Stop selling radio like a fire extinguisher

Radio loves patting itself on the back for showing up during hurricanes and tornadoes. I grew up in Florida watching cones of uncertainty aim at my house, so I get why that story feels good. But building your entire pitch around being useful only when everything else breaks is a terrible way to run an industry, and it’s exactly what radio has been doing for years.

In this episode I get into why the disaster narrative is true but incomplete, what Pew’s 2025 local news numbers actually reveal about how few people choose radio over just encountering it, and why a station like WELY in Ely, Minnesota proves the model that actually works. Spoiler: it’s not more emergency messaging, it’s showing up on a random Tuesday when nothing’s wrong so people already trust you when something is.

If you’ve ever wondered why radio keeps losing ground despite being technically essential during emergencies, this is the conversation about what happens when an entire medium forgets to earn its relevance the other 364 days a year. This is digital ownership and tech accountability applied to broadcast, and it’s a hard look at what local actually means.