John Laws - #1 radio icon quits

Australian radio broadcaster John Laws has announced he is retiring from
broadcasting and will leave the nation's airwaves by November.

Laws, 71, has announced his decision live on-air during his morning
radio program on Sydney's 2UE which is syndicated nationally to more
than 2 million people on the Southern Cross Broadcasting network.

Word of Laws's imminent announcement spread shortly after 9am, forcing
the man nicknamed "Golden Tonsils" - who is famous for his "Keep the
dream alive" slogan - to break the news during his program.

"We have certainly been able to keep the dream alive. Sadly we haven't
been able to keep the secret alive.

"But given there are television crews all over the place and
newspapers on the telephone and prime ministers ringing and all sorts
of extraordinary things happening I assumed that the secret was out."

He has said he has loved every minute of his long career. "I've known
nothing else. It's been the second great love of my life, apart from
my family.

[EDIT]

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,21962276-5005962,00.html

Laws' views may not have been to everyone's taste, but he always seemed sincere,
which was not something you could always say about his rivals in Australian radio.

[EDIT-post truncated because originating material is copy-protected. Unauthorized use of copyrighted content is in violation of Radio-Info's TOS. URL provided by Radio-Info as a courtesy to other users.]

In Australia, ABC Radio’s PM programme marked the 40th birthday of talkback radio this week. It's hard to imagine there was ever a time without it, yet talkback in this country only began forty years ago, in 1967, with a Sydney radio show hosted by Ormsby Wilkins.

Commercial talkback radio celebrated its 40th anniversary, and one of the masters of the craft was there in Sydney. Not a broadcaster, but the Prime Minister John Howard, who has used talkback to reach out to the public over the heads of journalists and commentators.

Listen to the report here.

http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2007/s1992263.htm

New forms of media are appearing all the time, but radio is still a favourite of many.

The current PM, John Howard, said “in the time I've been Prime Minister, radio has been my preferred medium of communication.”

And media commentator Mark Day sees radio's continued importance in simple terms: “Radio will be what it's always been. It's a mobile medium: it's there if you go jogging, it's there in your car, it's there in your home, it's wherever you want it and if somebody is out jogging it's very, very hard for them to interact with blackberries, emails or various other forums or various other methods of getting their information. So they'll just wear ear buds and listen to the radio.”

Amen to that!

Now three years later he's coming back!!!

Starts 31 January 2011 on the SuperNetwork.