Category Archives: Learfield

RadioIowa.com: 100,000 stories

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Radio Iowa News Director O. Kay Henderson called yesterday to report the network website now has 100,000 stories. More on the website but first a little background on Kay.

Roger Gardner and I hired Kay right out of college (Iowa State) in 1987 as we prepared to launch Learfield’s second state news network. Thirty-nine years! The most recent “new hire” in her newsroom was in 1995! Since day one it has been one of the companies most successful networks, due in no small part to Kay’s leadership.

It was the first network for which we created a website. Don’t recall why but probably because of the state’s high political profile. The earliest screen-grab on the Wayback Machine was from December, 1996 with another capture in January, 1997.



For reasons I never understood, web pages in those early days of the “WWW” all seemed to have a grey background.

These first efforts were hand-coded by Allen Hammock and Dan Arnall, two young college students we hired to help us “get online.” Those two, along with the amazing Learfield engineers, figured out how to “stream” audio in those early days.

“Before Digital Had A Name”

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This post was written by a “team” of AI agents/bots running on Phil Atkinson’s (long time friend and former co-worker) computers. He gave the bots two documents I wrote several years ago, chronicling Learfield’s early experiences with the Internet and the emerging digital world, tasking them to summarize.

Learfield Data, Learfield’s early Internet work, and the Phil/Steve overlap

Learfield’s best early technology work was not about being “an Internet company.” It was about finding trapped information, moving it through a cheaper or faster channel, and discovering who valued the result. That habit began before the web, with satellite sideband data, weather, crash reports, wire copy, and affiliate services. The web did not replace the habit. It exposed the same habit to a bigger audience, looser rights boundaries, weaker business models, and much more operational complexity.

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Perplexity is a better writer than I

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A couple of years ago I pulled together some notes and files about Learfield’s early adventures with the Internet. (I’ve posted on this topic more than once.) Yesterday it came up in a conversation with Perplexity which asked I would like to see a “narrative chapter” of that history. I was pretty sure Perplexity would produce something more readable so I said “go ahead.” 

It boiled my fourteen page ramble down to three pages while creating a story that –to my mind– accurately captured the vibe of those frantic days. [Links above to PDFs]

I’ve resisted the temptation to let an AI write or rewrite these blog posts and will continue to do so. But I wonder if it’s much different than an author submitting a manuscript to an editor who cleans it up and generally improves it.

Dan Arnall, Allen Hammock (The Cyber Twins)

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I have posted on Learfield’s early adventures with the internett and the crucial role played by Dan Arnall and Allen Hammock. I’ve stayed in touch with Allen but not so much with Dan. The “Cyber Twins” got together recently and shared the image above. Allen’s career path has been in technology while Dan has made his mark in journalism.

Dan is currently with NBC News, where he serves as Vice President of News Standards. He is based in New York. Continue reading →

Claude Reads My Learfield Internet History

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A while back I posted my recollections of Learfield’s early explorations of the Internet. Today I asked Claude for an “analysis.”

Claude: This is a genuinely fascinating document — and not just as company history. It reads as a microcosm of the entire early-web era, with Learfield stumbling through the same phases that thousands of other media companies went through, just from an unusual vantage point (mid-Missouri, radio-centric, deeply regional). Continue reading →