Authenticity and Locality

Upon finishing reading the 'Making Waves' book by Ramsey I was happy to find that he concluded with and 11-point plan for radio's future. Bottom line: a station should connect with its listeners, it should be concerned with local issues and events. It should foster the kind of relationship with its listeners that has substance, a relationship that is real. It should be the place where they turn to every morning on their commute and every afternoon on their return home to get the information that they want, to hear the music that they can relate to. I love this idea of 'leveraging your loudspeaker'. Radio does not have the visual element that TV or the Internet do, but we do have a huge megawatt speaker that is heard by 90% of adults at least once a week, and if used in the right way can put us way ahead of the competing media outlets.
So we know that we need to truly connect with listeners, and once we do that we need to keep doing it. Flexibility and change are key, introducing new formats and programming and new talent is essential to the continued growth of a station. Everything that I have stated is not any easy task to achieve and a lot of the concepts seem conflicting... be authentic but don't cater to such a small market that you have no listeners... connect with listeners on a more intimate level, and then once they are comfortable change it up, yeah it sounds ridiculous to me just writing it. But there needs to be some sort of balance. To achieve that balance and overall success Radio first needs to start in the communities and ask themselves: what is it that consumers/listeners want that they are not already getting or getting enough of? Once you find that then move on to how you will go about providing them with what they want in an 'authentic' way. Authenticity can then be achieved through new ideas and new talent, which incorporates the element of flexibility. Radio has to remember how it started, for example, low power stations started out of a need for niche programming and music, so when they nationally syndicate almost every one of their programs they lose that 'local' touch, essentially they have lost the personal connection with listeners.
From what I gather thus far, Bearcast has not lost its 'local touch', it is just in need of a broader reach, more publicity, and essentially more listeners, so in this case it seems we have the opposite problem of terrestrial radio.