https://www.listennotes.com/e/22ae9e60f4ca401b899fa3c7902f436a

What are the pros and cons of communicating in any one medium? Well, any one medium can have both strengths and weaknesses. For example, television. There's nothing like the glamour of television. There's nothing like the ability to become famous overnight if you're on all the TV shows, all the TV networks at once. If you're in everyone's living room, if you're on a big screen and people see your face talking about whether it's a political issue or a sporting event that you've won, you can become famous overnight. Television is not a particularly good medium for going into massive depth for covering substance, for getting a lot of air time, going into great, great detail. Radio, let's look at that. Radio does not have the glamour of television, but radio can be an intimate medium where people hear you and they spend hours and hours with you. not just in the 2010 to 2020 range, but in the aughts and early 2000s, the 1990s, 1980s, the most highly paid media personalities were not TV folks other than Oprah. They were radio personalities. Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, the now deceased Paul Harvey. These people made a lot more money than TV stars because of their ability to really have strong relationships with their audiences and because they could be on for three, four hours a day and command all that advertising revenue. So there is a certain intimacy and power of radio that you don't have with TV. Let's look at print. Print, certainly if you're looking at things like actual books, traditional newspapers, it traditionally has the legitimacy, the authority, the intellectual heft. To have a column in the New York Times op-ed section was to be able to, at least at one point, to be able to move the political needle in Washington and elsewhere in public policy. To have a serious book from a serious publisher on the New York Times bestseller list was to really have influence and cloud. These days text can be online, digital, there's the ability to go into more depth, longer, more substance, but text can also be Twitter these days, 140 characters, and someone like Donald Trump essentially won the Republican nomination in 2016 off of the power of his Twitter feed. Being able to communicate in short pithy text statements has more power than ever. Here's what I think any communicator should really size up and that is what are you best at? What do you enjoy doing the most? What are you best at? Focus most of your time doing that but then try to use every single communication tool. Rush Limbaugh, for example, not someone I necessarily agree with politically, but has been a master of the medium of radio for decades now. He'll periodically write books that become bestsellers. He had a TV show that was actually pretty successful, although people don't remember it that way. He's had his own tie line newsletters. He's had a lot of different ventures, so he's certainly used all media, but he spends most of his time on radio. Howard Stern, the same could be said about him. Wildly successful publishing books. He's been a movie star, movie about his own life, he's had TV shows, video on demand, but it all comes back to his radio show as a base. Bill O'Reilly has a base as a primetime TV anchor. And because of that, he's had radio shows, a gazillion books that have been New York Times best sellers, and he's able to get his column printed in newspapers and be a guest on everyone else's show. So because he does well in one medium, he then communicates in all other media. These days, I think you have to figure out where are you best, where you're going to spend most of your time. For some people, it's Keynote speaking. The books, the radio appearances, others are secondary to that. For some people, they're superstars on YouTube. Their podcast doesn't get much audience at all. Others are wildly successful with their podcast in an audio format and their YouTube channel has 10 views. That's okay. My recommendation seek out every opportunity you can to communicate in every medium, but spend most of your time on the medium that you enjoy the most that also resonates the most with an audience.