President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first “Fireside Chat” – March 12, 1933 | Wikipedia Commons
It’s amazing to me how certain traditions span time, somehow retaining their relevance and resilience.
Take the “Fireside Chat,” for example. Pictured above, FDR started this unique communication device early in his first term in 1933 when America was in the throes of “The Great Depression.” The President intuited that radio could be an incredibly effective medium for a leader tasked with calming down a country wracked with fear and anxiety.
FDR would go on to give 29 more of these intimate talks with his millions of constituents over the next 11 years, called at the time as “a revolutionary experiment with a nascent media platform.”
They worked famously, not just for a president tasked with turning an entire country around but also for the first electronic medium, already in many living rooms and soon to end up in car dashboards, keeping Americans company at home, at work, and on the road.
Presidents have changed a lot since the 1930s and so has broadcast radio. But the elements in place back then that worked so well for a new president and a fledgling medium are still in place today.
All Americans would cherish a U.S. President who laid out his programs calmly and clearly in a personal way. And radio still has the ability to help wise and compelling communicators connect with listeners in an intimate one-to-one way.
It has always struck me as interesting that to this day, convention planners use the term “fireside chat” to describe one-to-one interviews with famous and compelling guests. They really aren’t all that similar to what FDR innovated, but we get the idea.
And similarly, radio has become a ubiquitous term to connote a live, seamless one-to-many conversation between a speaker and an audience. What made radio a powerful medium in the 1930s hasn’t changed in the 2020s.
It’s what we made of it.
Originally published by Jacobs Media
