In this week’s issue… AI, virtualization hot topics at NAB – WBAI faces second site eviction – CBS Sports Radio affiliates rebrand – New morning show at Y108 – Remembering Mister Cee
By SCOTT FYBUSH
*LAS VEGAS – As more than 60,000 broadcasters gather once again for the NAB Show and all the conferences and meetings that surround it, there are two letters that define this year’s event.
It’s the year of AI, not just in broadcasting but seemingly everywhere – and if you, like your editor, tend toward skepticism on that topic, you’ll find plenty to be skeptical about on the show floor. There are lots of vendors this year who’d love to sell your radio station some sort of AI-driven (or at least AI-adjacent) disembodied voice from the cloud that will take the place of a live or voicetracked human. Some of them are even reasonably convincing.
But just because it can be done, is it worth doing? There aren’t a lot of broadcasters who seem to be asking that question, and perhaps they should. After all, broadcast radio already has an identity and visibility crisis. We spent some time on the show’s first day talking with Xperi and other vendors about the challenges radio faces in remaining front and center on auto dashboards, an increasingly important connection point in a world when few listeners are buying standalone radios for home or portable use.
We’re a long way from the days of five pushbutton presets and two knobs. Rent a car now and it can take several menu layers to even find the radio at all, never mind how to navigate to HD subchannels. What’s going to drive listeners to continue to want to go to that trouble, and to tell car dealers they still need radio in their dash? I’d bet that it’s the kind of actual human contact and content that radio still excels at, when it wants to. Are there plenty of applications for AI when it comes to things like captioning, running traffic systems or any of the other offerings on display here at NAB? Certainly – but only as ways to enhance, not replace, human-created content.
Speaking of things for which there’s no replacement for a human, another theme we’re taking away from NAB this year is the continued urgent need for more broadcast engineers. It’s been a running theme in conversation after conversation: while groups such as SBE and the Association of Public Radio Engineers are trying hard to provide mentorship and training opportunities for would-be engineers, the aging out of the profession still represents a looming crisis that needs a bigger, industry-wide effort to fix.
We’ll be talking more about that in the months to come, and we’ll have more NAB wrapup next week when we’re back on the ground in NERW-land.
We don’t have a cover yet (stay tuned for that reveal soon!), but we’re hard at work on an achievement we never thought we’d reach – the landmark 24th edition of the world-famous Tower Site Calendar.
It’s not just a useful wall calendar. It’s also a tribute to more than a century of radio history.
And the proceeds from the calendar help sustain the reporting that we do on the broadcast industry here at Fybush Media, so your purchases matter a lot to us here. For just a few weeks, you can pre-order your 2025 calendar at a discount price, so it’s a good deal for you, too, as postage and printing costs keep going up. Visit the Fybush Media Store and place your pre-order now for the next calendar, get a great discount on previous calendars, and check out our selection of books and videos, too!
In this week’s issue… Sterling returns, Castiglione retires - Bruins, Knicks name new voices - WNYC celebrates centennial, cuts jobs - Corey's new Canadian gig - Rock moves in VT - Zandy returns to PRO-FM
In this week’s issue… Evanov shutters Ottawa signal, two others - Quinn's new gig at WICC - New morning shows at WKTU, WAWZ - WFME lives again
In this week’s issue… NY's 98.7 enters stunt mode - Double shifting at WBLI - WICC, WFOX simulcast with talk - New country in Toronto - Big booster project in western Mass
In this week’s issue… An emotional, classy farewell to WCBS and all it meant - Beasley's Boston cutbacks - Shamrock shuffles Scranton (again) - WJTO's new dial spot - The 2025 Tower Site Calendar is coming!
