The State of Radio

"Everybody's got troubles at some time," says a CBS radio executive. "The silk business had nylon and we have TV. We just need adjusting."

Like many another radio network man, the CBS official is praying, whistling in the dark and hoping for a miracle. Only seven years ago radio, in the form of a little table model or an impressive console, held a prominent place in the American home. It sat in the living room and often attracted the whole family in the evening. Then, only six years ago, TV arrived. Overnight, radio lost its glamor. It also lost listeners, advertisers and talent. It began to look, and sound, half dead.

But radio is a lot more alive than it might sound. Local stations, unlike the networks, are feeling good and talking bigger. Says Richard Buckley, manager of Manhattan's WNEW: "1954 was the biggest year in billings and profits in our history. Sales ran 42.7% ahead of 1948, the last pre-television year." Some local stations never had it so good. Non-network time sales rose from $276 million in 1948 to $402 million in 1954, an alltime high. The number of radio stations almost tripled from 1,004 in 1946 to 2,745 in 1955.

Constant Companion. One reason for the fabulous success of local stations is the post-TV development of a new average radio listener. He treats his radio like a constant companion who is pleasant to have around but can be comfortably ignored. The dial twister listens intermittently while getting up, before going to sleep, while shaving, eating, working around the house or driving (26% of the in 111 million radios in the U.S. are in automobiles). Aiming at such listeners with scattershot advertising (many spot announcements instead of big shows) and the inexpensive formula of recorded music, news and sports, local stations have hit the bull's-eye. They grabbed an audience from the networks, then sold time cheaply in large quantities to new as well as old radio advertisers, who recognized that local stations might not be so good for institutional advertising but were fine for selling specific products.

Says Richard Klaus, manager of Cleveland's WERE : "You might say TV is following the national magazine pattern. We pattern ourselves as closely as possible after the successful local newspaper." The formula is so successful that a year ago WERE ran out of time to sell, now stays on 24 hours a day instead of signing off at 1 a.m.

Revolutionary Plan. But the network situation can still be summed up conservatively in one word: catastrophic. In 1949 radio's highest-rated show, the Lux Radio Theater, reached 11 million homes. In March 1955, again the highest-rated show, it reached 3,000,000 homes. Between 1948 and 1954 network time sales dipped from $137.5 million to $76 million. In that time TV advertising went from practically zero to $320.1 million, while all four radio networks dropped in sales volume.

NBC's crackling President Pat Weaver has announced a new, revolutionary plan to catch what radio listeners he can. In June he will launch Monitor, a 40-hour show running from 8 a.m. Saturday to midnight Sunday. Monitor will run every weekend (the time that TV has made network radio suffer the most ) and will include news, sports, time signals, weather, comedy, drama, music, theater, sound track from films and records. It will originate from New York at a $150,000 pushbutton listening post that will make it possible to pipe "remotes" from all over the world into the program. Listeners will have no way of knowing what they are going to hear when they tune in, because the show is intended to have spontaneity and surprise. Says James Fleming, Monitor's executive producer: "We have a new 'vignette approach' and intend to put on anything lively and keep a constantly changing format." Advertisers will come in for one-minute, half-minute or a new six-second billboard announcement.

Nobody can predict whether the NBC experiment will succeed. But it is based on the assumption, undoubtedly correct, that radio is neither dead duck nor dying pigeon. There are still three times as many radio as TV sets in the U.S. On a typical day, according to Mutual's President Tom O'Neil, 77,568,000 people listen to their radios as compared to 79,312,000 people who look at TV. In the face of such facts, the real question is not, "Will radio die?" but an older, more familiar one, "Who is going to capture the radio audience?"

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