You forgot the obituaries. Now thats big. The old folks pay big money and foam at the mouth to here that. Thats community service....
I'm unable to tell if you are serious or if you are "putting down" the dead people. (Intentional play on words!)
Small markets, rural markets do tend to contain an older demographic. If you are young and you live in a more urban area like Knoxville or Cookeville or the Kingsport-Bristol-Johnson City area broadcasting obits will likely seem quaint, strange and maybe distasteful. (For the young, even ATTENDING a funeral tends to be distasteful.)
Your community does not have a daily newspaper, or if the paper has poor circulation in the area outside the city limits, without radio obits the funeral is often over and body buried before people become aware of the event.
Churches and civic organizations in rural areas tend not to have a "well oiled" internal communication methodology. In the city it is more likely that churches and other organizations will have a phone tree organization or a committee that will see that such an event is communicated so that is why city dwellers tend to write off the idea of broadcasting obits.
Getting back to the original question and topic of this thread: If radio does not have SOMETHING that people want to hear, need to hear, (or can I say it...) dying to hear, why would they ever turn on any radio thus the (radio) market is eventually dead.
Here again, Younger people who dwell is groupings known as cities tend to be much more focused on MUSIC so radio in the last 50 years not only has been built on a foundation of music, but the walls and the roof have also been music.. If we sat down and made a spreadsheet listing every station in East Tennessee and then started putting check marks in columns to indicate what they program, what would we find? Music is 97% of the programming content? If the market is dead, that may be the cause of death.
Now: back to making a list of vitamin pills to keep our radio station alive. Tradio. obits, Police station news. Boy! We run out of inspiration quickly, don't we?
