Category Archives: Learfield

15 years of Day-Timers

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I burned fifteen years worth of Day-Timers today, the culmination of a months long project. I went through each day from 1984 to 1999, creating a corresponding entry in my Google Calendar. By ’99 I had started keeping notes in Act! (now on a rusting hard drive in some landfill).

I considered shredding these but the wire binder made that impractical. So I put them in a wash tub, soaked them in gasoline and burned them.

In addition to being a long, tedious (and pointless?) task, I found it a bit stressful. The pages were filled with more unpleasant memories than I would have imagined. Don’t get me wrong. I worked for a great company, with some really wonderful people. But, in retrospect, I wasn’t having as much fun as I always though I had. Does that many any sense at all?

Flipping through those old pages brought back some physical sensations. A little stomach clinch over some bad news… tightness in the neck muscles as some unpleasantness unfolded. I was glad to get through the final month. And the burning ritual seemed therapeutic.

Senator McCaskill honors Bob Priddy

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“He’s a journalist and I’m a politician and if you’re a journalist then you don’t make friends with politicians. You keep your distance because you have to be objective and you have to be willing to ask questions that you know is going to irritate them.”

Apart from the tribute video (and Bob), there was only one speaker at Bob Priddy’s retirement dinner this past Monday. U. S. Senator Claire McCaskill. She was very good.

For those who know Bob and couldn’t be at the event, you can watch it here.

Bob Priddy honored

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Bob Priddy is the best journalist I ever met and one of the best people I’ve known. He was the guest of honor last night at an event in Columbia, MO. Bob is retiring in a month or so, after 40 years as the news director of The Missourinet.

The event was cooked up Senator Claire McCaskill and Clyde Lear, the guy that started the company Bob worked for and it was, as they say, a special night. There was a great tribute video that I hope makes it to YouTube so I can share it here.

I started working with Bob and Clyde in 1984 and was very proud to do so, as you can see from this photo. I had just come from a small town radio station and getting to work with Bob Priddy at “the network” was my idea of making it.

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I (sort of) tried to recreate that photo last night but in the excitement of the evening, I got the order wrong. No matter. Still proud to call these two men my friends.

Bob Priddy: How it began

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In December (2014) Bob Priddy will retire from his job as news director of The Missourinet. The network’s first and only news director. In this interview Bob talks about how the network began; interesting people and big stories; politics and history. I was privileged to work with Bob for almost 30 years and he’s one of the most talented and interesting people I’ve met. The interview runs just under half an hour. Hardly enough time to reflect on his amazing career.

Charlie Peters

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charlie-petersCharlie Peters died this morning. Cancer got him. It got him and wouldn’t let go. Today he escaped. He was 53. Charlie and I worked together for almost 30 years. We didn’t socialize but I thought of him as a friend. A whole bunch of folks thought of Charlie as a friend. There’s probably somebody, somewhere that didn’t like Charlie but I never encountered that person. Charlie was the kind of person most people want to be. I guess I can’t really say that. He was the kind of person I would like to be.

Someday all the people that knew and loved Charlie will be gone. He — like the rest of us — will become a twig on a family tree somewhere. If some early 22nd century artificial intelligence stumbles upon this post, what would I like for it to know about Charlie? (I’m assuming smart machines of the future will eradicate every trace of Facebook)

Charlie was smart. The kind of smart that can understand and fix just about anything with parts. For most of the last 30 years he was in charge of engineering and technical service at the company we worked for. He was a huge factor in the success of the company.

He had fighter pilot nerves. I never saw him panic, even when the situation clearly called for panic. Charlie had that inherent confidence that he could fix just about any technical problem. And he could.

Charlie was quiet. He knew how to listen without offering an opinion. But when he did speak it was usually direct. Straight to the point. He’d just say what the rest of us had been tip-toeing around. Plop! Right in the middle of the conference table.

Charlie’s rock put a lot of warm, gentle ripples in the pond.

Charlie remembers The Big Dish Drop (video)
Game Day 2005, following completion of new sports operations area (3 min)

Goodbye Joyce Steinman

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joyceJoyce Steinman is retiring from Learfield Communications (the place I worked for 29 years) after 34 years on the job. Friends and coworkers lovingly roasted her yesterday to say goodbye. Lots of funny stories, lots of love.

I had the sense I was watching a dying tradition. Will people work at one company for 34 years? Can the same strong bonds be formed in the mobile 21st century?

Our company was very successful and it was a lot of fun. Joyce gets a lot of credit for both.

Seth Godin on Blogging, Radio and Stuff

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The company I worked for for 29 years, Learfield, brought four or five hundred employees and friends to Dallas last week to celebrate the company’s 40th anniversary. We had two speakers: Ken Blanchard and Seth Godin. Following Mr. Godin’s excellent talk, he took questions.

How important is your blog?

“There’s two kinds of important. There’s the important of ‘can I make a living doing this,’ and the important of ‘this is who I am.’ My blog has nothing to do with me making a living. I don’t run any ads on it and I don’t sell many things on it, almost nothing, and that’s not why I do it and why I’ve been doing it for ten years. I do it because this is my chance to speak the thing I want to say, to talk about what I notice. If I had to pay money to write my blog, I would. The people who have blogs you don’t want to read are doing that blog because it’s their job. So I spend more time on my blog than almost anything I do because it’s my chance to do my art, as I see my art. […] The people who say ‘how am I going to get paid for this tomorrow?’ never make good stuff.”

“My blog is read by more people than all but ten magazines in the United States. And I write the whole thing by myself, every day. I don’t expect to stop blogging any time in the next 40 years.”

What do you see as the future of radio?

“Radio means two things. Radio means audio delivered to masses of people who want to hear it, and it means FCC coveted spectrum. Spectrum is over. For sure. We’re only two years away from cars having radio in them that has wifi. Once that happens, my radio, in my car isn’t going to have ten channels or a hundred channels, it’s going to have ten thousand channels, a hundred thousand channels. When there’s a hundred thousand radio stations to choose from, I’m not going to pick the local jock who’s yelling at me because he needsw his Arbitron ratings to go up a tenth of a point, I’m going to pick someone who cares. Radio connects us if it chooses to.”

And here are some of my notes from Mr. Godin’s remarks: Continue reading →

Learfield 40th Anniversary

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Me with two really smart guys

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Pepper Bullock calls himself a “Change-Agent.” He has been advising senior management at Learfield (where I once worked) for years and I’ve gotten to know him a little. A really smart guy who happens to be really nice. That’s him on the right.

I was a little shy about getting my photo made with Seth Godin so Pepper dragged me up for this photo. (Thanks to Alan Blake for sending this along so promptly. He was one of the photographers at this event. A really nice guy, in addition to be a very good photographer.)