CBS, Colbert, And The Collapse Of Broadcast TV

What happens when some of broadcast media’s biggest institutions start disappearing all at once?

On the latest episode of In the Vicinity, local media veteran Tim Hanlon is joined by TVREV Publisher Jason Damata for a wide-ranging conversation about the end of CBS Radio News, the looming demise of the late-night TV model, and what those shifts reveal about the future of local media.

From the collapse of monoculture to the rise of fragmented “feudal media” communities, the discussion explores whether broadcasters still have a path forward in a streaming-first world — or whether the economics and behaviors that once defined TV and radio have fundamentally changed for good.

Listen to the full In the Vicinity podcast above or get it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Tim Hanlon: Greetings and salutations, everybody. My name is Tim Hanlon. I am the founder and CEO of the Vertere Group here in Chicago, where we consultatively and advisorily help lots of different folks in and around the media and technology landscapes. Thanks for finding us in your feeds this week, and welcome to our little weekly sojourn into local media discussions and conversation In the Vicinity.

That's what we call it. And we’re glad to have you aboard. We generally have conversations with our pal Jim Wilson. He is the CEO of Madhive and on the boards of places like GSTV and Audacy. But we've long wanted to bring in, on a fairly regular basis, some outside voices to the mix.

So we're gonna test that concept out this week with our first ever outside guest, and he's not really an outsider. He's probably the consummate insider. His name is Jason Damata. He is the founder and CEO and the chief cook and bottle washer of Fabric Media in Los Angeles, which specializes in narrative content and promotional and PR efforts for a ton of different companies in and around the creative media space, technologies and all the like.

And is also, among other things, the progenitor Fabric Media is of TVREV, where yours truly has a weekly column focused on local media. We call it Proximity. Hope you check that out, subscribe to that, get it emailed to you, et cetera. And this very podcast actually is an extension of that. And so in many respects without Jason and his team there at Fabric and TVREV we wouldn't be having this conversation.

So in many respects this is the boss man bringing him in and getting a few brownie points. And we're delighted to have him, of course, 'cause he knows what he's talking about. He's been around the block and then some. And we're gonna use this as an excuse to test this outside voice concept and see if we get some others in the weeks and months ahead.

I think you'll enjoy this conversation. We’ll start out with a mutual lamentation around what's happened literally seemingly overnight to CBS, both on the television side and the radio news side. Let's begin with that, shall we? Please, as always, enjoy.

Hi, can you feel the excitement? Hello, everybody. Jason Damata, Mr. TVREV and all things Los Angeles marketing and media. How are you? Nice to have you on the show. How about a little background about you for those who are uninitiated? Yes. I think you're the biggest person in media and publicity that people may not know about behind the scenes.

Jason Damata: Don't say publicity. I'm the biggest person in my office right now. You forgot Fabric Media, the parent company of TVREV. We own TVREV, we own The Measure. We've been in marketing media, helping companies at the intersection of technology and advertising and media. We're about to celebrate our 18th birthday.

A long time. Yeah got into streaming a long time ago, and yeah, just excited to be here. Obviously we came up with this idea together and I invited myself on, so thanks for letting me invite myself on your podcast, Tim.

Tim Hanlon: It's not mine. It's through the kind auspices of TVREV and the Fabric foundation there.

So, yeah, all the people behind the scenes, Melissa and Jessika and Mike and all the others and stuff who've been part of this. You guys have facilitated this for me, not vice versa.

I think it's only fair that you fill in some time once in a while and make yourself known and available.

So I'm happy to have you here. 

Jason Damata: Fabric is a Fabric endeavor, and I... we love having you as part of the Fabric team, Tim, and the way that you deliver information to the world. It's one of the great honors of Fabric is that we get to work in this, with this universe of people that really are thought leaders like yourself and Alan and Jon Lafayette for The Measure, and it really is one of the better things we do with our time, and I think what you give to the industry is invaluable.

So I'm joking about inviting myself on, but I am serious when I say thank you for having me. 

Tim Hanlon: Please. Right back to you. I appreciate all the efforts and the collegiality and all the opportunities to be of help and figure out other new ways to push the industry forward to the extent that we can.

But okay, so as we start to entertain a rotation of guests beyond our semi-regular conversations with Jim Wilson we of course have to grill our guests with various quandaries that are out there in the business. And I think today is an interesting day as we record this. It's a pretty, pretty sad day for I guess you could call us media traditionalists, right?

In particular, the three letters of CB and S. CBS's radio news division essentially will be ending by the end of today. It's a 99-year run of being probably the gold standard of trusted news and reporting. All the way back from the early days of World War II and beyond. And also, it's the day after the end of the late night run of CBS’s The Late Show, most recently inhabited by Stephen Colbert, and a vacuum that's gonna be taking its place. You and I are of a certain age. Yeah. What does CBS mean going forward? Is this the beginning of the end of that brand? And do you feel as, I don't know, shaken up by it perhaps as I do, or am I just a crusty old media guy?

Jason Damata: We are, one correction there, we are of an uncertain age, but I think it is really a sad day to watch Colbert go off the air. I think it's just yet another domino to fall in the way things used to be. I'm not one to rue the past. I think I'm just so thankful that it was around.

But look, late night, that format, the culture, the growing up when there were only a few channels and you had to change them with your hand, it was the... Oftentimes it's in these comedy shows that the greatest truth is told; the most freedom is given for expression. And yeah, it's a bummer.

It's also, from a business perspective, I think the math, the calculation that these things were... were they a little bit bloated? Do you need 150, 200 employees to run a show? I don't think you do. But could they have mustered this through? They definitely could. And from an ROI perspective, it's foolish to look at just the advertising revenue because the halo effect that you get on these networks and the halo effect you get on culture and the Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart, in a lot of ways these are really critical touch points in our country.

And they, I think they serve a role to let us laugh and to let us look at culture in a way that you can actually see how ridiculous it is. And when those voices go away it'll be left to the very many influencers and all their different algorithmic discovery paths that we have to find ourselves in.

But it is sad. I'm curious what you think, especially as regards to Colbert, but also radio.

Tim Hanlon: Yeah. Look, this is really, it's also a time period or day part kind of conversation, right? Because a lot of this is predicated, the whole existence of late night and for that matter daytime and prime access and primetime and all that kind of stuff are basically, vestiges of purely linear television before the days of recording. Before the days of streaming, any of that kind of stuff, right? So there was a time pattern. You tuned in at all the same time, and that was it. You missed it. Maybe there was a repeat if you were lucky. That's right. And I think that also if you really look at this sort of coldly, we can argue about the economics and perhaps there is something viable that will fill the time more, I don't know, interestingly than the relatively inexpensive Allen Media Group content, yeah, there's no controversy there. It's pretty straightforward. It's a time-buy deal, that kind of stuff, right? But, a couple of things. Number one, you have to wonder about the linear television model, especially that of broadcasting and the affiliates and the owned and operated stations.

We've already talked ad nauseam about how that industry is very challenged right now, how streaming and retrans is just upending it all. But if you really believe that the time period doesn't matter much anymore in this day and age, then you probably have to logically extend that to why do we have networks and affiliates anymore?

And what about things like local news and the late local news and the audience flow that usually goes out of the local news into the live or live to tape late night shows and stuff, right? So if that part goes away then doesn't that loosen up some of the validity of some of the other pieces?

And I've spoken about that in the past. I think you wonder how the CBS affiliates, and to a lesser extent the owned and operated stations, are gonna be affected by the fact that a big piece of their cultural relevance is now essentially gone. 

Jason Damata: Agreed. Going back to the financial and the business calculation, and I think what's missing from this conversation is they had this halo effect.

Remember, late night was one of the best barker channels for all the studios, for all the tune-in, for all the programs. It was as close to branded entertainment that actually worked as you could invent. You think about the other side of that coin is that behaviors are hard to predict in terms of what people will watch, and I think linear television is one of those things.

Late night television. We used to call it appointment TV, but it really was. It was baked in people's routines. Humans all have routines. There's something comforting about knowing you can, at the end of a day, you can tune in and just be amused and be entertained, and take what is a stressful day and have somebody, the last thing you do is you laugh a little bit.

And it's not that way on social media because I laugh, and then I'm horrified, and then next thing I'm looking at puppies, and then I'm looking at war, and it's like all this smattering of ADD. Whereas you had this predictable format, this joyous, and also because you're on broadcast, you had this level of innocence and predictability and comfort and all that, it just goes away.

And I don't think that the new owners really factored in the behavioral part of it. I don't think they really tried to even skinny it down into the form where it made more financial sense. And when you think about, to your point, you think about the downstream, the power of CBS isn't in New York, it's in Poughkeepsie and in Denver and in Florida, right?

It's in the power of the network. And so to see all those local stations now have one less reason to have people tune in, it's a pretty big point that I don't think, other than you, that most people are missing in this conversation. 

Tim Hanlon: The irony though too is that I don't think the format of a talk show is any less relevant, right?

It could be modernized. And I think from the economic perspective, like you're hinting at, the cost of the entry to create a streaming show, if you will, is relatively low, right? The notion of a video podcast, maybe with a few little extras that make it a little bit more, I wouldn't say broadcast quality, but certainly broadcast-esque, right?

That's the irony. All these shows coming up from the ground upward into streaming, and then they're all trying to emulate what, quote unquote, "television has historically been." 

So there's probably a right sizing in terms of the economics. I think there's gonna be a wellspring of other kinds of talk, conversational pieces of programming out there.

They're probably already out there, that can certainly fill that void. I'm not sure it's gonna be in a broadcast manner at 11:30 Eastern Time every night. 

Jason Damata: That's right. That's right. 

Tim Hanlon: It might be more on demand or more on as needed, right? So if you look at what some of the like Substack and stuff, literally some of the folks that you might follow on the newsletter front, they literally will just send out a note like, "10 minutes we're going on the air," and then boom, you're on the air, right?

So there's an instant gratification. The capabilities are just enormous to be able to reinvent that kind of idea. But, the idea of having a conversation, maybe making it comical and topical, I think just the manner in which it's delivered is gonna just change. And what does that mean to affiliates?

What does that mean to broadcast? I think it just means, I don't know, we re-question what those economics look like. That's all. 

Jason Damata: This conversation can go in a lot of directions. I agree with all you're saying. Fragmentation creates a ton of irony and a lot of dichotomies. I would argue that Smartless is the new talk show format, right?

It's funny. You know what you're gonna get. You get three people you're gonna build a relationship with. You don't have to watch it, but you don't get the same sort of razzmatazz and sense of let's be honest, these things are part of Americana, and they're really baked into our culture going back to Jack Paar.

And I remember back when I first got into streaming and I rolled off of C-SPAN and got into a streaming company called Media TV. The very first thing we did was to emulate the MTV format, and we did a show with Tom Green and a show with David Barlow, and we replicated the live show. So I don't think it'll go away.

I'm interested to see if a local, a streamer does it because, again, it comes down to behaviors and getting people hooked into some kind of guaranteed thing as all this inventory becomes dynamic and price pressure bringing the cost of ads down. Perishable formats continue to be of high value, and I just don't know if they can get the kind of...

If you're getting two million people to tune in a night, that feels more suited for YouTube in the future. But I agree, someone's gonna figure out how to make it happen. You see it in politics with The Young Turks made a run at that. You see it in the political realm to an extent.

But I also think that people have moved past, as Alan [Wolk] calls it feudal media has taken over. They've moved past this monoculture. They've moved past... When The Rock came out with that wrestling movie recently, it had all the makings to be a mega hit. After it didn't do all that well, even though it's a really good film, I don't know if you've seen it.

They said, even a celebrity isn't enough to drive ticket sales. There's just too much to choose from. 

Tim Hanlon: It speaks to... I don't mean to interrupt, but it does, it just speaks to, I think, what replaces these kinds of shows over time are probably gonna be things that are more focused and communal and have some little literal sense of community, right?

Because one of these things about these podcasts that gain some kind of traction, right? And it's a relative statement, right? One person's Smartless is another person's Beyond Yacht Rock, right? Or whatever. Yeah. There's, in the world of Patreon and that kind of stuff, you can be part of the show.

If you're part, and subscribe to it. The economics completely change. They can be very viable. Yeah. And the scale, quote-unquote, that's needed to make them viable is nowhere near what a broadcast model sort of requires, right? Yes. I'll go one step further. I actually wonder if local stations with or without the network affiliation, which is, I think, something that's gonna be a conversation in the next couple of years. Because if these big tent pole day parts are essentially being hived out or sold out or whatever, and you can make the argument about CBS's news coverage and all that kind of stuff, and what, all the things that might be happening, what is the value of a network to a station?

And maybe the station perhaps can be more vital and viable in a truly more local sense. Maybe have less network programming than more of it or in total of it. And I think that's where the news and other local programming can come into play, right? It doesn't take much for a local podcaster dynamic to be specifically focused on something in that city's or that region's sports or culture or entertainment or comedy. And remember the oldest days of television way before we were even born, right? Every single station might have had a relationship with a fledgling network, but they were responsible for the lion's share of programming outside of that.

Yeah. They only went to the network for a couple of hours. The rest of the day was humina humina. Somebody doing a kiddie show and somebody doing a weather thing and whatever and doing somebody on the street, whatever it is, right? That might be where we go. 

Jason Damata: Where are you going?

Hawaii I oughta know that one. Sometimes I feel like we're talking about, what's the cliche? Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. There is a generational divide that is basically probably the biggest indicator of where things are headed and we used to call it the digital divide, and the haves and have-nots, and I actually think it's more behavioral, where, people, streaming and fast channels and even ad-supported, older generations are now on YouTube more than they're on television to an extent. And this format, this formula, will it exist in the future? Definitely. There's growth in things like diginets and local specialized television, and they're not gonna turn away from that.

Free programming's not gonna go anywhere, I don't think. I think there'll always be a market for it. But what percentage of what audience, what demographic is there to consume it? And will it attract enough, given that you can get hyper-personalized, hyper-targeted, all that stuff from an advertising standpoint?

My concern is that people are following influencers more than they're following shows. These younger generations watch television, but it's going to be on their phones or it's going to be on demand or it's going to be… They're not. I think live behavior is only a sports thing these days.

And by the way, these networks have done no favors to themselves by doing it bleeds, it leads journalism. People wanna know what's going on, but you turn the TV on and it's murders and kidnappings and molestations and, just violence, and it's horrible. And you're showing, you're literally pulling the worst of the community in the name of ratings just to keep people tuned in because we all can't stop looking at a train wreck.

So I'm of mixed feelings here. It's almost like it's a breakup that you know is inevitable, and you cherish the good days, and those good days are the Colbert days, and the Johnny Carson days, and the Jay Leno days, and the things that made even Golden Girls, the things that made TV special and cultural and these touchstones.

But on the flip side, like the bleeds, it leads garbage, can't go away fast enough, and i'm really encouraged by the fact that at a time when short form is really taking hold, there's also a huge movement to long form audio, long form video just in a self-serve manner that's personalized, so it's bittersweet to me.

Tim Hanlon: Also too, you have to think about it too from a local perspective, right? You look at Los Angeles or I live in Chicago or I grew up in New York, right? The ability to better serve audiences with news and/or content in a more, I don't know, fractionalized way, right? I mean the dynamic in Highland Park is different than the dynamic in Hermosa Beach.

There are some commonalities, maybe the Lakers or some other thing, or the mayoral race Los Angeles, by and large, there's still very different dynamics. One's more, prone to fire damage from wildfires. The other one's worried about coastal erosion.

Yeah. These are things that, but these are things that broadcasters have historically skated over because their whole raison d'être has been we wanna serve the entirety of a region. And now in a world where streaming is available and targeted and all that kind of stuff, to me it feels like a tremendous opportunity to reinvent what local could be.

Have a little bit of national stuff, right? The stuff that matters like live sports and maybe a live late night show perhaps again the bulk should be completely the opposite, which is a lot more, I won't say community focused, but a lot more relevant to one's environs. And by the way, that's unique enough that can stand out in a streaming world because that becomes much more essential than any show that some friend recommended to be a part of my queue.

Jason Damata: I agree with that in theory as an aspirational thought. It's one of those things that you feel like should happen, but America has been homogenized and in a lot of ways my wife is really big into fashion, and anytime we travel abroad she always points out how it looks like Italy shops at J.Crew these days.

It's so disappointing. The homogenization, the corporate takeover everyone's got an Applebee's and a Foot Locker and a Grease Monkey and a nice, not to get all political, a nice private equity coming in and even buying up mom and pop shops, letting 'em keep their name, but they’re behind it, they own these cleaners, they own these laundromats.

And so I think we're heading towards a world where personalization is gonna get hyper, and I fear... I believe what you're saying is a good idea, and I hope it's true, and I hope it makes its way into communities. But I think that the fabric of communities has been ripped apart from an entertainment perspective with the exception of sports teams and the exception of things like talk about the weather.

I think we're all just a persona segment now. We're a fisherman and an auto intender and someone who likes basketball writ large. And so we're not. The community aspects are gonna be found in the more enduring institutions like schools and churches. And I think that it's gonna take some work to get people to feel a sense of community.

In Los Angeles, there is a sense of being an Angelino, but it's really, I think maybe it's an exception 'cause it's so big. The sense of local news is, it's horrible. Our local infrastructure, our news infrastructure, information infrastructure have been totally gutted, and it doesn't seem like there's a good replacement for it.

So that said, you talk about CBS Radio, I wanna ask you about CBS Radio 'cause we left it to go bare on TV. Scott, who you and I introduced you to, who bought some radio stations, my friend I talked to this week, he bought a bunch of radio stations up in the Finger Lakes. And I caught up with him and I said, "How's it going?"

He says, "It's great." He said that there is a culture and it's based on drive time radio. They all have to go 30 minutes. It's personalized in a way that they're talking about the region. They're bringing in the sports. They're bringing in national concepts, but it's very much alive. And I wonder with the decimation of CBS Radio, what you think is gonna come up in its place, and if that's just because what he owns is more of a rural area.

Tim Hanlon: So the Finger Lakes area of New York State is gorgeous territory, right? And indeed it has rural but also suburban kinds of dynamics to it. And obviously it's got adjacency to some major cities and metros throughout the state, right?

I think you have to look at the radio industry writ large right now. I think it's probably in a really bad place. The fact that CBS Radio News in its $40 million a year budget and serving 800 stations around the country with news of a 99-year-old institution can't be  somehow logically assumed to be an okay proposition for business-wise, that tells you something.

The fact that the largest consolidators of broadcasting stations in the country, iHeartRadio, Cumulus, Audacy, all have gone through at least two bankruptcies each, right? And a few others. And homogenization, right to your point, a lot of these local stations, unlike perhaps your friend's collection there, are not locally programmed.

They're very homogeneously programmed either at central corporate control or a host of syndicators that basically have jocks that kinda just do reads to emulate what a local station person might be doing, but they're not even physically located there, right? So I guess the point is that radio has probably shown how bad it can get. There should be, though, green shoots of, and again, this, I think this has an application to television. Localism is actually really not only possible, but it's also the thing that can't be replicated by other things, right?

In a sea of thousands of choices or millions of choices and algorithms and all that kind of hyper targeting where you're an audience, not a member of a community, that actually stands out, right? And the fewer environments those exist, the more substantial those that keep doing it or start to do so with purely local understanding in a marketplace can be very valuable and necessary, right?

Sought out. 

Tim Hanlon: But I think radio's full of opportunity still to do that. I think the future of it is local. Again, it could be some network programming and whatever, but I think the bulk of it has to be on a local basis, right? I think beach communities and resort towns and those kinds of places probably are the best examples of that.

Yeah. But I agree it should be, it could absolutely be I worry though, right? 'Cause there's not a week that doesn't go by where there's not another 5 or 10 AM radio station that is literally being shut down and their signals being given back.  

They're literally sunsetting AM radio stations.

Yeah. We talk about the bandwidth and all that kind of FM versus AM and all that stuff. But the fact that actual radio stations, WBT in Charlotte, a very heritage station in Charlotte. The AM signal, they just shut it off or are gonna shut it off next week, right? That's a big deal. Now it's not nostalgia.

Yeah. These are big stations that used to be their community linchpins, and they're going away. It's gonna take a lot for broadcast radio to come back, especially in their era of streaming, but localism absolutely can be the salvation. And I think your friend's got some opportunity there if he can convince people listening to the radio is a pastime worth doing.

Jason Damata: Yeah, I think I guess my point is that it's going really well for him. I was, I'm not gonna say 100% surprised 'cause he's smart and he's finding ways to digitize and modernize and, but I think a lot of it might be these pockets where the behavior of getting in your car and driving to work is widespread, and there's really no other option.

I would say that's probably a better opportunity to capture someone than even all those people when they go home at night and turn on the television. 'Cause when you turn on the television, now you get access to the whole wide world, right? And not to say you don't have that on your phone and through integrations with Spotify and whatever.

Again, I think it might be a digital divide thing, but there are these bands of stories that I've been hearing, and another one is these high-gloss magazines. I have a friend who I just had dinner with. He owns a quarterly high-gloss magazine in Bainbridge Island off of Seattle.

And everybody in the town knows it, reads it, loves it. And so I don't think local will totally go away, but I think that from an ad spending perspective, it's gonna continue to be an engine and local businesses are still gonna need to invest in being discovered and building loyalty.

I just think that TikTok's investment there makes them really smart, right? They understand when you wanna find a restaurant nearby, the future generations are just gonna open up their phone and go to TikTok and look for reviews. And the whole nature of localism is gonna change, and I don't see how it does that on a dumb signal, a broadcast signal of any kind.

I think it's gonna be a smart signal that can help bring people together. My other hope is that this thesis that the written word is gone, it is quickly becoming commoditized to the point where it's all noise, you can't trust if it's a human or not.

There's an entire movement of people that are fed up with it, and there will be. And, with that, they'll be the opposite in some way. And so I think that creates an opportunity for new community, new inner life. So that's why I think experiential is gonna become increasingly important.

That's why I think ticket prices for concerts have continued to skyrocket. There, although I know there's some consolidation there with these mega concerts now instead of smaller bands I read something. But the point is, my hope is that the drown of AI and the drown of noise will increase the value people get in trusted voices.

And honestly, that's why we invest in things like this show. That's why we invest in things like TVRev, where it's like at least you know you're getting real people that are giving you opinions you may or may not agree with or perspectives you may or may not agree with. I just don't know how much physical proximity will trump special interests that help me, that...

Because ultimately you wanna go places that give you value and help you along your way or that you already identify with. And so I just wonder where local goes from there. 

Tim Hanlon: All right, I'll end with this and then maybe you tickled my nostalgia thing here. When I was back in the agency space at Starcom and Starcom MediaVest Group and Publicis Groupe Media and all that sort of aggregation that happened back in the aughts, as the internet thing was becoming a real sort of thing, we kinda created this little term, and I don't know who was responsible for it.

But we kinda saw the internet as basically being the garden of, I guess you call them passion groups, right? Where it enables via a smart signal, to your point, right? Call it an IP connection or whatever that is, the ability for other like-minded people, for better or for worse, to recognize that there are other people like them out there somewhere in their interest or their passion for, or their obsessiveness about certain things, topics, hobbies, whatever it might be. And to know that there are others out there and that those can be collectivized, so to speak into its own group, right? Which is outside of a DMA or a city or any other sort of traditional demarcation. And the only way that marketers essentially can benefit from that or have benefited from that, who've been successful, is to aggregate those audiences.

Not only target them to the extent you can without being too creepy maybe that's out of the barn already. But the ability to coalesce them into groups that are large enough or financially viable enough to market to and/or speak to in their particular realm. And those are endemic brands that specifically speak to miniature dollhouse enthusiasts or New York Mets fans or whatever those things might be.

And then that's how the marketers… And it's things like the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards. While those prices go up, the audience for the more generic or the more broad the audience actually, the more I think, the less actually intriguing that is to marketers because it's harder to activate to everybody, right?

But if you can give me groups of everybody that have a couple- ... of different distinctions to them, I might be able to speak in their respective languages. 

And I think that's the world we're in right now. And I think with all due respect, I think the broadcast radio and the broadcast television industries are the last to find that out.

Now what are they gonna do? And that's the thing I wanna at least help some who wanna change and evolve get there. Yeah. I'm worried. 

Jason Damata: You're also well-suited to help them figure that out. I agree with you on that. I think they've known for a long time and it's like a managed decline and whether or not they invested in the transformation is you're seeing that they actually didn't.

And, but to your point about these local nodes, fashion nodes and how they... This whole idea of proximity being physical, I do think it is our own interest. There’s a great Sebastian Maniscalco skit, that he does where he talks about how the internet all of a sudden brought all these people that were in their basement out, and now you can go to a Holiday Inn down the street and find a bunch of furries.

Next thing there's all these furry conventions. But maybe not the best example, but I always think of it as yeah, people at least have a place where they can find others like them. And so again, back to that double-edged sword of technology is tearing apart the central organizing principles of the past.

But thankfully, they're giving a lot of people a new place to connect that just happens to be distributed. And sadly, digital does not replace in-person. Digital does only so many vibes can be had over the internet. You still wanna be able to hang with people in person, and you still wanna be able to share your shared interests that you can't organize against, and that to me is a tragedy.

So it gets a lot harder for local municipalities to say, "We don't want this factory. We don't want this data center. We don't want this policy," because they're all, everyone's following a national narrative now, or they're following their interest graph and the information ecosystem that broadcast delivered us was so vibrant that actually you really couldn't have big issues escape the public knowledge.

And today you really can, and they go uncovered and they go undiscussed. And so anyway, I think you were trying to close out and then I ran my mouth.

Tim Hanlon: With that, let's hope that Jason touches some grass this weekend. I will do my best to do the same as well. Because I think that's at the end of the day, you have to put all of this in perspective.

Like we can obsess about the demand of a CBS Radio or a late night television show and stuff. And sure things change, things evolve and stuff, sometimes when some of those things go away, you don't miss them until you miss them, right? 

I wonder if the absence of CBS Radio News and almost 100 years of its strength as a trusted source, an accurate source, and professional source of news won't be lost to someone or to us at some point in time when we could use it the most.

And same with a late night show and maybe the beginning of the end of the daypart. Are we losing some social currency collectively as a nation that we relied on to distract us? Yes,  for half an hour each day before we go back to fight our battles? History, they say, it doesn't repeat, but it certainly rhymes.

We'll see these ideas probably come back in some other form, but I think it's gonna be a short term, at least, loss for these kinds of things. I guess I'm really curious as to how these things might regenerate and push us forward now that they're gone. 

Jason Damata: That's right. It's funny how much we mourn the loss of things I didn't support in the first place.

I haven't listened to radio in forever, and I'm so sad to hear it's [declining]. But I know the value of it to so many, and that's the part that one can only hope.

Tim Hanlon: We're gonna leave it there. Thanks to Jason. We'll have him back, of course, on a semi-regular basis as we graduate this platform into more conversations with a whole host of voices in and around local media. Doesn't mean that Jim is being banished by any sense or any stretch. We'll have him on the regular rotation, but kinda wanna get this more broad and more voluminous in terms of points of view and all that kinda stuff.

Jason, this week, was an excellent start to that dynamic. Our thanks not only to him, but the incredible team at Fabric Media and/or TVREV, and in particular, that's Melissa Hourigan and Jessika Walsten. We also wanna thank our friends at Madhive for the sponsorship of this show whose idea this was a co-creation of.

And of course, to our editorial person extraordinaire, his name being Jerry Payne, for his audio excellence this week. Of course, can't do the show without him, and we can't do it without you. Thank you for listening. We appreciate you being with us this week In the Vicinity.