Yearly Archives: 2005

HD radio might not be the answer

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Bill Figenshu, former group head for Viacom’s radio group, more recently a SVP at Infinity and a Regional President for Citadel, and now a consultant, on a panel (“Future of Radio”) at the recent National Association of Broadcasters annual meeting:

“I’m concerned when I walk into Circuit City or Best Buy and I ask to see the HD radios — and I know they carry the Kenwood model — and the sales guy takes me to the Sirius display and tells me, “This is it! This is digital.”

More on the NAB at Kurt Hanson’s Radio and Internet Newsletter.

Whirlpool is podcasting

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Charlene Li at Forrester writes that Whirlpool is podcasting. The podcasts are produced and moderated by Whirlpool’s director of customer insight, Audrey Reed-Granger, who has a background in broadcasting. And it shows. What’s interesting is the podcasts are focused on family issues and are not centered around Whirlpool products. Moreover, Whirlpool has done no overt promotion of the podcasts, preferring that they be found through word-of-mouth marketing. [via Blogspotting]

Wonderful Library Thing

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BooksRegular readers know I love lists. A couple of years ago I made a list of my books at the time, but it’s a paint in the ass to do without a database. Now, a clever guy named Tim Spalding (a web developer, web publisher and search-engine optimizer based in Portland, Maine) has solved this problem and the world is a better place for it.

LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. A free account allows you to catalog up to 200 books. A paid lifetime account allows you to catalog any number of books. I’m just getting started and it’s going to take me a bit to enter all of my titles but once it’s done I’ll have something so much more useful. Thank you, Tim.

Jane Marshall in NYC

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Long-time friend and star of The Basement Diaries, Jane Marshall, was in NYC last week for Sheryl Crow’s performance in Bryant Park:

“Stayed up all nite making signs with my friends and left the hotel about 5:45 to make the walk to the park. Even though I don’t know (Sheryl) personally, we were able to get her attention and at the end of her set she gave “a shout out to Kennett, MO” that was enough for us. The concert was good but, what really blew us away is how beautiful Diane Sawyer is. I mean, TV does her no justice at all. We were in awe, she is just stunning.”

You can forget big TV stars and famous recording artists… Jane Marshall in the Big Apple is the show I want to see.

Endangered species

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When I started working at KBOA (summer of 1972), Studio A (more commonly known as the “on-air studio” or “the control room”) was always manned. I believe Mr. Rudy was signing on in those days and later shifts were manned by Jeff Wheeler, Charlie Isabell, Charlie Austin, Ted Guffy and Keith Parker. And we were simulcasting the FM during the day with a part-timer running the Cardinal games at night. No automation. No computers. A real, live person cued up the records and played recorded commercials (or read them live). Not very cost effective but a lot of fun for those of us privileged to be “on the radio.”

Between 1984 (when I left KBOA) and around 2000, I traveled all over the midwest visiting radio stations affiliated with our networks. Most in small or very small towns. For many of those 16 years, there were still radio stations with live announcers throughout the day.

Are there any still doing this? I’m not talking about “breaking in” a couple of times an hour to do the weather… I’m looking for one station that still has live announers, sitting in a studio, running the show from sign-on to sign-off. Yes, I understand this makes no sense from a business standpoint. And I can’t give you any good reason why some station owner would be doing this. I’m just asking some of my radio pals to email me if they know of such a relic.

If I can find one, I’ll call them up and see if someone will talk with me about their station and what it’s like to work there (I’ll post the interview here). Better yet, I’ll take my camcorder and get in the car and go visit the station. I’ll record the entire day. We can make a project out of this, like tagging and monitoring Bengal Tigers or some other endangered species.

Buyers shifting to new media

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Story on the Broadcasting & Cable website about ad buyers shifting to new media:

“Advertisers are shifting as much as 20% of their media dollars away from traditional media—TV, magazines and newspapers—and moving them to emerging categories, such as the Internet or movie theater ads.”

Hello? Did you forget radio? Are we not part of traditional media? Or are we not affected by this? (I’m looking for the pony.) And please tell me advertisers are not really taking money out of radio to buy movie theater ads. I refuse to believe that.

Office make-over

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They’re painting all of the offices along our hallway so I’m homeless for a couple of days and the webcam is offline. The office make-over is taking forever and god only knows the price-tag when it’s over but Learfield will be one very nice place to work when everything is complete. I can’t imagine working in nicer surroundings. And today the company had a cookout, just for the hell of it. Someone invited the the guys doing the work on our building so we were all sitting around drinking beer and eating ice cream and feeling fortunate.

How Barb Spent Her Summer

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For those wondering what Barb does when she’s not cooking and scrubbing, we refer you to the American Health Lawyers Association’s Guide to Legal Issues in Life-Limiting Conditions. Barb is a co-leader of the task force which produced the guide and a teleconference that explained it (“The Role of Family and Health Lawyers in End-of-Life Decisions”). It’s all abaout “the important legal and practical issues that arise in the care of individuals who face a life-limiting condition.” I think “life-limiting condition” means “you’re dying.” [News release]

Seth Godin keynote at NAB

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Couple of nuggets (via Radio and Internet Newsletter) from Seth Godin’s keynote this morning at the National Association of Broadcasters annual meeting in Philadelphia:

“With the web and satellite radio and WiMax, radio’s not going to be one-way communication any more — it’s going to be two- or three-way. You’re either going to embrace it or not.”

“The FCC is the reason you exist,” Godin said. “It’s about limited spectrum. If there were a million FM stations, you couldn’t sell any advertisements.” But with the advent of TiVo, Xbox, DVDs, Yahoo!, Escient, home theaters, 400 TV channels, 10,000 magazines, and more, “the TV-industrial complex is going away. What are you going to do about it?”

He challenged his audience,”How many podcast subscribers do you have?”, noting that one New York City station has 50,000 subscribers now and will someday have 500,000 subscribers — “and each one of them is someone who’s not listening to you.”

Responding to the speakers before him who extolled the value of radio’s localism, Godin noted, “Local doesn’t necessarily mean local on a map; it can mean local based on interests.”