Curious Hair wrote:
DAC is always on his high horse -- but don't you dare point that out! -- about how caller-driven radio is a foolish waste of time and that his valuable time is better spent listening to expert insight from trusted analysts such as, I dunno, Boomer Esiason or something. But think back on the good old days of B&B. As much caller-based content there was then, there was a lot of expert-analysis content, too. Hub had an hour a week to share his thoughts. They'd have Bryan Billick on for some reason. Brad Biggs, Matt Bowen, random NBA beat writers no one cared about talking about games the Bulls weren't playing in, so on down the line. All those guys did all those hits and I don't really remember anything from them. Maybe it's stupid to think that I would, but I don't even remember coming away from them feeling all that enlightened in the moment. Those were just the vegetables we had to eat to get to the fun stuff, which I remember rather well.
If we can't base sports radio around live interaction anymore because everyone under 50 has a panic attack over picking up the phone, then yeah, the format is dead, put it out of its misery, please. Just run gambling talk all day and gambling commercials in between. The point of sports radio was never the sports, it was the sense of community -- "like being at the bar," they called it then, "toxic parasocial relationships," we call it now. That's what, sorry to say, Barstool gets and Entercom management doesn't.
Gambling talk is terrible too.
The stations don't take callers because there's nobody out there that's going to sit on hold for 30 minutes just so they can talk for 30 seconds on a dead medium. If there was someone out there willing to do that they would probably post here, and this site has like 2 dozen active posters.
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Juice's Lecture Notes wrote:
I am not a legal expert, how many times do I have to say it?