I was driving along minding my own business when the announcement came on the radio for “The National Bereavement Conference 2023!”

“Egad!” I thought.

Were they talking about an amazing get together of caring people that come alongside those whose lives are forever changed due to the loss of a loving spouse? You’d never know it by what sounded like the label to a file folder.

There is no promotion so brilliant that it can’t be made utterly ineffective through the presentation of data, such as a list of dates and times.

In my other life I announce some baseball games for the St. Louis Cardinals. Last week, a Hall of Famer member of their storied franchise passed away. While he had a significant 21-year playing career, he was mostly known to recent generations for being a broadcaster announcing 29 consecutive post seasons in a row on national television.

In hearing the tributes to Tim McCarver, I ran across an interview with the talented Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post Dispatch where he talked about the craft of being a broadcaster.

The “leaky bucket.”

That’s PPM-talk for stations losing listeners by tuning away or turning the radio off. The traditional thought is that it is easier to keep listeners than to get them back. And darn logical that is, I reckon’!

But that’s only half the story. Or, should I say, two-thirds.

A recent study of 37 million listening occasions conducted by Coleman Insights and Media Monitors found that…

“Nearly two thirds of radio listening occasions are the result of a consumer turning on the radio, listening to a station and turning the radio off.”

Inside Radio

In a world before computers, my classmates and I would gather by a bulletin board in the school hallway to find out our class assignment.

Did we get the good teacher or the one nobody liked? Did we get the teacher that would allow you to have some fun or the one that was strict? (My fifth grade teacher Mrs. Lay actually invited us to her house to watch the World Series. Those were different times, don’tcha know).

Seeing which teacher we got wasn’t the real goal of checking the bulletin board. No, we wanted to see if we’d be with our friends. I wanted to be with Rodney, David, Buddy, and Julian. And just maybe that pretty girl Marlene.