I was on the radio yesterday morning here in Birmingham – 960 AM WERC to be exact. I was the first guest of a segment looking at area bloggers on the station’s new morning show hosted by Steve Shannon and Leah Brandon. It’s not the first time I’ve appeared on the air in town, but the first since I’ve become a web publisher.
As I was reminded by one of the volunteer contributors to The Terminal, talk radio really is the first and at times still purest form of engaging a lot of people in a conversation. Bloggers could really look at themselves as hosts and personalities, with the comments section serving as a slightly more hidden way to “take calls from the audience.”
I went on about an hour after Jay Saxon did (I will say that I’m convinced that Jay is one of those “adventure follows me everywhere” people…) and his appearance made me a little more relaxed about mine. For those that didn’t know, Jay was the “local Birmingham resident” in the midst of the devastation caused by the natural disaster that struck Myanmar recently. He’s also someone who previously appeared on this site as we followed his adventures in Beirut almost two years ago.
Anyway, it was fairly painless going on and both hosts were quite nice. They knew as much about me as I did about them, though I knew that I recognized both names from elsewhere in my travels and knew that for us to land both of them in this market says a lot about how far we’ve come from the days of The Radio Carousel, though I’m sure that many are waiting for the inevitable next rounds of moves.