At the Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference, Vivian Schiller, the head of NPR, talked about where news is going, the business model for public radio and what happens to laid-off journalists.
Riffing on Schiller’s appearance in a post to Social Times, Neil Glassman, a media watcher and consultant who has worked with several broadcast equipment suppliers, reflected on radio’s role in relation to social media. Glassman said Schiller “made a few heads spin with her statement that Internet radio will take the place of terrestrial radio within 10 years. One would be hard pressed to find another major executive at an ‘over-the-air’ broadcaster who would cede the airwaves, much less put a date on the towers going dark.”
However, Glassman says, “Radio has assets social networks need and that presently are just slides on business plan PowerPoint decks for many digital-only content providers. Listenership figures can be staggering when compared to Internet-only media. … U.S. radio is the most reliable, redundant point-to-multipoint data distribution network in the world, with an unmatched coverage footprint,” he wrote.
Read more of his thoughts.
