For years, radio professionals have started their day by reading Tom Taylor NOW Newsletter, delivered promptly at 4:00am (ET). After December 21, that habit could be a memory. In today’s edition of NOW (December 11) entitled A Radio Goodbye, Tom Taylor announced his retirement, and the final edition of the newsletter.
“Yes, it’s time for me to retire,” Taylor wrote. “I’ll miss this daily conversation with you.”
Tom Taylor began writing about the radio industry in 1987, for Inside Radio during some of that time. The current iteration of the newsletter has operated steadily since November of 2012, and is currently produced by a three person editorial and sales team of Tom Taylor, Robert Unmacht, and Kristy Scott — familiar faces at industry events. The NOW Newsletter has been a RAIN friend and media partner at RAIN Summits for several years.
The NOW Newsletter is an email-only product, a weighty and deeply informed radio trade that covers headline stories, reviews market ratings, and observes format and branding changes. The end-of-page YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS UP feature, which solicits funny true-story experiences behind the scenes in radio, has unfailingly made readers laugh every day. The feature was born in a pre-NOW newsletter as “No Names, Please.”
“In three decades of covering the business, I’ve tried to be fair, to get the story right, and to be at least a bit entertaining,” Taylor wrote in his announcement. “And an important point — Please don’t read my personal decision as a judgement about the future of radio.”
Is it really the end of the NOW Newsletter? Taylor pins the end date for the “Tom Taylor NOW Newsletter” (note his name in that attribution), and says “we’re working to keep information about the business coming.”