Wondered whatever became of me,
I'm living on the air in Cincinnati,
Cincinnati, WKRP.
Got kind of tired packing and unpacking,
Town to town and up and down the dial
Maybe you and me were never meant to be,
But baby think of me once in awhile.
I'm at WKRP in Cincinnati...
We in Cincinnati love ourselves better then anyone! That's why we love this classic tv show.
I recall one episode in which Johnny Fever (I think it was Fever) dreams of the future of WKRP. A future where the only thing left of the radio station is a desk, Herb Tarlek and an automation machine.
It is now the future and this is no longer a a dream. It has happened and on a scale that you may not know.
I had no idea how "human free" radio station operations had become, until the day a hurricane blew through Cincinnati and was never mentioned on any local radio station until hours after the event! Of course the only reason I know this is because after the hurricane took away our power and dropped a tree on our house, I still had a functional radio and all of the stations were cranking out the same old crap like nothing different was going on!
Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming technology. The villains in this piece are the upper management types who apply it to replace personnel rather then augment their productivity. When you fire everybody and automate everything the result (as noted above) is tragic. Oh and by the way, there are a disturbingly large number of examples of this same tragic outcome in other markets.
So how many tragedies will it take before the situation is fixed? It doesn't matter! Because the same technology that makes it possible to automate away salaries is rapidly making radio as we know it completely obsolete. With the advent of wireless internet everywhere (remember it's all technology), radio is no longer needed.
Radio is like someone in a persistent vegetative coma, only alive on a machine.
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