The obituaries are a little premature.

Spotify fired a lot of staffers and pushed out the executive responsible for the company's push into exclusive, big-name podcasting... and, yet, podcasting isn't dead.

Audacy's stock has dropped to alarming levels and rumors abound about selling off assets and more cuts to come... and, yet, radio isn't dead.

Streaming video services are laying off thousands, dropping programming to save money, and grappling with subscribers dropping out and coming back in depending on what they want to binge... and, yet, streaming isn't dead.

Newspapers... okay, some of them are dead. But some are doing okay online, so newspapers aren't quite dead, either.

What may be dying is the model by which the media have operated since Gutenberg put the first sheet of paper on his first printing press and produced the first issue of the Lake Ronkonkoma Pennysaver. Advertising isn't what it used to be. You can see the shift in how brands are using social media and pursuing virality rather than, or along with, buying traditional ads. Take the M&Ms brouhaha and the A&W followup: The M&Ms Twitter post, the right-wing pearl-clutching, the pivot to Maya Rudolph, the A&W parody, more right-wing pearl clutching, and the next step, the Super Bowl ad payoff, all but the last part textbook social media viral marketing. The publicity generated by rattling cages in a tweet exceeded anything an ad campaign alone could have created. Someone in the M&M/Mars marketing department (and someone at A&W for glomming onto the controversy) will be getting a gold star for that one.

Jerry Blavat, the Geator with the Heater, passed away Friday morning, and among the tributes to the Philadelphia radio personality was a line in a post from WJBR (Mix 99.5)/Wilmington PD Eric Johnson on Facebook that I hope he won't mind me quoting. EJ said that he once ...

For a large number of talk radio listeners, streaming video has supplanted radio as the way they get their fix. As Fred Jacobs wrote in his blog post on Friday, research shows that a substantial percentage of the podcast audience wants their content served up as video, ...

New years always start with CES, followed by people telling you that you should have been at CES or that you need to pay attention to CES or that OH LOOK A ROBOTIC BUNNY HOW ADORABLE. 2023 is no exception, and so we have the usual breathless reporting about 5G and smart ...

The radio industry puts a lot of stock into the value of personality, a fact of which I was reminded the other day as we drove around town with a music station on the radio and heard a jock, obviously voice-tracked, use every single break to read something straight out of ...

The thing is, you don't really NEED any of them. That is not what you've been told. You've been told that, as a radio host or a podcaster or a manager of a radio station, you need to be on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, and now that Twitter has become a ...

Would they miss you if you were gone? We're not talking mortality here. It's about judging whether what you do on the air means more to your listeners than just background noise. Baseball has a statistic to measure the value of a player, Wins Above Replacement, WAR. ...

The first thing is that we're fine. The hurricane is gone, we were prepared, the storm hit just up the coast but we avoided a direct hit, and now we go back to awaiting the end of Hurricane Season. We're almost there. Okay, then, radio. I'm not going to belabor the ...

Why is it so hard for companies to give people what they want? Why dom't they even seem to KNOW what their customers want? Right now, you can ask those questions about Twitter. This is about things like charging for blue checks, eliminating verification, offering paid ...

Baseball and radio go together. Ask any American guy of a certain age about baseball on the radio, and he'll more likely than not launch into a misty-eyed memory of being out with his dad as Vin Scully called a Dodger game on the car radio, or hearing Harry Caray through ...