It’s been a while since Bomani Jones hosted his Raleigh-area sports talk radio shows, The Three-Hour Lunch Break on 620 The Bull, and Sports Saturday with Bomani Jones on 850 The Buzz. In the years since, he has been very successful with his The Right Time podcast, as well as his work at ESPN and HBO.
Jones recently appeared on Jon “Stugotz” Weiner’s podcast, where he lamented not being able to bring people together in digital media the same way that he once did with sports talk radio.
“I do miss it,” Jones admitted. “The coolest thing about radio to me, and why I enjoy it over every other medium, is that the community that surrounds it is always so much more intimate, and always like much closer.”
Jones mentioned a book he read that argued that more communication doesn’t necessarily bring people closer together. He then emphasized that by allowing live call-ins, sports radio helps bridge the gap between people and enables them to connect on a personal level.
“Doing the jobs that we do, especially like in the face of social media and everything else. You talk more and more, and you’re going to reach a point where you say something, or you’ve evolved and changed in such ways that somebody is not going to like it,” Jones said. “In radio, it was calls and people would call up to the radio station, and maybe they want to get one off on you because they’re upset with whatever it is that you’ve done… Where we all are now is the longer you do this and there’s no feedback mechanism and the radio creates the possibility of feedback mechanism…
“I miss when I did daily radio. There were five or six people that I knew I would talk to every day. They call in. They were happy to talk to me. I was happy to talk to them. We would hang out. In your life, you got no five people that are going to call you every day that you want to talk to.”
In the same vein, Jones touched on his belief that the closed network of podcasting, where audiences can only engage through comments after the fact, has had a diminishing effect on talent’s ability to connect with their audiences.
“You record it and you put it up, people are now more likely just to go b*tch about it on their own little platform than engage the person. Then the engagement is tough as the person now, because you get so much sh*t along the way that you can’t even tell who a real person is.”