regular pulse-taking of the United States population. (This partnership, incidentally, was the most accurate predictor, out of all US polling organizations, for Barack Obama’s victory last year over John McCain – at 53% to 46%. Their numbers, reported the week before voting day, were dead right.)

 

Regarding our supposedly unstoppable subjugation to online news sources today, ORC’s new survey showed, sure enough, that American consumers now get just 31% of their news from television (down from nearly 35% this time last year) and a little over 19% from newspapers (compared with nearly 25% last year).

 

And predictably enough, online sources can be seen making their inroads – scoring up to 15% compared with a little under 13% last year. (But a 2% gain doesn’t strike me as a ragingly rampant rise, and that with the ‘net still commanding less than a seventh of the total news-supply. That’s pretty well bound to change, admittedly, if only because net-users skew heavily toward the 18-34 age group, as the survey confirmed).

 

However it’s a different picture when it comes to another delivery-system that's saddled with the label “old media”. I mean, perhaps surprisingly for some, good old Radio. What we smart-alecks in British TV childishly (and now it seems myopically) used to disparage as “steam-radio”. Rather ironically, too - in an odd foreshadowing of 21st century usage - an older generation of Brits used to call it the “wireless”.

 

Radio now turns out to have a bigger share of the US information consumer market than the Web, and appears from the ORC numbers to be growing faster than online sources – that’s 19.4%, up from 16.5% in a year.

 

  
 

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THERE ARE MANY VIRTUES to extol with the audio-only medium – notably, for me as a journalist, its flexibility in news-gathering and delivery – which often achieves uncanny power and immediacy as well. But I’m prompted, by the big Washington media event organized yesterday and today by the US Department of Transportation, to praise an aspect that's not often commended … radio's safety.

 

The so-called "Distracted Driving Summit" is tackling serious threats to life and limb on our highways from texting, talking on the phone and dashboard computers, to name just some modern media interferences at the top of legislators’ worry list. 

 

Listening to the radio while driving remains in the official category - despite some regrettable nanny-ing tendencies at various levels of government - of the not-too-dangerous.

 

Radio is undeniably quite old as a mass medium - originating back in 1920 in Pittsburg, something my BBC colleagues always forget when they claim “the Beeb” is the world’s most senior service, dating in fact from 1922. And, under-acknowledged though this is, it has been for the vast majority of its life a mobile medium. Did you know the first car-radio was introduced just 10 years after radio itself?  It was a Motorola, unsurprisingly – and once again Europe was a couple of years behind the times, with Germany catching up in 1932 and Britain in 1933. After exhaustive research, I can report that rarely, if ever during the decades since has an automobile accident been blamed on the humble AM, or FM, or even the still newish and startlingly clear HD-audio airwaves.

 

(The sub-species of talk-radio might, however, need special regulation -.since it can induce apoplexy. But radio’s generally unblemished accident record has survived in spite of the fact that phone-in programs date from 1945, with the legendary New York DJ Barry Gray on the now much changed, and now-Christian station WMCA. We should recall too, in this connection, that New Media’s much-vaunted dimensions of “interactivity” and “user-generated content” are nothing special to this old medium.)

 

So all in all I applaud radio's resurgence. I didn’t figure in ORC’s statistically scrubbed sample of 1,000 survey respondents, but if I’d been asked, I would say that the mode of communication that nurtured unforgettable chroniclers of society from Edward R Murrow to Charles Kuralt to Studs Terkel will stay without a doubt my own personal all-time favorite.

 

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