Here's a different idea: an academic look at sports-talk radio.
Your first reaction to that might be something along the lines of "Boy, they'll study almost anything at universities these days."
There may be some truth in that. For our purposes, the question, though, is whether "Sports-Talk Radio in America" might be more interesting to a more general audience.
Probably not.
Sports-talk radio is about 25 years old right now, and it's certainly had an impact on the medium and sports. Most big cities have at least one such station on the dial.
After a brief introduction, editor J.M. Dempsey jumps into 10 case studies of successful stations. The size of the cities goes from New York down to Omaha, so it's quite a cross-section. Dempsey gets the first chapter, devoted to Dallas.
The stories are pretty striking in their similarity. While there are some national syndicators, such as ESPN, most of the biggest stations prefer local talk. Each city gets a station history, with a few profiles of memorable personalities and incidents thrown in. Some stations try to go over the top in terms of programming, jumping to non-sports topics deemed interesting to the demographic (young males, mostly) when there are dead spots on the sports calendar.
Fine. The catch is that most of the stories read the same way. After finishing a couple of chapters, most readers will get the idea. But the personalities of the on-air staff members don't really come through here most of the time, and that's too bad.
One of the few chapters to break the mold had a local connection for me. Bill Raffel does a good job of examining the battle between Buffalo's two sports talk stations. (Heck, it's why I bought the book in the first place.) There's some drama present there, and it helps that chapter break out of a mold.
More importantly, the book's subtitle is "Its Context and Culture." That's a very interesting area. Sports-talk radio may have changed the sports culture in some ways. We seem to be a lot quicker to criticize athletic figures, and we sometimes don't have attribution and accountability for charges. That may have poisoned the atmosphere a bit. It's fertile area for discussion, yet it rarely comes up here.
Dempsey mentions at some point that this is the first book on sports-talk radio. Actually, a book called "Sports Talk" came out a few years ago. That featured interviews with such personalities as Eddie Andelman (Boston) and Mike & the Mad Dog (New York), and had its entertaining moments. While having flaws, that book had more of a chance to reach out to the general audience.
For the most part, "Sports-Talk Radio in America" proves its main premise -- that nothing drives interest like local conversation. It's difficult to become interested in reading about the radio activities in other places, especially if the stories read the same. Those seeking analysis on the subject will have to go elsewhere.
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