Yearly Archives: 2005

Execution journal: Donald Jones

Posted on by

In his capacity as news director for The Missourinet, Bob Priddy has witnessed 15 executions. The most recent was the April 27th execution of Donald Jones, for which Bob produced an “audio journal” that begins as he leaves his motel in Bonne Terre to go to the prison and ends as he prepares to leave the prison about two and a half hours later. Bob telescoped the audio down to about half an hour and some segments have been shifted for context purposes (the reading of the final statement of Donald Jones, for example).

Bob was not allowed to take his recorder to the execution witness area, so he summarizes the events that took place in that approximately 90-minute span. The main voices you will hear are those of Missourinet News Director Bob Priddy, Corrections Department spokesman John Fougere, and Corrections Director Larry Crawford. Voices of various other officers will be heard as part of the process.

Podcasting: New life form

Posted on by

“Podcasting is a whole new system, a whole new class of activity. It may be like radio, but we make a mistake if we understand it in terms of radio. Think of it instead as a new life form that’s native to the Net. That some of it can be leveraged, or harvested, for the radiosphere, fine. But understand that the pioneers here are blazing new trails, opening new frontiers. Not restoring old burned-out cities.”

— Doc Searls on podcasting and broadcasting

XM Radio Online

Posted on by

This is just a very different listening experience. The player displays the artist and title currently playing each of my preset channels. Listening can be as passive or interactive as mood dictates. And the audio quality (on my DSL connection) is pretty amazing. Radio good enough to pay for.

Learfield Sports Operations

Posted on by


Our company has the broadcast rights (football and basketball) for some of the top colleges in the country and most of the production happens here in Jefferson City, Missouri. A major expansion of our sports operations and engineering facilities is underway and I asked Chief Engineer Charlie Peters to give me a tour this week.

Ad dollars moving online

Posted on by

“This year the combined advertising revenues of Google and Yahoo! will rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of Americas three big television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, predicts Advertising Age. It will, says the trade magazine, represent a watershed moment in the evolution of the internet as an advertising medium. A 30-second prime-time TV ad was once considered the most effectiveand the most expensiveform of advertising. But that was before the internet got going.”

— Economist.com on an article in this week’s Advertising Age. More of the same at Yahoo!

First all-podcast radio station

Posted on by

“The world’s first all-podcast radio station will be launched on May 16 by Infinity Broadcasting, the radio division of Viacom. Infinity plans to convert San Francisco’s 1550 KYCY, an AM station, to listener-submitted content. The station, previously devoted to a talk-radio format, will be renamed KYOURadio.”

— Wired

Internet radio “not real radio”

Posted on by

David Goldberg is VP/GM for Yahoo! Music, the home of LAUNCHcast. From his keynote speech at last week’s RAIN (Radio and Internet Newsletter) Las Vegas Summit:

“We really want to replace broadcast radio for music discovery. We believe music will migrate off of terrestrial radio to the services we are offering because we can deliver the music consumers want, when they want it, where they want it,” he explained. “We don’t believe music will continue to be broadcast on analog radio. Terrestrial radio will continue as a very successful, profitable business — but it will be mostly talk (he cited the only formats growing on terrestrial radio as Talk and Hispanic),” he said. And, he explained, this goes for satellite radio as well.

Susquehanna Radio Senior VP Dan Halyburton claimed that since Yahoo! Music couldn’t bring the “personality” and “local community” like AM and FM radio, it’s “not real radio.”

Business Week: “Blogs Will Change Your Business”

Posted on by

I haven’t seen it, but Doc says it’s the cover story (May 2, 2005) in Business Week. In Blogs Will Change Your Business, Stephen Baker and Heather Green offer this warning: “Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.”

There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. Let’s assume that 99.9% are off point. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.

While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to.

The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they’re losing control of it.

The dot-com era was powered by companies — complete with programmers, marketing budgets, Aeron chairs, and burn rates. The masses of bloggers, by contrast, are normal folks with computers: no budget, no business plan, no burn rate, and — that’s right — no bubble.

A prediction: Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like — you guessed it — blogs.

We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m getting a thin spot on the top of my head from people patting and smiling when I talk about blogs. I’ve bookmarked the new blog at Business Week Online(Blogspotting.net).