Now for 15 years, the only Television Network devoted to nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2, created by the cable tv industry and funded by your local cable or satellite provider. Watch us in hd, like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. Alexander russo sat down with booktv at the Catholic University of america to discuss his book, points on the dial golden age radio beyond the networks. This 25minute interview is part of booktvs college series. Host and youre watching booktv on cspan2. We are at Catholic University in washington, d. C. Interviewing some of the professors who are also authors. And now joining us is Alexander Russo who is the author of this book, points on the dial the golden age of radio beyond the networks. Alexander russo, who invented radio . Well, thats a complicated answer, and, you know, the march coney often gets credit for it, but like many of these stories, there were lots of Different Actors operating and lots of different times. And that kind of institutional history or erasure is one of the reasons why i wanted to write book. You know, i initially conceived it thinking about our current moment and the tendency of Media Industries to not particularly turn on a dime. We see lots of industries, and our current era trying to figure out what to make of digital convergence. Well, it struck me about radio, particularly radio in the 1940s and 50s is how quickly it had adapted to the introduction of television. Very quickly you had a recurrent to profitability by these, by the radio industry as a whole. But when i began to scratch the surface a bit reading different kinds of trade literature and looking at different archives, i began to see that a lot of the things that had been talked about as new at that moment, things like multiple radios in the house or things like local Advertising Sales kept being called new in preceding years. And i kept going back and going back and going back, and eventually i was back in the 1920s and start of what is sometimes called the network era. And so what this book then became was a way to tell that story, the story of an alternative system of radio programming, of radio technologies, of radio listening techniques that was not really, that had not received a lot of scholarly attention because most of the work on radio and very good work, i might add focuses on National Networks; the big organizations, the big stars, the, you know, the bing crosbys, the jack bennys that are often remembered of that era. So what i found, in fact, is that there was a parallel kind of radio industry at this time, and i began to explore different facets of it. I looked at, you know, the way that and for many, for many years of this National Network era, radio wasnt necessarily national. The networks did not physically reach across the country or they left out [inaudible] lots of it, particularly in the south and in the west. And so what does that mean for the communities who listen to those, to listen to radio . Sometimes they could get the, they could hear stations from big cities, but did they have their own radio culture, and what does that sound like . So i began to find all these other ways in which radio programs were distributed. There were these companies called transcription disc companies, and they would basically produce everything that you would possibly need to put on your own radio show. Theyd provide commercial copy, theyd provide the musical selections. Some of them would even provide the filing cabinets to store all this stuff. And for local stations they began to use these kind of services to put on localized programs. So they werent purely local, they werent purely national. There was a level of interpretation that was going on to make these kind of programs acceptable to that local audience. And they began to put in local references and local brands or regional brands for different kinds of, for different kinds of products. You mentioned that a you were from indiana earlier, and one example i can remember is the Beechnut Company wasnt able to advertise gum, or they didnt want to advertise it there because of the connections it had with covering over the alcoholic breath smell, right . Because, you know, indiana was sort of very much a dry area at that time. So these are the kinds of localizations and regionalizations that i, that i cover in this book. And there are other examples of that. I look at really an interesting guy from boston named john shepard, and he managed a couple department stores. And he saw in radio the ability to really connect with what he saw as a unique audience, the new england audience. And he created a Regional Radio network that aired baseball games, local University Football games, homemaker programs, all of which was designed to drive sales, of course, to his local department stores. But in so doing, what he kid was create what he did was created the idea of a new England Network or new england market that was distinct from the mass audience and the mass product that is typically thought about in terms of National Radio at time and those big National Brands and the big stars. And so there are different places like that. Host when did these regional or local radio stations start to form, right in the 20s when radio did . Guest yeah, absolutely. Shepard, shepard had a was a pioneering boston broadcaster, and, you know, and he often i mean, i shouldnt say, i shouldnt give the impression that shepard was completely separate from the national ns. He was at various times affiliated with all the National Radio networks in his station, so he wanted to bring in that top flight talent and those big stars, but he also wanted to make sure that through other points in the day that he could provide other kinds of programs. So, you know, his regional was called the yankee network, and then he had a spare one called another one called the colonial network. You know, they started in the late 1920s as well and sort of steadily expanded into the 1930s. And one of the interesting things about him this particular is that he was a real pain in the rear of the networksment they disliked him tremendousliment they needed him tremendously. They needed him because of his access to the lucrative boston and new england market which was very dense and, you know, an industrialized region with high wages. But they were kind of making a, you know, a deal with the devil, they felt. And so there were repeated clashes between shepard and these different networks. At one point, you know, nbc kicked him off and, you know, cbs kind of took him back but not, but not without mys givings. Many misgivings. And thats important because it says unlike a lot of fears about a National Media culture that, you know, obliterates the local or blitz rates these other kinds of culture, in someone like shepard you can see some sort of pushback and some sort of hybrid culture that wasnt necessarily going to take everything that the National Cultures offered up. Host was the radio industry from the start an advertisingbased industry . Guest there was a fair amount of skepticism around radio broadcast or radio advertising in the 1920s. I dont know if that, you know, deeply progressive liberal named herbert hoover, you know, actually decried what advertising would go do to radio when he was is secretary of commerce. But it quickly became supported by advertising, and there were educational stations, but they were they tended to not have very powerful signals. There were a number that were quite popular especially in the around big ten and agricultural universities that survived, but there werent all that many nonprofit stations. In about ten years my colleague here at catholic will have a book on that for you, but thats looking ahead. Host were the nbcs, the mutual, the cbss threatened by these local networks . Guest i dont know if they were necessarily threatened. They sort of saw them as obstacles potentially to what they wanted to do in terms of controlling the maximum amount of scheduled time. But, you know, for example, partly as a reaction to his dealings with nbc and cbs. But for that reason there really is a kind of, you know, mutual antipathy but acceptance mostly because these different, these stations tended to operate in different times when the National Networks werent offering sponsored programs and things like that. So, yes, i dont think i would not characterize them as being threatened by them. Host is it comparable to what we see as the local news today . And the National News . Guest well, i think a kind of interesting comparison would be a company like sinclair, right, which has a lot of local news, a lot of local stations but also syndicates its own news packages, all right . So you have things that are appearing to be local but are also, you know, given a particular local or coming from a National Organization but are given a bit of a local flavor or a local spin. And, you know, the way in which television and radio as well, you know, eats up content so quickly as we are here today demonstrates theyll take content where they can get it. And those economies of scale are really important for the profitability of local stations. And so that profitability in and of itself gave them a little bit of, a little bit of leeway. And, you know, this is also a story of in terms of interaction of local and national of kind of the intermediaries that made this possible. So i also look at what are called the different station Management Companies that, you know, basically sold advertising on these for National Brands and did so in ways that if the National Brand didnt want, didnt have distribution, say, in the an area, they didnt want to buy a National Network package on that. But, again, like shepard these are individuals that were creating markets, right . That they were calling, they were shaping them and describing them in ways to make them appeal to the advertising agencies and the sponsors that they wanted to cultivate. And so, again, its not the cut and dry local national entity. There are these individual, individuals moving between them in significant ways. Host Alexander Russo, were the stations politically adept . Did they get regulated differently than the National Networks . Guest yeah, i mean yes, they did. Most of the radio regulation is locally based around the different, the particular stations. And its stations that have to give their program logs to the fcc which is, i found, actually, very important was that was the record that i could trace of the different programs that they were offering because most of these stations didnt keep their own papers around. Yes, and so they were regulated differently, you know, and even the National Networks also owned stations, and so they that was where most of the regulation came in for their activities. Host when you talk about the golden age of radio, whats the age youre talking about . Guest were talking about 1926 to 1952 or 53. You know, by the end point it was pretty clear to most of the tokes in the radio folks in the radio industry that television was going to take over in significant ways. You know, the famous talent raids where in the late 1940s when he plucked radio stars and brought them over to his network so that he would have programming when television really got going. And, you know, because Radio Networks were so profitable, they really underwrote televisions development at that point before television was economically viable. But that hollowing out process was one that everyone in the radio industry sort of pretty much were pretty sure that the writing was on wall many that regard. In that regard. But by that point the radio industry on many levels had already begun to transform itself via, you know, these different institutions and these different entities such that in the, you know, in the final chapter i look at, you know, the rise of distracted listening, right . That in the 1930s Radio Networks really wanted to, you know, cultivate this idea of the family sitting around the radio set in the evening and everyone listening with rapt attention. But there is a recognition by, you know, the mid 1940s that many people had multiple radios. There were radios starting to be installed regularly in cars and midget sets that, you know, teenagers were listening to. And so all of the things that would later be sort of thought about about in terms of culture of the 1950s were operating in significant ways well before, you know, radio actually Network Radio collapsed in the 1950s. Host how often has radio been pronounced dead or on its death bed . Guest any number of times. Host right. Guest i mean, itll be very entering to see interesting to see. Right now were seeing another, another way in which radio has been pronounced dead. But, you know, these are complicated processes. As certain kinds of radio, mainstream popular radio, rock radio maybe waning to some degree. Spanish language radio is thriving. There are new low power fm initiatives that the fcc after, you know, a decade of sort of stalling and bickering are rolling out. And so there may be, you know, very small local stations, you know, operating within a broadcast radius of just a few miles. But serving, you know, these micro niches that may provide a possibility for different kinds of future programming. On other, and likewise, you know, this is also an era of a flourishing of artistic radio programming. Things like the third cost audio festival, shows like radio lab and this American Life have become sort of cultural touchstones for, you know, for Youth Culture today. You know, and its not always clear if they are being listened to on radio or online. Radio lab in particular gets more listeners to its podcast than it does to its terrestrial broadcasts. But all of which sort of suggests is that radio to what extent is it radio and how will that, the idea of an audioonly broadcast, you know, continue into the futurement. Host when did future. Host when did public radio come about . Guest well, thats a complicated story. I mean, there were, there were educational broadcasters which i talked about earlier that operated in the 1920s and into the 1930s. They operated in a reduced capacity into the 1950s with the spectrum allocation there. They began, hay finally got some they finally got some bandwidth, so they began to experiment. But a lot of the locations of where they had a lot of the places where they were located on the spectrum were on the uhf or fm spectrum. And so that wasnt a very popular people didnt have fm sets until the 1960s. You really began to have public radio come starting around the late 1960s after the creation of the corporation for public broadcasting, and you had a little, you know, a clause stuck into what was ostensibly a funding bill for Public Television that, you know, became a mechanic nhl for a mechanism for a national lick radio network. Public radio network. And so that taliban began to take off starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In fits and starts. I think there was an npr bankruptcy in 1978 or 79 or 80. But it really became well institutionalized after that point. Host what about talk radio . Guest talk radio really started in the 1980s. There were around the relaxation of the fairness doctrine where radio stations began to be less concerned that if they provided merely one point of view, they wouldnt get the fcc coming after them. There was also a story around satellite broadcasting, and you had the ability to distribute radio programs via satellite meant that the rise of, you know, the personalities like Rush Limbaugh they could syndicate their shows much more easily on a live basis whereas, you know, previously that was east money more expensive either much more expensive with the reduction of sound quality. So one of the ironies that i like to think about is starting in the 1980s, though you can even push that back further, you do have a return to certain kinds of National Radio and a certain kind of high business hybridized system where now we have local stations, but they will use their deejays from different locations and pretend like they are, you know, broadcasting from a given area. Hi the local public radio traffic guy actually lives in richmond and does his broadcast there as he describes the local traffic conditions in washington d. C. In that kind of, you know, jumping through spaces what makes audio broadcasting in many ways pretty interesting. Host Alexander Russo, when you teach radio in your media studies classes, what do you want your students to take away . Guest i want them to take away the ways that the medium has transformed itself again and again. The initial ways that radio was thought about as a pointtopoint medium with the Marcone Company or a domain of boyish amateurs in the 19 teens and 1920s and, you know, this national, you know, National System or a system of, you know, free form l radio in the late 1960s. It suggests the ways in which different kinds of Media Technologies adapt themselves to different cultural contexts and different economic contexts and that the pronouncements of any medium being dead are going to be premature, and we need to look at what are the different dynamics that make a medium transform itself t or fail to transform itself. Host what are currently some of the Public Policy issues that radio stations are dealing with . Guest i dont really do all that much in policy.