The web site, L.A. Radio.com www.laradio.com is beginining a new phase this year. It started out over 10 years ago as a small and free site with notes on radio and people, then evolved into something that missed very little in the radio scene, in front of and behind the mikes and across all the formats that you can find in Los Angeles. It turned into a subscription based site, but even that cost was pretty cheap, $36 or $39 for 12 months, Monday through Friday.
Don Barrett is the creator and manager of this site and there's not much that goes on in radio locally that he does not know about. He often finds out about things before many others in the news business do. Some of the on-the-air personalities have said that they check laradio.com everyday to see if they still have a job or if their station has been sold. You may have noticed that over the years, there's CBS and Clear Channel as examples of the major owners of dozens of stations in the U.S. It used to be that radio people would move over to other stations when it came time to move on (fired) since there used to be so many stations independently owned. That's a big change for now.
Leave it to the government to de-regulate things and now you have whole groups of stations in a single city owned by the same company. So if you lose your gig and the company didn't shift you to another one of their stations, your choices for other work were dramatically slimmed down since there were not that many "elsewheres" to check for jobs.
So, to continue with the impact of this change, if there used to be 5 stations with 5 general managers and 5 program directors now owned by one company, the trend was to have fewer, or even one person, do the job of the several. Lots of people were now out of work but the corporate goal was to make money and cut costs. This outranked the idea of service to the public with a quality product, an old idea that was followed by many stations in the radio industry of old.
There are still a few independents but you will see the corporate mark across the country where they have the same person doing voices for stations in different cities, and similar formats in the chain, like cookie-cutter products that are the same from one region to the next. And in the end you lose a lot of the personality that radio stations used to have that was created by the people that worked there.
But for the meantime, you can find out what's happening and what has happened in the past with people and where you favorite DJ's are or what happened to them over the years and currently, too, if you follow the pages of L.A. Radio.com.
The current version with news is now FREE, with additional features available for that low subscription price.
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