Content by Anthony Dockrill

As a Gen X-er, I am a creature of two centuries. My grounding was in the 20th century, but a significant part of my adult life proper has been in the 21st. So it’s with some degree of sadness that I call time on linear media.

When the news broke that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was being axed, the instant narrative and debate around the axing was: was this a political decision? Did CBS cave to Trump?

Maybe they did, but the bigger story here is that linear media is dying before our eyes and ears.

Late-night talk shows on US TV are, in many ways, their breakfast time. It was a game that set up networks and drove the conversation. “Did you hear what Carson said last night?” In 2025, all the late-night shows are reportedly losing money and, while they may still drive conversations (mainly thanks to YouTube), their influence is greatly reduced. The Late Show was the number one of the late-night talk shows with 2.9 million viewers, which sounds impressive, but to put that figure in perspective: 55 million tuned in for Johnny Carson‘s last show. The real story is not just in the low numbers, but when you drill into the figures, what you see is not just a rapidly shrinking audience but also an audience that is old. Young people have long left late-night TV—it’s no longer relevant.

I do believe radio has a much stronger hand than linear TV due to its immediacy and its ability to link people to events in real time. While I strongly believe radio has a future, the challenges it faces are immense.

We live in a linear world and, for a long time, our media matched this paradigm. This also meant our media offerings were carefully curated and presented to us so we could make the final choice, but the media helped us make sensible and appropriate choices. Call it spoon-feeding or call it consideration—either way, this is how modern media has operated for over 100 years.

Bottom line: this was a market that worked well for most of the 20th century.

So while you did make the final choice, your options were strictly limited. If you wanted The Late Show in the middle of your day? Bad luck. This limitation meant there was always an inconvenience to our consumption of media. You had to be there.

We now live in a world where the idea of waiting or missing out is perverse.

This world of absolute convenience is great in many ways, but what is missing is order and curation. Also, we are all now full-time programme directors, and in many ways this has been awesome.

In this new world where we are our own programme directors is also why many people now live in a world devoid of news or a world that is actually twisted. Let’s just say someone who is following Andrew Tate is probably not getting a rounded experience from the media. So it’s not just the idea of the shared experience we could all join in around the water cooler that is being lost with the death of linear media, but many of us now have an experience that can’t map back to the world we all live in.

In 2025, linear media can still work. Breakfast radio is strong and TV can hold large audiences mainly around sporting rights. But the cracks are everywhere for people to see. Yes it’s holding a core audience who want live news and special programming. But the idea linear media is still central to our lives to the extent that we are willing to structure our lives around it is fast disappearing. For anyone under 30, it’s more or less dead.

Breakfast radio is now the outlier in all this doom and gloom and that will (hopefully) remain for some time—or maybe it will hold on forever. But if it is replaced in our cars and our homes, it will be because we all chose to remove ourselves from its demands on our time. We desired its company and its ability to make us laugh or get angry (let’s be honest here), but we no longer wanted to be just a player on the linear playing field waiting for the siren to begin the game.

Anthony Dockrill is a Digital Producer at Pod Jam and the former Program Director of 2SER FM Sydney.