LETTER: Notes on radio in the 2000s
April 9, 2025To the Community:
Many of you know that Jack Donovan recently hung up his WDEV earphones. He and I had a conversation recently about changes in radio since he and I began.
Needless to say, how and where we listen has changed dramatically. Where we once turned a switch and dialed to a frequency, we now go to a streaming site or a podcast. The days of someone sitting in front of a control board, playing records or tapes have disappeared – literally – into the cloud. In many cases that human has been replaced by an automated equipment rack that uses different frequency tones to cue a commercial, music or a recorded interview.
And so it is with Jack’s and my radio home for decades. On WDEV now there is very little if any music, replaced by live or recorded talk programs. The reason? The reality of commercial radio in the 2000s. Selling commercials to a business now depends on proving your station has an audience. Younger listeners have vastly different tastes for what once was very popular programming. In place of listening over the air, they’re going to an app to listen.
From where Jack and I began in radio until now is a yawning chasm of change. Audiences are now hopelessly splintered into hundreds of options that appeal to thousands of different tastes, each literally a needle in the haystack.
Since the advent of Facebook, I have discovered that hundreds of men and women once took delight in spinning discs. My first studio was a spare room in our house where I devised a radio station that broadcast to the four walls of the room.
The more things change the more they stay the same? Not in this case.
Brian Harwood
South Burlington
Brian Harwood grew up on Main Street in Waterbury next door to Rusty Parker and both went on to careers in Vermont broadcasting. His first radio job in 1954 was at WWSR in St. Albans, owned by WDEV. He spent 70 years on and off on the WDEV airwaves, and with Ken Squier, he started the WRFB-FM radio station in Stowe that eventually found its way to an antenna on Mt. Mansfield. Harwood now lives in South Burlington.