Radio Yesterday Today and Tomorrow

Richard Campbell - Author, Media and Culture

The soap opera was a radio invention. The variety show was a radio invention. All these things that later become staples in television history, talk shows, I mean all of these things started out in radio. Lots of radio is programmed automatically, and you might have a DJ that sounds like they're right there in town, and they're actually recording and re-recording for every city to personalize it, but who knows where they are. They're not in your town.

Dino Corbin - Partner and General Manager, Deer Creek Broadcasting

We don't have records anymore. We very rarely even have tape anymore. Everything is a .wav file and computer-based. Most if not all radio stations in one form or another in the world today are based on computers. Some radio groups believe that we can operate importing talent, importing distant signal, importing our music, doing all that, and running everything on a really automated system where there are very, very few people in the studios. On the other side of that spectrum is still stations that believe that having local on-air talent and people behind the microphones, working in the business and being part of that community is still an important aspect of how they operate their business. If you look at people like Paul Harvey or Sedge Thompson, you'll find that in all cases there's a commonality of speaking to people on a level that bonds all of us together as human beings.

Live segment from West Coast Live, courtesy of Sedge Thompson

When we go on a date we don't wiggle our tail feathers and squawk. [Host: "We sort of squwak for my girl."] We show off how creative and clever our brains are. Where do you think I learned to BS like this?

Sedge Thompson - Host, West Coast Live

We have listeners around the country both through traditional radio stations and through the Internet. We named the show "West Coast Live" because we wanted to say that's where it's from, it's from the west coast. Radio is a medium, for me, that has always been immediate, it's always been live and it is the last pure, un-editable, un-manipulatable medium. With live radio we have no delays on our show. It's what you hear is what you get. That causes all the performers, all the guests, to rise to the occasion. Any mistakes become part of the fabric of the show. Just like you see in a garment any sign of a little flaw, a sign of human craftsmanship. It's about a human a medium as I know of and I'm very comfortable within. We love doing it in front of an audience because it's not in a studio it doesn't have the sterility of a studio.

Charles Osgood - CBS Radio and Television News Anchor

Well, I think in my own lifetime, radio has been sentenced to death about a dozen times, and it has yet to die! So, I think it does have a tremendous amount of resilience and can respond to the situation that exists, which is what we have to do, if you're a broadcaster. You know that the technology is going to keep changing. At first, a radio was a thing like a television set used to be. It was a console, and people sat around and listened to the radio. You asked somebody, "What are you doing?" They would say, "Well, I'm listening to the radio." More likely, the biggest radio audience is in cars now. Most likely, you're driving to work. People get up in the morning, chances are they'll say, I never listen to the radio. I say, well, how do you wake up in the morning? Is it just an alarm clock? No, it's a radio alarm. And the first thing you hear is somebody talking at you from some studio, and that's radio. Radio, in fact, is so ubiquitous that people do it without even knowing they're doing it. It's like breathing. And I think the things that we take for granted are very often the most important things. Radio doesn't need to make major changes to survive; it just has to remember there's one person talking to another person.