Is talk radio just about dead? Or is that just their audience?

From the Daily Beast:

"There are a lot of program directors whose radio ‘spider-sense’ is tingling,” says Randall Bloomquist, a long-time radio executive and president of Talk Frontier Media. “They're thinking ‘this conservative thing is kind of running its course. We're saying the same things from morning 'til night and yes, we've got a very loyal core audience—but if we ever want to grow, if we want to expand, we've got to be doing more than 18 hours a day of ‘Obama is a socialist.’”

A look at radio’s PPM ratings for the largest talk radio market in the nation bears this out. An apples-to-apples comparison of ratings between November ’09 and November ’10 in the New York area shows that Rush Limbaugh’s ratings on WABC declined from 5.4 to 5.0—despite the crescendo of a GOP election year landslide. Likewise, year-end to year-end comparisons of the crucial 24 to 55 demographic show that Rush declined from 3.7 to 2.6—while his packaged follow-up acts Sean Hannity and Mark Levin narrowly declined and flat-lined, respectively. And Hannity was dropped from his Philadelphia radio station along with Beck last month after being dropped from his syndicator in Salt Lake City (!) last year before finding a new home in the area.

“I will tell you that a very senior talk radio executive, somebody with responsibility for a large number of talk radio stations, expressed to me just this week his concern that talk radio as we know it could be largely gone in five years and the reason for that is, just plain and simple, the aging demographics of the format,” explains Bloomquist. “Depending on who you talk to, the median age for talk radio is somewhere between 52 and, and, and 63, and it's just going up… for the most part political talk, particularly ideological political talk of any stripe, appeals to old people.”

This matches exactly what my personal observations have been.

I personally NEVER listened to talk radio until Shannyn went on the air, and still only rarely tune in. I just find it an irritating noise after awhile, and virtually ANY ONE'S voice grates on my nerves past the half hour mark.

My daughter WILL NOT ride in the car with me while the station is tuned in to talk radio, and really demonstrates only a passing interest in cable news channels. (Except Rachel Maddow.  She loves Rachel!)  And by the way not one of her friends, not ONE of them, has ever even watched Fox News!

To hear my daughter tell it even Twitter leaves much of her generation cold, and only blogs, Facebook, and texting are able to hold their attention for any length of time.  (Oh, and by the way, the friends of hers I have met are almost exclusively progressive.  Suck on that Sarah Palin!)

Wouldn't it be awesome if the blowhards and trouble makers from talk radio suddenly found themselves essentially talking to themselves in the next five years while the up coming young voters simply turned away from their bombastic rhetoric in order to search for the truth on their own?

Well than it already IS awesome because that is exactly what they are doing.

Let me just say one more time how much hope I have for this new generation coming up behind us. From what I can tell from my vantage point, we did good baby boomers, we did good.