From Corey Deitz,
Your Guide to Radio.
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David Citron has been the webmaster of South Florida Radio Pages for 11 years. If you want to know what's going on or what has transpired in that area's Radio world, this is the place to stop by. I recently posed a few questions to him about his website, its focus and its future.

Corey: How did South Florida Radio Pages get started?

David: My original idea for starting the South Florida Radio Pages in 1995 came when WLRN and oldies station WMXJ and a few other stations had announced that they had web sites. I decided to put the URLs together in one central location. Your old RadioEARTH site was one of the first non-local radio links I added! Later I decided to scan and upload some newspaper articles about radio I had written in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

But the real inspiration had come many years before, from when I was commuting two hours a day to college and listening to AM radio, before the days of cassettes and CDs (and before I-95!). I thought radio content was under-publicized compared to TV, so I started writing about radio for a couple of now-defunct weekly papers. Some of those columns are in South Florida Radio History, on RadioPages.net.

Corey: What type of information will site visitors find?

David: My focus right now, after the move from the old site, is radio news and features. When local deejay Eric Brandon was on ABC-TV's "Wife Swap", I probably had more hits for a single file in an hour and a half than I had ever had before for the whole site in a whole day: people from all over the country who wanted to find out more about him.

Since I had written about Eric as the lead story in July Radio News several months before, the South Florida Radio Pages apparently had more info about him than any other site in the world!

Corey: As a follower of media, what effect do you think new media (satellite, podcasts, Internet) have had on local media like AM and FM?

David: They are killing broadcast radio by inches and station management doesn't care. They don't care about any but the youngest and biggest and hippest market segments. But those unserved niche market segments have disposable income to spend, too.

Corporate radio is sticking to the same consultant-driven game plan rather than adapting to the competition from podcasts, web radio, satellite, and other media. This will be their undoing.

I've heard the refrain "people only want the hits" from so many people. But if that's so, why do people buy MP3 players that can hold thousands of songs? Miami's local so-called oldies station has a playlist that I've heard estimated at 200 to 800. Big deal!

When a market has three sports stations (which we actually had until recently) or four rock stations or three talk stations, that hurts radio as a whole, because that means less total ears on broadcast radio and more ears, which are now unserved, going elsewhere for aural gratification.

I don't even have an iPod, but if I wasn't a radio geek, I'd probably have quit listening to radio long ago, because there is no jazz station, no classical station, no big band station, no real oldies station around here. And hardly any local talk -- mainly syndicated. I guess I have eclectic tastes.

Corey: South Florida Radio Pages is getting a new domain. Why after all this time?

David: Why RadioPages.net? It's a funny story, kind of embarrassing. I never expected the site to get this big... about 100 pages total. The owner of the old domain, who is in commercial-grade hosting (and is actually retired from local radio), had said that his domain had lost its identity in the search engines because of my site, and it had become identified only with the Radio Pages! Oops! (That's why I'm not even mentioning the old domain here. I don't want to make it any worse!) It's an excellent local company and they're still hosting me, but now on RadioPages.net.

Corey: What's in the future for your website?

David: First of all, the annual April Fool's edition is coming soon. The biggest ever. I have about two dozen articles for it so far, parodying everyone from local deejays to Air America and Bill O'Reilly.

I am getting more and more input for both Radio News and Radio History, from local radio people, past and present. For example, there's a chapter about WQAM from retired deejay Bob Gordon's autobiography. And articles by people like Rick Shaw and Greg Budell. Tom Caminiti just wrote about legendary WAXY-FM this week.

That makes it more interesting than if I wrote everything and besides, these radio pros know a lot that I don't know. Remember, I'm a copywriter and technical writer and not in the radio industry, per se.

Plus, I'm still updating dozens of existing pages from the old site, not yet revised and moved to RadioPages.net. Everyone's been telling me there should be a book about South Florida Radio History. Yes, there will be... I'm working on it.