This is a short but sad story about a once-great radio station. Let’s call it KXXX. It was, for many years, “the voice of” the community. Had as many as four or five full time news people back in the day. This morning one of our reporters called the station regarding a pretty good story in their community.
“The phone rang and rang and rang. No answering machine. Nuthin.’ So then I called the main office number. I got one of those automated answering systems. It told me to push this or that number for this or that person. There was no number to push for news. And when I automatically got the system operator, it was automated too. And it asked me to leave a message.” (sigh)
Press 1 for disappointment
Press 2 for despair
Press 3 for pessimism
“In nine to 12 months, Ford’s Sync will enable Internet capabilities on a smartphone and allow the Internet’s most popular radio station – Pandora — to play throughout the car’s sound system. Want Live 365 — you’ve got it.
It’s not just Ford, the other surviving automakers will also be adding the most anticipated consumer audio feature of all time — Internet streaming. Delphi and Autonet Mobile are calling for companies to create Internet connectivity devices as standard equipment for new cars.”
We’re gonna need more buttons on that dial.
More at CNET. “We’ll be able to link you to your Internet in the car. If you brought an iPhone into the vehicle, you could interact with that through voice. You could then read your e-mail by voice,” said Joe Berry, Ford business and product development director for Sync, referring to a future version of Sync.”
TweetSpin, a new Twitter application designed by a radio programmer named Rico Garcia. Among other info, TweetSpin can post "now playing" data from a station's website.
Here's a couple of snippets from a review in R&R, a radio trade publication:
From KHOP PD MoJo Roberts: "TweetSpin allows us to constantly have 'what's playing now' on our status and set appointment tweets to go out so we can set it and forget it."
In addition the "now playing" feature, Garcia is more excited about built-in scheduling that allows stations to set up hourly, daily or weekly messages to encourage listening appointments.
Hardly surprising that an industry in the process of automating itself out of existence would look for a way to automate social media, too. Of course, if there's really no one at the station…
A few months ago I received an email from a young man in the UK, asking permission to use a photo he found on my flickr for the cover art for his band’s new single (Cockatoo). I said sure and please keep in touch. And he did.
“The vinyl version of the single’s out now and is doing really well. The photo has certainly done it’s job and intrigued people. We’ve had lots of national airplay from the BBC and lots of new opportunities have been popping up all the time which is obviously very exciting.
We did a single launch in this big DIY arts space called The Arts Organisation in Nottingham. There was talk of doing a Steve Mays photo reel featuring a whole raft of the photo’s to be projected on walls and stuff but we didn’t have enough time in the end and felt that we’d be taking the piss a bit in terms of permission to use them.
Here’s 23 seconds of that show that somebody took on a phone (I’m the short guy wearing the black jacket and white T-shirt btw):
We’d love to send you some copies of the single in the post if you’d like. Posterity and all that. Let me know where to send them and we will. That said we certainly wouldn’t be offended if you’d rather we didn’t. Once again thanks for everything.”
James and all of Fists
Ah, to have my life become the backdrop for an edgy British pub band…
I’ve added the Fists blog to the sidebar for wonderful passages like this:
“…if you want to go on a slightly wrong night out then you should go to Wildside which is this once monthly cock/sleaze/glam rock revivalist night at Junktion 7 in Nottingham. It’s mostly filled wall-to-wall with dysfunctional hard rockers who get crazy drunk whilst getting emotional about it not being 1986 before dropping to their knees for an Eddie Van Halen solo and then disappearing into the toilets to have sex and drink Jack Daniel’s and fall out with each other due to fringe scene claustrophobia. It’s like going to a special zoo that houses dying musical sub-cultures and is one of my favourite nights out.”
Okay, but I like to be home no later than ten p.m.
“The VTech IS9181 is a Wi-Fi music streaming device, designed to make accessing the near-infinte variety of Internet radio as easy as traditional radio.”
“The IS9181 connects to any wireless network (802.11 b & g) and lets you access more than 11,000 free Internet radio stations worldwide. It also lets you access audio files (MP3, WMA, AAC, WAV, Real) stored on you Wi-Fi-enabled computer (PC or Mac). The IS9181 also offers localized weather (based on zip code).” (via Podcasting News)
My first thought was, “If I’m running a radio station, it better be one of the 11,000.” My next thought was, “It better be one of the ‘best’ of the 11,000.”
Wonder how many of these there are now? Started in 2006. The three new ones are Customer Care, Elimination and PC Choice Chat (above). I love that they didn’t bother put with mic cord or phone cords. If you’d like to make these stop… get a Mac.
I remember reading Bob Garfield’s The Chaos Scenario as an article in Advertising Age but I’m not sure I listened to the interview Mark Ramsey (Hear 2.0) posted to his website back in March. More on that in a moment. I don’t think the book is out yet but here’s a blurb from the web page:
“What happens when the old world order collapses and the Brave New World is unprepared to replace it…as an ad medium, as a news source, as a political soapbox, as a channel for new episodes of “Lost?” That is The Chaos Scenario.
In this fascinating, terrifying, instructive and often wildly entertaining book, Garfield is not content to chronicle the ruinous disintegration of traditional media and marketing. No, having established the problem, he travels to five continents for solutions.
What he discovers is the answer for all institutions who wish to survive – and thrive – in a digitally connected, Post-Media Age. He calls this the art and science of Listenomics.”
Mr. Garfield is Advertising Age editor-at-large and co-host of NPR’s On the Media. Looking forward to the book. If you spot it before I do, let me know.
“She wanted marriage, she wanted children; and not that I didn’t want that, but I didn’t want that at that time because I had just gotten out of a marriage, I’d just had kids [Luke, Grace and Bella],” Armstrong, 37, reveals. “Yet we’re up against her biological clock — that pressure is what cracked it.” — New York Post.
I’m a little fuzzy on whether the following description of the newspaper business model should be attributed to Warren Buffett or Eric Rhoads (Radio Ink) but the point is the same:
“Write the news, cut down millions or trees for paper, build massive printing plants to print it overnight, have a distribution model that pays people to fold and bag hundreds of papers and burn thousands of gallons of gas to go house-to-house throwing papers out of their car windows so people can walk out into the cold or rain in order to read news that is 12-24 hours old.”
Well, if you put it that way… And I particularly liked the line: “Do they really believe the Internet generation can be convinced to sign up for home delivery?”
This is a short but sad story about a once-great radio station. Let’s call it KXXX. It was, for many years, “the voice of” the community. Had as many as four or five full time news people back in the day. This morning one of our reporters called the station regarding a pretty good story in their community.
