There are a lot of justifications -- excuses, really, but that's a matter of attitude -- for considering January 2021 a time to make a fresh start of everything. New year, new administration, maybe the pandemic response will finally bear fruit, resolutions, you know the drill. New is, usually, good. Fresh is good. Time to get going on getting into shape, restarting the job hunt, planning good things for the coming year.

Far be it from me to throw a wet blanket on that enthusiasm. Okay, I usually do that, but not this time. In fact, I'm going to just offer a few suggestions on things you can do, as a radio host or podcaster or programmer or manager, to make 2021 a better year. Herewith, some thoughts:

1. Embrace the advantage of your platform. If you're a radio host, concentrate on what broadcast radio does best, which is reaching a mass audience with live voices. Sure, social media is live, too, but the sound of a human voice offers a different kind of connection and relatability from a tweet or photo. Take advantage of that by keeping ultra-current. Use social media to stay on top of breaking news so that listeners aren't being fed stuff that got stale hours or days ago. Live, (sometimes) local, always immediate. That's what people used to get from radio. Still a good idea.

There's an old Warner Bros. cartoon in which vaudeville performers Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck compete for applause. Everything Bugs does gets wild acclaim; Daffy, despite frenetic attempts to please the crowd, gets silence or literal crickets. Frustrated to the end of his ...

Where next? Everything I wrote about in recent years has come to pass. Talk radio's lack of discipline and supervision, its pandering to a narrow sliver of "true believers," its turn from entertainment to political tool, its lack of creativity and imagination, all of it ...

Okay, then. Now what? We're at the end of the year and talk radio is coming off an election year like no other, and I imagine that for your garden-variety conservative talk radio station, they'll be able to ride the post-election, post-inauguration Trump madness for a ...

Is there any value left in localism? Yes, of course there is, but there are powerful reasons to go in precisely the opposite direction. It's happening everywhere, of course, and we saw more of it this week when Bell Media flipped both of its Windsor stations from ...

The joke we told thirty years ago was that it had to be illegal for any talk radio conference to post an agenda that didn't include at least one panel about whether the talk radio format belonged on FM. "Will Talk Move to FM?" "Can Talk Make It On FM?" "Whither FM Talk?" ...

You don't HAVE to do that. By "that," I mean put something -- anything -- on the air. And by "you," I'm talking first to management, GMs and PDs and "Brand Managers" and whomever else makes the programming decisions at your station (the screaming you hear is me, ...

Are you proud of what you've done? Now, see, some of you are already upset and defensive, and you're assuming that I'm going to take the opportunity of my last pre-election column to take you to task for your political views. Nope. (That's what Twitter and Facebook are ...

YouTube. Instagram. Podcasts. TikTok. Snapchat. All of them offering alternative, gatekeeper-free methods of creating and distributing content. No gatekeepers, no studio notes, no Program Directors or General Managers or General Sales Managers. Slickly produced or ...

How have I been doing? Glad you asked. It's been a week filled with watching a radio convention online, comprised of what seemed like an endless procession of Zoom panels featuring moderators behaving like the stars of hostage tapes, reading stiffly from scripts on their ...