Swap-shop shows can offer glimpse of recession

"Swap Shop" and "Trading Post" programs have long been a staple of rural radio, a sort of free-classifieds-of-the air that may have been harbingers of Craigslist and eBay. Now P. J. Huffstutter of the Los Angeles Times finds that an over-the-air marketplace of an Ohio radio station offers a unique view of the impact of the recession on individual rural families. Sounds like a story most any rural news outlet could do.

"Three or four years ago, there used to be some days where the phones were dead," Chris Oaks of WFIN in Findlay told Huffstutter. "Now, we can't get everything in." In hosting Tradio, the "classified-ad section of the airwaves" for the station that reaches six largely rural counties, Oaks, left, has learned a lot about "life on the farms and blue-collared factory towns dotting the rolling hills" of Northwest Ohio, Hufstutter writes. "Every weekday at 11 a.m., he spends 30 minutes offering hope and the chance to make a few bucks." (Times photo by Jeffrey Sauger)

Oaks' callers range from sellers of wedding rings and dresses with the tags still on them, to older listeners looking for someone to talk to and families looking to move and sell their belongings quickly, Huffstutter reports. One regular listener called to sell a lawn mower and commercial carpet cleaner from his now-defunct business to pay for his medicine after esophageal-cancer surgery. "You can tell these are people who need to raise some cash. That becomes kind of tough," Oaks tells Huffstutter. "How do you react when people will say, I just lost my job, we need to raise money, so we're selling the car; or we're selling the TV we just bought?" (Read more)