{"id":365,"date":"2026-08-14T04:01:22","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T09:01:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/saveyourbreath.org\/?p=365"},"modified":"2026-08-14T10:36:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T15:36:19","slug":"radios-next-great-format-may-have-nothing-to-do-with-traditional-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/saveyourbreath.org\/?p=365","title":{"rendered":"Radio’s Next Great Format May Have Nothing to Do With Traditional Radio"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Dave Van Dyke’s<\/a>\u00a0 [Bridge Ratings Media Research] recent essay suggests that radio’s next great format could be “the wisdom of its own audience<\/a>“. Using AI to organize thousands of listener responses that local personalities can turn into programming is a great concept.<\/p>\n

I just don’t think it’s strong enough.<\/p>\n

As a technologist, I’ve argued three things about the disruption to terrestrial radio<\/a>:<\/p>\n

1. The disruption to radio’s audience is catastrophic and probably unrepairable. The audience isn’t zero. The revenue isn’t zero. Radio isn’t disappearing tomorrow.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That’s not the point.<\/em><\/p>\n

The mass audience that once made radio such an efficient cash machine is fragmented to the point that no single ‘bolt-on’ approach can fix. I keep seeing ideas floated that are trying to win back pieces of an audience that no longer behaves like an audience.<\/p>\n

A podcast doesn’t solve that.<\/p>\n

A You Tube studio cam isn’t the answer either.<\/p>\n

Putting the station on Facebook, X, TikTok or any streaming service is a bandage covering a mortal wound. Radio has spent decades optimizing a dying model that crumbled when the technology shifted the valuable commodity to information and data over audience size.<\/p>\n

2. Radio needs to make a much larger pivot.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The industry has historically packaged audiences. Ratings tell advertisers how many people were there, when they were there and roughly who they were. That made sense when the viable commodity was access to a mass audience.<\/p>\n

Today, audience is fragmented and attention is increasingly personalized. Radio’s future isn’t about finding a better way to count listeners. The future is all about finding a better things to know about them. Information that is useful.<\/p>\n

I’m talking about the kind of information that is potentially much more valuable than demographics, psychographics, geography, or buying habits.<\/p>\n

What problems are appearing before institutions know about them?<\/p>\n

What local events are unfolding that don’t yet exist in a database?<\/p>\n

What is actually happening in the community right now?<\/p>\n

AI creates a fascinating possibility here. Thousands of individual observations can potentially be collected, classified, geographically organized, compared, verified and turned into something useful.<\/p>\n

The product isn’t “more engagement.”<\/p>\n

– It’s community intelligence.<\/p>\n

3. Radio still possesses something its disruptors cannot easily duplicate.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A license and a tower to transmit. If signal area is a limitation, then you must flip the script and use the asset in a way the disruptive technologies simply cannot match.<\/p>\n

Others have said it. Not sure anybody’s listening.<\/p>\n

– Radio is hyper-local. <\/em><\/p>\n

That’s a magic bullet and the corporations do not understand how to do it.<\/p>\n

The local business owner gets it. So does the auto repair shop, the car dealer and the beverage distributor.\u00a0 Their entire customer base is local and that’s where they keep their focus.<\/em><\/p>\n

Re-imagine the platform to combine localized reach, simultaneous distribution, free reception and the ability to communicate with an well defined community without requiring every person to buy, configure and upgrade a device that spies on their private lives.<\/p>\n

Now, re-imagine the content, laser focused on everyday experiences, neighborhoods, and responsive in real-time to the people who actually live there.<\/p>\n

When used correctly, AI has some amazing skills; pattern matching, data compilation, source attribution. Start with the human journalists and creative personalities with the means to interpret, challenge and verify AI observations. Find the engaging, report the vitals and share the local experiences.<\/p>\n

The new architecture becomes:<\/p>\n

People \u2192 observations \u2192 AI distillation \u2192 human creative judgment \u2192 community \u2192 people<\/strong><\/p>\n

That’s very different from:<\/p>\n

People \u2192 ratings \u2192 advertisers.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And it is very different from doing yet another AI-generated or voice track show.<\/p>\n

Van Dyke understands that AI could allow the personality to “hear the entire room.”<\/p>\n

I’d simply ask the question another way: What if the benefit isn’t to hear the room better?<\/p>\n

What if the benefit is to know what’s really happening in the room?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The pivot could produce something radio hasn’t really had before: a continuously updated, real-time model of the exact community it serves.<\/p>\n

The things people are experiencing before they’re reported anywhere else.<\/p>\n

The AI doesn’t decide what’s true. It’s a tool to identify patterns, contradictions and confidence levels. Humans still provide judgment, verification, accountability and the creative spark to engage<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The on-air signal still does what it has always done remarkably well:<\/p>\n

Reach an entire community, live – 24\/7.<\/a><\/p>\n

A former Apple evangelist talks about how HP revolutionized printing. HP\u00a0 didn’t just introduce a new font, they made the printer 1000 times better.<\/p>\n

Radio won’t survive if the goal is to just become more interesting.<\/p>\n

Radio must become more useful.<\/strong><\/p>\n

AI could be part of an answer,<\/a> helping the local broadcaster build a new kind of community network. That’s a much bigger bet . Potentially, a much more interesting, and lucrative future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dave Van Dyke’s\u00a0 [Bridge Ratings Media Research] recent essay suggests that radio’s next great format could be “the wisdom of its own audience“. Using AI to organize thousands of listener responses that local personalities can turn into programming is a great concept. I just don’t think it’s strong enough. As a technologist, I’ve argued three … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Radio’s Next Great Format May Have Nothing to Do With Traditional Radio”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[15,50,48,49,14,47,6],"class_list":["post-365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-ai","tag-digitaltransformation","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-innovation","tag-media","tag-podcasting","tag-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/saveyourbreath.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/saveyourbreath.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/saveyourbreath.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saveyourbreath.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saveyourbreath.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=365"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/saveyourbreath.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":400,"href":"https:\/\/saveyourbreath.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365\/revisions\/400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/saveyourbreath.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saveyourbreath.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/saveyourbreath.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}