Styrofoam cups and cans of diet Coke are scattered across a desk dominated by a bulky radio microphone. A fleshy, pie-faced man in a short-sleeved shirt is idly dealing blackjack hands to himself while grappling with questions from his call-in radio audience. Mostly, the problems revolve around money: investments, insurance, loans, lawsuits. A man from Topeka who sells computer cables for a living wants to know how much liability coverage he should have. Bruce Williams replies, "I wouldn't walk across the street with less than a mil. Juries are crazy." A caller from Spokane wants advice on borrowing $2,000. Williams grabs a nearby booklet and tots up the interest on a three-year vs. a four-year loan. For a Seattle man, Williams becomes an instant expert on zoning codes; for a listener in Rochester, he's an authority on inheritance taxes. And for a high school student who is uncertain about college, he is a sympathetic uncle: "Kinda overwhelming?" "Yeah." "Let me tell ya somethin'. You're just getting started on a great adventure."
Nowhere but on radio could this mix of fast-fact glibness and folksy sentiment be so engaging. While Garrison Keillor entertains listeners with tales of his mythical Minnesota town, residents of real Lake Wobegons and metropolises across the country are happily cuddling up with a new array of nationwide radio personalities. These voices from the darkness offer advice, information, news and chat with the sort of one-on-one intimacy that slick, impersonal television cannot approach. "Radio personalities are not stars but friends," says Sally Jessy Raphael, whose friends include nearly 2 million weekly listeners to her weeknight radio advice program. "You don't know what Jane Pauley had for breakfast, but you know what I had. People regard their radio stations as an extended family."
That radio continues to flourish more than three decades after it was supposedly doomed by television will come as a surprise only to those who confidently predict the demise of every old technology the minute a new one comes along. Although radio was forced into the background by TV during the 1950s, the medium did not die; it merely took on new forms. As TV became the nation's main purveyor of mass entertainment, radio turned predominantly local and aimed to please smaller, more specific segments of the audience. The whole family might gather around the TV set at night, but people usually encountered radio in private moments--waking up in the morning, driving to work, getting ready for bed. Soon everyone from country-music fans to news junkies had a station to call his or her own.
Now another new technology is changing the face of radio. The advent of communications satellites has enabled programs to be distributed more easily and more cheaply than ever before. At least 23 national radio networks are currently in existence, compared with just four in 1968 and nine in 1974. Though music, news and sports constitute the bulk of network fare, the radio dial is increasingly filling up with daily, weekly or monthly "longform" programming, from music/variety series like NBC's Live from the Hard Rock Café (with Host Paul Shaffer of TV's Late Night with David Letterman) to national talk/call-in shows, many inspired by the phenomenal success of Mutual Radio's seven-year-old Larry King Show.