Goodbye, radio — certainly your golden years are behind you.
Run a quick Google search of anything to do with radio, and you will be met
with not one but multiple headlines that begin “The sad, slow decline of
[insert sector of radio here].” In the age of instant digital media, radio is
in a period of decline.
Commercial FM rock stations are being sold off, National
Public Radio faces being cut off by the federal government at least once a
year, and the voice of the youth one embodied by radio is growing old. Now that
we can make a playlist and get any music we want, why do we need someone to do
it for us? Radio is in a make-or-break period of transition, and has been for
the past decade. The dilemna is, in a essence, an image crisis: what is radio?
Even while I spent four years as a DJ and two years on the
executive board of WKNH Keene State College radio, I still felt it dying.
Sitting in the station at midnight on a Thursday night
broadcasting a local band to maybe 30 online listeners, I couldn’t help but
feel that I has holding the hand of a friend as their pulse slowly faded. I was
a flannel-wearing crusader, trying to keep college radio alive as the hip,
underground, free airwaves for the people it should be. All the facebook groups
and status updates in the world weren't saving radio. But I was having the time
of my life! How could it die?
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