Getting a clue.

AFTER giving its Internet competitors a huge head start, Clear Channel is ready to play catch-up. --The New York Times, 07/18/05

O.K. fine, Big Radio is finally doing real things on its Web sites, and Big Media now covers radiobiz in a big way. Yawn. But the real news is no longer how clueless radio's been about new media. It's how clueless US radio still is. It forgot it's a hometown medium about 30 years ago--standardizing, formatting, researching, consulting, copycatting, and conventioning its way to comfortable national conformity--and it shows no sign of waking up. All the powerhouse stations are now real chainstores, actually owned by a few corporations and programmed for the shareholders in lockstep. But even before ownership consolidation, virtually all 11,000 US radio stations had been long since McDonaldized by industry groupthink, right down to the smallest town. Real news will break when some radio guy wakes up and smells the hometown coffee--and decides he wants to be rich at home instead of famous in the industry. Only then will non-wired, non-satellite, steel-tower radio stations begin to be reborn for the digital age.