Category Archives: Learfield

Game Day (2003)

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I spent most of Saturday doing something I’ve wanted to do for years. I shot some video of “game day” at Learfield Communications.

Our company produces the radio broadcasts (some TV?) for many of the top colleges in the country. Play-by-play crews feed back the game broadcasts to Jefferson City where some very hard working folks mush it all together and send it (via satellite) to radio stations throughout the country. Mega-stress. Give me a few days to edit the video and I’ll post something here. My little project will fall far short of capturing what it’s really like on a Saturday. You gotta be there.

20 Years at Learfield

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I started working for Learfield Communications on June 4th, 1984. When that rolls around again it will The Big 20. Annother one of those “ends in zero” anniversaries. I kept all of my pre-computer calendars (Day-At-A- Glance, Day Timers,etc). That first month it was one of those desk blotter/month calendars. Lots of memories. On my first day, my predecessor –Jeff Smith– presented me with a list of projects-in-progress. An interesting snap-shot of the regional, radio network business in 1984. We were trying to get programming cleared in Kansas City and St. Louis. We called them “custom casts” and they worked for a while. We organized a series of debates between the candidates for governor (we fucked up the broadcast). We cooked up a statewide public opinion poll that got us a lot of ink (not all good). But my favorite project was a series of daily, one-hour talk shows featuring shills for various associations. On Monday, somebody from the Missouri Chiropractors Association; on Tuesday an optomotrist; on Wednesday a podiatrist; etc. Station managers just laughed at me. Rule One: Don’t let commissioned sales reps cook up your programming. Looking back, I must say I’m surprised how little our networks have changed. For some reason, I’m reminded of something Charlie Warner said. Your method of distribution defines the nature of your business. That was true back in the days of land-lines and analog satellite distribution and it’s sill true as we move more and more content to the web. Maybe it’s all about band-width. Radio stations have a bunch and you can move a lot of data over those frequencies. Factor in that those frequencies are rare commodities, granted by the FCC. No competition. Fast forward to a world where any DJ/reporter/entertainer/you-name-it can reach an audience. New ball game?

BBC checks with Radio Iowa

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One of the reporters that works for our network in Des Moines (Matt Kelley) was interviewed by the BBC today. A British man was arrested in Fort Madison (Iowa) after flying there from England to rendezvous with a 14-year-old Iowa girl. The two met on the Internet three months ago. The man tried to pay his hotel tab with a check from a bank in England… a dispute arose… the cops were called and he mentioned the name of the girl who was staying with him. The girl had been reported missing by her parents as a runaway the day before. The BBC called the Radio Iowa newsroom and asked Matt Kelley to fill them in on the story. The busted Brit, by the way, is a radio deejay who –if convicted– could get 12 years in prison. I’ll see if Matt recorded the interview from his end. Doubt it.

Derry Brownfield Show Trailer

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I’ve spent most of my evenings for the past couple of weeks working on my first video project. The hardwarde (Sony) and software (Studio 8) have gotten so good and so affordable, I had to take the plunge. I decided I needed a practice project that would hold my interest while allowing me to make countless mistakes. The result is an 18 minute piece on The Derry Brownfield Show, a daily, one-hour talk show heard on 80+ radio stations. Documentary is too grand a word but my objective was to give listeners a peek into the studio. Lots of places to make mistakes: lighting, sound, composition. Once I get the basics in hand, I’ll try something a bit more creative. These buggers are too large for downloading but I’ve made a little 60 second trailer. [Watch on YouTube]

Relaunch Learfield.com

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After months of planning and hundreds of hours of work, we re-launched the corporate website at 5:00 a.m. on November 1. On time and only a little over budget. The look and feel is the work of a very talented designer named Kory Johnson. Her style is very sleek and clean.

Everything beneath the hood was created by Gestalt, Inc. Chief Knowledge Architect Andy Waschick has spent so much time on our sites that he’s had no time for his own. He has a blog but it’s a sometimes dark and forbidding place that I dare not send you without his permission and note from your mother. Having Andy build your website is like… having Thomas A. Edison wire your home. It’s likely to take a little longer because he’s always creating and inventing and staying up all night in his workshop building a garage door opener before you have a car (or they’ve been invented). Somewhere along the way I stopped asking, “Would it be possible…?” because nothing is impossible for Andy.

The next phase for Learfield.com will be the development of a company-wide intranet. The thought of really connecting all of the employees in our company can be a scary one for some of our managers. Do we really want everyone to be able to communicate with everyone else? Do we really want them to be able to communicate with our customers and business partners?

Indiana State Fair

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Due to a staffing crises at one of our networks, I’ve been pressed into service to cover (?) the Indiana State Fair. Since ours is an ag network, I’ll be there for Farm Day, August 14th. It’s been a while since I’ve been entrusted with an asignment like this and I’m desperate not to screw it up. It promises to be a pretty exciting day:

Old-fashioned Pancake Breakfast (There must be contemporary pancake breakfasts)
Square Dancing Tractors and Antique Tractor Olympics (Square Dancing Tractors? I’m there!)
Celebrity Milking Competition (I didn’t know you could)
Rooster Crowing Contest (Good audio)
National Shropshire Show (I’m not sure I can say that)
Open Shetland Show (…or this)
Sheep Shearing Demonstrations (…or this!)
Clogging (Plumbers’ online journals?)
Country Western Dancing (couples) (I’m staying for the individual competition)

I’m sure there will be out-takes and I’ll try to share them here.

The Biology of Typing

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I didn’t take biology in high school. My mom called the school and told them she didn’t think I needed to take the course. Turns out she was right. But she insisted I take typing. We used real typewriters. Manuals. There were a few electic typewriters in the back of the room but they seemed too exotic and high-tech to use. Every week or so we had these “timed typing” tests to see how many words-per-minute we could type. There some kind of formula…total words minus number of errors, something like that. I quickly figured out that my best shot was to go wide open, with no regard to errors. I frequently had the best score for a document nobody could read. This was 1964 and computers and word processors were years in the future.

Twenty years later I started working with a guy named Bob Priddy. Bob was (is) a broadcast journalist, author and –in 1984– power typist. His “office” was a cramped, dusty corner of an attic in Jefferson City, Missouri. The digital newsroom was still a few years off and Bob hammered out his news stories on a battered old Royal typewriter. The floor and walls shook when Bob was on deadline. No IBM Selectric for Bob, he was a manual guy all the way. Bob “keyboards” these days. And if he doesn’t pound the keys as he did back then, it’s only because they couldn’t take the punishment.

I recently came across an article by Roger Ebert (In Cyberspace, Writing Is A Performance) that reminded me of Bob and his battered Royal.

“A few moments ago I took the L.C. Smith down from the shelf and tried to type on it, and found that I could not. It’s just so klutzy. My fingers have to travel so far and work so hard to depress a key. You have to manually return the carriage at the end of every line. You have to hit the Tab key to indent. My fingers are no longer trained to hold down the Shift key.”

I love email. I’m trying to get comfortable with Instant Messaging but it’s a struggle. Knowing the other person is sitting there (“Mays is typing you a message”), waiting for me to respond. I find myself drifting back to typing class (“Fuck the typos, I’m going for speed!”).

I don’t think they make manual typewriters any more. Seems like I read that some place. I’m tempted to add, “too bad” but I can’t say why. Sort of like me and biology.