Parkins1 wrote:
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3) Callers. Yes, I enjoy callers less than most of you seem to, but not for the reasons most seem to be outlining. We get way less than the old days. We get literally 1500+ text messages per show and depending on the topic and how much we push it we can get 10,000. Think of your life. Are you willing to wait on hold for 15-60 minutes to talk for at most 2-3 on the radio? Research back in the day showed 1% of your audience would call. It’s much much much smaller now because people have better things to do and other ways to interact with the station that take way less time. So the quality of the caller has plummeted. Also, we can filter the texts and tweets and read the funniest, smartest, dumbest, most helpful, etc as opposed to having to take 7 or 8 calls to get one good one.
Now, could we do better? Sure. We could do better at everything we do. But I’ll admit that I find caller driven shows to be mostly lazy. When I did my Sunday night CBS show it’s solo and the bosses are from NYC so they like callers. I’d do a monologue and people would call and react. It’s fine. It’s just not that challenging and so much gets repeated. As a listener I tune in for the hosts, producers, and guests. Hopefully they are all professional communicators. It doesn’t mean calls can’t be funny and good and provide unscripted gold, they can. And it is something that differentiates radio from podcasts, I just find the juice to not be worth the squeeze 9 out of 10 times we go to the phones.
Fostering relationships with interesting listeners who end up being good and/or entertaining callers isn't lazy. It's difficult.
You say you loved the Score. So did I. There was fierce loyalty by the fan base during the golden age of the station. You cannot say the same is true today. I'm not going to pretend to have the answer as to why. I do venture a guess that it isn't so much the listening habits of the fans as it is the dilettante attitude the hosts take towards branding themselves. North is a dumb guy but he did a lot of smart things back in the day. He was able to flip the dynamic of sports talk from guys like Chet being the high priests who were the intermediaries between the gods and the people. Instead, he was one of the people and eliminated the need for an intermediary. Somehow it sure feels like the Score has flipped it back to the god-priest-worshiper model, where the hosts are the buffer for the teams/players. I listened to Chet and generally liked his work. I loved the Score with the Monsters and HFC.