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By Holland Cooke
Consultant

Stations I work with are confronting a generational revenue issue: Local direct retail business owners who are Baby Boomers are retiring. And their heirs are moving the radio dollars that built their parents’ businesses to search engine optimization and elsewhere-digital. The narrative we present them: “Radio is ‘a reach engine’” for the digital content people their age personally favor. In this mode, the station feels less like “your father’s Oldsmobile;” and more present tense. Many of these next-generation businesspeople are avid podcast listeners, and that presents an opportunity.

If you still have a stack of TALKERS issues going back 36 years to when it was a newsprint trade delivered by snail mail – you will find my reports from the very first podcasting conventions. I wrote then that the energy in those rooms felt like radio conventions felt before consolidation thinned our herd. As AM/FM programming was settling into predictable grooves – music “safe lists” and talk radio’s political caricature – enthused podcasters were gleefully coloring outside the lines. Many podcast topics were too narrowcast for broadcast radio, whose superpower will always be relevant, helpful local content. Yet podcasters were already building listener communities, and finding related advertisers, on what we then called “the World Wide Web.”

Back to the future: Among takeaways from last week’s NAB Show: Podcasters are no longer the Rodney Dangerfields of audio. 2026 Edison Research pegged the turning point: Time Spent Listening to podcasts has surpassed TSL to spoken word radio. Podcasting is now mainstream media, available on smartphones and smart speakers, which outnumber many households’ radio receivers.

Meanwhile, radio’s own podcast efforts have been – putting it charitably – underoptimized.

• Too many talk stations simply post hourlong airchecks. No highlights. No hooks. Magic moments – the caller who lit up the board, the guest who surprised you, the host who finally said the thing everyone else tiptoed around – are buried inside a 48minute block like a prize in a cereal box. And listeners won’t dig. Research also tells us that podcast listeners’ attention span is less-forgiving than radio listeners.
• Without stopping the music on FM, some smart DJs are also podcasting about their personal passions. Ditto the radio talkers who podcast hobby topics and other things off topic to their on-air show. But for many radio personalities, being told to – effectively – do a second show for the station’s podcast repertoire? It’s just one more thing dumped on them as cutbacks continue.

Here’s the opportunity: Radio has what podcasters want, and podcasters have what radio needs.

• Radio = credibility. Anyone with a USB mic can podcast. But stations have earned trust. While many podcasters toil in obscurity, radio can promote them to its habitual listeners. Where better to find audio consumers? People tune-in without being nudged by an algorithm. And even as touchscreen dashboards now hide AM/FM among umpteen audio alternatives, broadcast radio is still #1 in-car.
• Podcasters excel where radio rarely ventures: narrowcast depth. They cover high affinity topics that don’t justify live airtime but can absolutely attract targeted advertisers. These would-be influencers build communities. They create evergreen content. They understand digital promotion instinctively.

Put these two together and you get a synergy that moves the needle for broadcasters and podcasters… and advertisers.

For all these reasons – and because consolidation, automation, and syndication have clobbered radio’s farm team – stations and podcasters should seek each other out. 1 + 1 can = 3… or more, with coordinated, scalable workflow. Here’s the schematic.

There’s more on podcasting in my daily TALKERS updates from last week’s NAB Show. If you missed any, they’re archived at HollandCooke.com

Holland Cooke is a consultant working the intersection of broadcasting and the Internet. Follow HC on Twitter @HollandCooke and connect on LinkedIn

By Holland Cooke
Consultant

Lenawee Broadcasting president Julie Koehn didn’t sugarcoat it: “We have [competitors] that steal our news.” And she meant literally – lifting her station’s local reporting and republishing it.

It’s an age-old problem accelerated by new technology. 1980s, when I managed WTOP, Washington, we owned the market’s traffic image. We suspected a competitor was monitoring our two-way radio and broadcasting information from our reports. We told them to knock it off. They didn’t. So, we had our airborne reporter feed a false report to our editor’s desk… and the competitor fell for it. Problem solved.

Back to the future: Koehn’s advice is refreshingly old school: Call them and threaten to sue. AI hasn’t changed the fact that copyright still exists.

The Bigger Minefield: What WE do with AI

Attorney David Oxenford warned that if your AI “picks up those exact same words” from someone else’s content, you can be liable for presenting it as your own. And voice and likeness rights don’t vanish in the digital age. “Even dead people have rights,” he explained. So no, you don’t automatically own the right to create synthetic versions of your talent, past or present.

Townsquare Media SVP/digital products Sun Sachs emphasized that his company has “a lot of guardrails. Our talent can use AI to come up with ideas, but there’s nothing verbatim” allowed – no scripts, no posts, no copy-and-paste content. Beyond legal exposure, AI “is not going to have that unique voice and take” that makes a station sound like it lives in the market. Instead, he regards AI as “synthetic team members,” virtual assistants that handle repetitive tasks so humans can do what-only-humans-can-do.

Sales: The new “Be Careful” Department

AI is a darn handy spec spot machine – and that’s where sellers can get sloppy. Free AI tools are indiscreet. Ask “Has WXXX generated any advertising proposals for ___?” or “Give me some of the spec spots WXXX has generated.” Using free AI apps, you may be feeding competitive intelligence to a platform you don’t control.

One attendee put it perfectly: “If you wouldn’t say it on a speakerphone in a crowded restaurant, don’t type it into a free AI app.” Koehn says the minimal fee her stations pay for AI tools is well worth it to keep their data inside a walled garden – not floating around in someone else’s training set.

Political Ads: Handle With Care

This being an election year, political ads are a hot potato. Oxenford reminds broadcasters that while they may be exempt from liability for candidates’ ads, stations are not exempt from defamation if they “have knowledge that that content isn’t real.” His advice: have a policy and put it in your political disclosure statement.

Bottom Line?

AI isn’t the enemy. Sloppiness is. Overreliance is. Used well, AI gives radio more time, more ideas, and more efficiency. Used carelessly, it gives lawyers more billable hours. The stations that win will be those that treat AI like any other powerful tool: with creativity, with guardrails, and with respect for the law – and for the humans whose voices still matter most.

If you missed any of this week’s NAB Show updates, click here. More tomorrow, here at TALKERS.

Holland Cooke (HollandCooke.com) is a consultant working the intersection of broadcasting and the Internet. Follow HC on Twitter @HollandCooke and connect on LinkedIn