UPDATE 6/3/09 5:29 PM: We had no idea how quickly the link to Radio & Records’ announcement of its own demise would go away. The R&R site went down roughly 5 minutes after we posted the below link. We did warn you to “click it as soon as you can”, but we didn’t think the R&R site would go under in minutes!
To read more on R&R’s closure, check out these stories from Inside Radio and Mediaweek…
Our original item is below…
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If you’re a Certain Age in the radio business, the Radio Information Bible for you was “Radio & Records”.
Most broadcasters starting their careers from the mid-1970’s into the mid-1990’s found week-old “R&R” copies sitting on desks in the hallway or jock lounge…after their program director had already read them.
For many radio people, including your Primary Editorial Voice(tm) back in the day, those old R&Rs were their only connection to the world of radio outside where they worked.
No more.
Radio & Records, now owned by Billboard parent Nielsen, announced today that it is shutting down…and click the link as soon as you can, for it’s about to go away:
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The current state of affairs has left The Nielsen Company with no other alternative but to immediately cease all services, products and events related to Radio & Records. The magazine’s final edition is the June 5 issue. Electronic products end today, the Web site will be taken offline soon.
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R&R started up in 1973, according to the timeline on the linked story. When Print Was King, so was R&R.
And then, many years later, this thing called the Internet came along.
R&R followed with its online site, but it always seemed to fall behind other efforts to bring news about the radio and record industries to the online audience.
Most notably, Joel Denver’s AllAccess site basically supplanted R&R as the lead national source for radio industry news, information and gossip, and R&R never recovered. (Mr. Denver, by the way, is a former R&R editor.)
And since the site is free, and everyone has Internet access now, the dynamic as a whole has changed as well.
Of course, the transition from the Print World to the Digital World as far as news about the radio industry goes has played out on other levels.
Local newspapers make a very small effort to cover developments in radio, and at least here, this very blog has basically become a replacement for regular newspaper coverage of radio news…give or take an occasional column by the Plain Dealer’s Julie Washington, or Beacon Journal pop culture writer Rich Heldenfels.
Some of it is the migration to the Internet, some of it is because at times, there isn’t as much to cover that’s of interest to a general audience. (We do far more “inside baseball” coverage of both local radio and TV that wouldn’t really be in the spirit of a newspaper column.)
But back to R&R…even though it seems its most relevant days went away in the 1990’s, we’re sad to see it go…
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