I’m a pretty big fan of talk radio, and the Dori Monson show is near the top of my favorite 3 hours in radio.  Tomorrow (Friday), Monson’s show will get bumped for Mariners baseball at 12:55pm.  For most people, getting an extra 2 hours off on a Friday afternoon in March is a pretty good reason to head home, grab the kids and hit the park.

But I appreciate Monson’s experiment.  He’s going to continue ot broadcast, only on the web, from his page at MyNorthwest.com.  He’s merely curious what kind of listenership he’ll get.

Now some people in management might fear this.  After all, suppose he steals people from the Mariners Spring Training broadcast that they paid all those duckets for rights to?  But on the flip side, suppose they now DON’T lose the news talk junkies who hate sports and wouldn’t stick around to listen to a practice game being played by a 101 loss team?

If it works, it opens up all kinds of neat ideas for broadcasters.  Imagine if Monson did a 45 minute call with a politician, and ran the best 12 minutes on the radio, but you had the chance to listen to the whole thing online?  Or if there’s a topic important to Monson, but not necessarily radio worthy.  He could do an extra hour, complete with call-ins, and have it be Web only.

Bottom line is that the media needs to figure out that the 24-hour programming cycle is becoming a thing of the past.  It’s good to see Monson not only recognizing it, but figuring out ways to embrace it.