World Radio Day is a bigger deal overseas than in North America, where it generally gets ignored. But they did do a segment on, of all places, CKNT Wednesday and I heard a brief PSA on 640 in the afternoon.
 
I’m not sure if they were talking about it on CKTB when I tuned in this morning, but there was an incredibly absurd and hilarious moment towards the end of Tom McConnell’s show that had to be heard to be believed.
 
A guy called up, wondering about the future of AM radio and predicting that it didn’t have one, noting something I’ve complained about here in the past, that they all take a break at the exact same time (indicating the format clock, although he didn’t refer to it by that term) they play too many commercials and there’s no way to escape them.  
 
And then he claimed that podcasts were taking over. Naturally, the host defended his turf, arguing that radio’s one key asset was being live and local. To which the caller tried to insist that all podcasts are live, including the ones he listens to.
 
That made McConnell’s head explode, and they got into a shouting match about who was live and who wasn’t. (To be fair, a few podcasts can be fed out live and listened to later, but the caller seemed to be saying that all of them were done that way.)
 
McConnell also noted that for the most part, podcasting wasn’t a moneymaker and only a select few actually succeed in earning their makers a living wage. (Humble and Fred may be one of the examples.)
 
When the caller conceded that, yeah, sure, he was local, McConnell took issue with that as well, noting his show is syndicated and is heard on Bell stations in London, St. Catharines and Windsor, so he can’t really get into Niagara-specific issues any more for that reason.
 
And on and on it went, with both sides entrenched in their positions for a good 5 or 6 minutes, before McConnell finally hung up on him saying, “The guy’s been calling on this same issue for the past 6 years and he always expects me to say something different.”
 
It was highly entertaining overall and I bring it up not just because of World Radio Day but the fact that the medium rarely, if ever, actually talks about itself. And I’m sure those who frequent these pages would like to hear a lot more people on the radio talk about radio itself.
 
(I often think the topic is like Fight Club – the first rule is you can’t talk about radio on the radio!)

Charlie wrote:

   it's the best medium over-all, and we would all be worse-off without it   

Have you overlooked girls?
 

Thank goodness CKNT is here to save World Radio Day.  Loved by so many.
 

Yeah, he said he understood the irony of that, but noted the rest of the dayparts on the station were all devoted to local issues.