Radio: The State of Radio

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NBC's crackling President Pat Weaver has announced a new, revolutionary plan to catch what radio listeners he can. In June he will launch Monitor, a 40-hour show running from 8 a.m. Saturday to midnight Sunday. Monitor will run every weekend (the time that TV has made network radio suffer the most ) and will include news, sports, time signals, weather, comedy, drama, music, theater, sound track from films and records. It will originate from New York at a $150,000 pushbutton listening post that will make it possible to pipe "remotes" from all over the world into the program. Listeners will have no way of knowing what they are going to hear when they tune in, because the show is intended to have spontaneity and surprise. Says James Fleming, Monitor's executive producer: "We have a new 'vignette approach' and intend to put on anything lively and keep a constantly changing format." Advertisers will come in for one-minute, half-minute or a new six-second billboard announcement.

Nobody can predict whether the NBC experiment will succeed. But it is based on the assumption, undoubtedly correct, that radio is neither dead duck nor dying pigeon. There are still three times as many radio as TV sets in the U.S. On a typical day, according to Mutual's President Tom O'Neil, 77,568,000 people listen to their radios as compared to 79,312,000 people who look at TV. In the face of such facts, the real question is not, "Will radio die?" but an older, more familiar one, "Who is going to capture the radio audience?"