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.
Category Archives: Learfield
Charlie Peters
Charlie 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
Joyce 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.
Radio Iowa (Early Days)
Remarks by Missourinet News Director Bob Priddy at event celebrating the 25th Anniversary of Radio Iowa, a statewide radio news network owned by Learfield Communications. Lots of insider stuff here but we’re sharing so you can enjoy the fine writing and beautiful sound of Bob’s voice and delivery. [watch on YouTube]
Seth Godin on Blogging, Radio and Stuff
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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- Big Dinner at South Fork
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- Seth Godin and Pepper Bullock
Me with two really smart guys
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.)
Seth Godin
I first heard Seth Godin speak at a Radio Ink conference in 2000 in Boston. He published Permission Marketing the year before and it was changing the way everybody thought about marketing.
That presentation was the best I had ever seen and I didn’t see a better one in the ensuing 13 years.
Mr. Godin was one of the speakers at an event held by the company from which I recently retired. I had a great seat down front and center and he did not dissapoint. Not sure how long he spoke but it seemed like 15 minutes (probably and hour+ in real time).
If I can get my hands on the audio or video I will take some notes and share them here. Sorry I can’t show you the video because watching how Godin used slides to help him tell his story was a thing of beauty.
My offices
While cleaning out my office yesterday, I reflected on the spaces in which I’ve worked over the past 40 years. During my radio days I spent most of my hours in a studio (on-air or production). When I came to Learfield they didn’t have a real office but provided a tiny desk on a tiny sun porch attached to the old house.
I don’t have a photo of my desk but it looked just like this one (in which Roger Gardner is hiding his face for some reason). I got a nicer space when Jim Lipsey and I each had a corner of a big old room in that same house.
We eventually built the nice building we’re in now and I had a nice office just a couple of down from our CEO. That proximity mattered in those days (perhaps it still does). The carpet was a different color in these offices to visually make the point we were special.
I suppose we once needed offices to put things like filing cabinets and typewriters and chairs for visitors. And we needed a private space to talk about things that others weren’t authorized to hear. My little office started feeling like a small prison cell (albeit with a big window).
In an era of smart phones and MacBooks, a building filled with little square rooms lining hallways seems… quaint. Hardly the best use of space. But then, where would I keep my stapler.
Learfield 2.0
Latest release dropped on Friday with the announcement that our company had been purchased by a private equity firm.
Learfield was founded (co-founded, actually) by Clyde Lear, forty years ago. He borrowed $24,000 from some local businessmen and grew the company by ploughing back profits and — later– borrowing from a local bank. A great entrepreneurial story.
For the first dozen years of the company (ver 1.0), Clyde managed everything. Around 1984, he started growing the company and needed to delegate some the work. I was part of that hiring spurt (ver 1.1).
It wasn’t long before our sports division took off and we opened an office in Dallas. Our news division was growing, too, but not as fast (ver 1.2).
Sometime in the 90s we had a major restructuring of management, with Clyde handing off CEO duties. This was Learfield 1.3 and as the dust settled, I slipped out the window and began easing myself down the corporate ladder.
A couple of years ago, Clyde shuffled the cards again and Greg Brown took over as President and CEO (let’s call this ver 1.8)
Learfield 2.0 is a major update. Clyde still has a “minority interest” in the company but prior to Friday, he had the final word on anything big (if he wanted it). That’s a big change for those of us that were personally brought into the company by Clyde. And doubly so for those charged with the running the new company.
Let’s just call this a soft reboot. Control+Alt+Delete.