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 strictly DIY. Wide open.

Professionals -- the kind of people who make and distribute content for a career -- have always been dismissive of the podcasters and influencers and YouTube and IG "stars." That's not REAL radio or television. Nobody I know has ever heard of those "stars." Being a radio personality takes real skills and talent honed in countless small markets and developed over the course of a lifetime. There's no replacement for a pro.

Yeah, well, that ship has sailed. Newer generations are just fine with the content they get from the "amateurs." You may not have heard of their superstars, but that doesn't matter. In an increasing number of minds, what you do and what anyone else can do with a USB mic or a webcam are one and the same. And this week's news that Spotify is testing a method, powered by the Anchor app it bought a while back, that will let anyone make, in effect, a music radio show, a little patter interspersed between songs, in the right hands likely indistinguishable from what a pro would do, minus commercials and with complete, licensed songs if you hear it through the premium paid version.

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 ...

You can't prepare for everything. Or maybe you can. But if you're doing talk radio, you know that plans sometimes go out the window with some regularity. You can and should plan things out, do your research, be prepared. And then something pops up that demands to be ...

Remember the pivot? Yeah, that was fun. Sometime in the mid-2010s, between "we need to do a podcast" and "let's focus on social media," it seemed like every media company decided that the future was in online video, or at least the future of monetization was in video, ...

You have a widget for sale. You're in a competitive business, so you have to keep that widget fresh and innovative and adapting to a changing market. Who are you going to use to design that widget? The sales manager? No, of course not; you'll keep the sales manager ...

Hey, want a challenge for the Labor Day weekend? Stop looking at Facebook and Twitter. Okay, we've been told over and over that radio people need to be very active on social media. I've told you that before. It's all about the engagement with listeners, right? Plus, it's ...

Is it just me, or is talk radio sometimes really hard to listen to these days? It's probably just me. And, in fairness, it's not ALL of commercial talk radio that's a chore for me to consume. There ARE good shows and hosts out there. But I wonder, because it seems like ...

Thursday was National Radio Day, or at least one of those hashtag generator companies decided to make it National Radio Day, and it went as it does every year: ignored by the formal industry, embraced by people working in the business, a cavalcade of resumÈs on Facebook, ...

It's fitting in 2020 that the most talked-about song of the Summer can't be played on the radio without a "radio edit," not that this is a new thing. Plenty of hit songs have required extensive bowdlerization to be radio-friendly, what with the FCC and all. But it's the ...

Gonna keep it short and to the point this week: Don't be an a-hole. Okay, let me elaborate. You've read about the situation at Ellen DeGeneres' show, right? It's funny: If you know people in the circle of TV writers and comedians, the ones who tend to populate TV talk ...