As with a lot of things in life, radio people live with an undercurrent of fear. We fear losing our jobs. We fear making that one mistake on the air or on social media that can end a career. We fear getting hotlined. We fear being blamed for trainwreck segues ("it was the computer! Honest!"). We fear, as I wrote about last week, trying something new and different, lest it not work out. Sales people fear missing their goals, which in turn makes them fear their sales managers, who also fear missing their goals and angering their market managers, who fear missing their goals and thus fear corporate, which fears missing their goals and upsetting the private equity firms, made up of people who fear... okay, they don't have a lot of fear, other than not being able to completely and swiftly strip-mine the companies in which they invested, but everyone else lives with fear.

As I write these words, it's Friday morning, and I'm thinking about how nobody will be reading this. That's not precisely true -- you, for one, happen to be an exception -- but it's the precipice of a holiday weekend in the U.S. and most people, even radio and podcasting ...

What will you be doing for a living ten years from now? Twenty? What's your goal? Everybody asks themselves that once in a while, but for radio talent, it's an especially fraught question. Depending on who's talking, you'll hear that radio won't exist twenty years from ...

If you do one job for a couple of decades, you're going to find certain things repeating themselves. Write a column that long and you end up revisiting some themes, and by "revisiting" I mean "repeating yourself ad nauseam," which leads me to my time-honored "blank slate" ...

If you do one job for a couple of decades, you're going to find certain things repeating themselves. Write a column that long and you end up revisiting some themes, and by "revisiting" I mean "repeating yourself ad nauseam," which leads me to my time-honored "blank slate" ...

"What do I need YOU for?" I heard The New York Times tech columnist and podcast host Kara Swisher ask that about Clubhouse on The Daily Beast's "The New Abnormal" podcast. She could have asked that to anyone about anything, but it's a question I've myself asked in many ...

What if we've been looking at this all wrong? What if we've been thinking inside the box all along, even when we thought we were being cutting edge and radical? That was my reaction when Dan Le Batard and John Skipper announced that the destination for Le Batard's show ...

I was encouraged by a lot of the talk at the All Access Audio Summit 2021, which reflected more recognition that things in the radio industry need to change. At least, the right questions are being asked and the issues are being raised. Whether the answers are either ...

There's a couple with whom we're friendly who are, politically, polar opposites of ours, and by that I don't mean conservative vs. liberal or Republican vs. Democrat, though there's that, too. We're talking sanity vs. Q-adjacent here. Low-key vs. sending every meme you ...

Thursday morning, sometime before dawn, someone drove down my street, paused at the foot of my driveway, and flung a copy of the Los Angeles Times in the general direction of my front door. Shortly thereafter, I emerged from that door, retrieved the paper from its resting ...