UNCERTAIN

If you had to sum up, in one word, what the year ahead for radio would be like, what word would you choose?

The word I chose was “UNCERTAIN,” when Fred Jacobs posed that question to the readers of his blog.

Word Salad

To be more specific, the question Fred Jacobs asked his readers to respond to was:

What’s your unique “take” on broadcast radio in 2025?  In a word, how would you describe this next 11+ months?  What’s the state of radio in 2025 – in just one word?

He put that question to the readers of his blog on Monday (1/20/2025) and on Wednesday (1/22/2025), after more than 225 people responded,  produced the “Word Cloud” shown below.

My response of “UNCERTAIN,” can be found in the upper left hand corner.

CES 2025

On Tuesday (1/21/2025), Fred gave a webinar on this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (now just simply called CES) held at the beginning of each year in Las Vegas. He characterized this year’s show as “NOT NORMAL” calling it a transformative event.

In his summary of the Top 10 Themes at CES 2025, all of them included Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Filling Talent Shortages

A new study released Tuesday (1/21/2025) by Hult International Business School and Workplace Intelligence found that even when faced with widespread talent shortages, employers would rather hire a robot or AI than a recent graduate.

You don’t have to be in radio to feel a sense of terror for what lies ahead for America’s working class.

College Graduates

“Meanwhile, recent graduates who have successfully joined companies, have found the work experience invaluable. 77% said they learned more in half a year on the job than in four years of undergrad and 87% said their employer provided better job training than college.”

“Over half (55%) said that college didn’t prepare them in any way for the job they currently hold,” according to the survey, which isn’t a glowing endorsement for getting an expensive college education and racking up a large debt.

This was something I realized while teaching at the university back in 2016 and blogged about in an article called “Just In Time Learning.”

Division

Fred summed up the results of his unscientific experiment saying:

“And we wonder why radio discussions on social media turn into debates, while often devolving into rants and responses in ALL CAPS. We may as well be talking politics. Actually, we very much are.”

The one word that never came up in the more than two hundred participants was…

“unified.”

For America today, the one word that best describes our country is “divided.”

So, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that when asked about what the future of broadcasting is, the answer is…

Radio, like our country, is divided.

We have the large and powerful radio operators and then we have a few mom & pop stations, with the rest of the local service primarily being the dedicated operators of Low Power FM (LPFM) radio stations, supported by listeners and local business underwriters.

The gap between the haves and have-nots keeps widening, which prevents the radio industry from speaking with one voice.

America’s 2^nd Gilded Age

You tell me if what happened a century ago sounds like what’s happening in America today.

During the 1920s, America became more prosperous and saw unprecedented growth in industry and technology. But the Gilded Age had a more sinister side: It was a period where greedy, corrupt industrialists, bankers and politicians enjoyed extraordinary wealth and opulence at the expense of the working class.