Today is World Radio Day!  It’s a day to celebrate and recognize the great medium that I’ve been lucky enough to have been a part of for over 18 years.

As the first true mass broadcast medium, the death of terrestrial radio has been predicted over and over again for decades.  Television was supposed to kill radio.  So was Napster, satellite radio, streaming music services…the list goes on.  It didn’t.  Radio is alive and thriving today.

I think radio has survived all of these new mediums and transitioned well into the digital age because the best posts on social media are ones that tell great stories and share compelling content.  This is something radio presenters have excelled at long before the digital revolution.  When I got my first job in radio in 1999 as an overnight announcer at CISN Country in Edmonton I was a part of the end of the analog era of radio and the beginning of digital.  We were still splicing tape on reel-to-reel machines as we also learned the ins and outs of audio editing and digital broadcasting software that was pretty rudimentary by today’s standards.  Back then, we’d work hard to create compelling content that we’d get to share once or twice during our show and that was it.  We still work hard to create that content, we just have more platforms by which to share it.  This makes radio a much more robust format today than it used to be.

I really focus on local content in my morning show.  We play a great mix of music but you can get a great mix of tunes from multiple sources these days.  But you’ll never hear about the debate around short term vacation rentals in Canmore on Spotify.  You’ll never find out about great local bike friendly initiatives, or conversations with Banff’s Mayor about town issues on satellite radio.  I want people to listen to my show and walk away with a good sense about what the current issues are in the Bow Valley and the interesting things going on around town that they might want to check out that night or that weekend.  The immediacy of radio, and the focus on hyper-localism, makes radio a great format to be a part of.

Happy World Radio Day, and thanks for continuing to tune into this old-school medium that’s still wonderful today!

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