When newsletters were printed and mailed

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In 1988 if I wanted to communicate with the 60 radio stations affiliated with our news networks, I printed it and put it in an envelope and mailed it (USPS). Took as long as four days to reach some stations. No fax machines yet and email still years away.

This has such a Pony Express feel to me, here in 2017. The idea of a monthly, printed newsletter seems… quaint. But I recall almost every company and association doing a monthly (sometimes quarterly) newsletter. Somebody spent hours writing these things, often with multiple managers “signing off” before they went out.

When desktop publishing (and laser printers) came along, newsletters got ugly, fast. That was my opinion and I my philosophy was text-only; short paragraphs; one page, front and back. I read somewhere, “No more than an hour to write and a minute to read.” I think I knew, in my secret heart, that nobody read these things anyway. But I did them, every month for years. I kept most of them and they provide tiny snapshots of what was going one with our networks at the time.

Today we have Facebook pages and Twitter feeds and maybe even a blog or two. But I’m seeing some Big Names moving back to newsletters. Easier to monetize? More likely to be read?

Clyde’s first business plan

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It’s pretty easy to come up with an idea for a new business. It’s really hard to write good business plan for a new business. In 1972, 28-year-old Clyde Lear put together a proposal for regional radio network. He showed it to a half dozen local businessmen who invested in him and his idea. Last year Clyde’s company was valued at more than one billion dollars. It’s not really his company anymore, he sold it a few years ago.

Clyde kept that first business plan and it’s interesting reading. I worked for Clyde for 30 years and have known him for 40 so it might be more interesting to me than you. He’s graciously allowed me to share some of it here. It begins with the concept, his “big idea.” An excerpt:

Regional news and farm networks have been especially lucrative. The growing farm economy required quick dissemination of farm information. Much of this information is a necessity to the agribusinessman. Further, the advertiser wanting to market his good — machinery, seeds, services, fertilizer, feed, chemicals — looks for the way he can get the greatest number of farmers and ranchers to hear his message at the lowest possible cost. The regional farm network is the answer.

Advertising rates, proposed programs, projected expenses, descriptions of other networks. In 1972 there were 113 radio networks in the U. S. and Clyde researched eleven of them. Clyde’s First Business Plan – Other Networks (PDF)

Ohio Farm Network: This is a full-time farm network, but distribution is by tape, and five days late. Programming is entirely morning about 20 minutes in length. It is entirely a pre-sold program, based on a percentage of the rate card of each station. One man handles all the programming and all the selling. The overhead is low, and sales, by comparison to the others, are moderate at best, seldom reaching $10,000 per month.

If you’ve ever thought about starting your own business, or if you started your own business, you might find this bit of history interesting. The company that Clyde and others built from his original idea doesn’t look much like his original dream but that was never a static thing. Clyde’s First Business Plan – Background (PDF)

Jimmy Haggett at WSM

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I have a fondness for old photos. Especially photos from the early days of radio. My friend Charles Isbell sent me some good ones this week. They were found in an old house being torn down in Caruth, Missouri. They feature Jimmy Haggett, a musician and DJ who worked northeast Arkansas and southeast Missouri in the 50s. He and my father worked at KBOA at one point. You can find a bio at the link above.

UPDATE from John Carpenter: “(These) Jimmy Haggett PR photos are all from Friday, February 11, 1955 at WSM Radio in Nashville. He’d been chosen “Mr. Disc Jockey, U.S.A.” for that month by the Country Music Disc Jockey Association. The award was noted in the March 1956 issue of “Cowboy Songs” magazine, in their “Disc Jockey Roundup” column: “A member of the CMDJA, Jimmy appeared over WSM, Nashville as ‘Mr. D.J., U.S.A.’ in February 1955, and appeared on Grand Ole Opry the following night.”


L-R: Unknown, Teddy Wilburn,Doyle Wilburn,unknown, Betty Jean and One Wheeler, unknown, unknown

As for the other people in the photos, two of the young men are The Wilburn Brothers (Teddy and Doyle). Looks like the photos were taken at WSM in Nashville, so perhaps some of the others are performers. If you recognize anybody, please leave a comment.

Interviewing Onie Wheeler. “Compliments of my friend Johnnie Smogh & myself, Mrs. Bubba White. Sincerely, Jimmy Haggett.”

Jimmy with Teddy and Doyle in the photos above/below. Would like to know who the other gentleman is. Will work on it.

How was your day, Ian?

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In chapter 8 of The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly talks about Remixing. “Unbundling existing products into their most primitive parts and then recombining in all possible ways.” He spends a good bit of time talking about video and the amazing new ways we will find to create and use it.

I will have my AI (we’ll all have one, or more than one) pull all of the available video of Ian Emmerson. He lives in the UK somewhere. Don’t know where. Or what he does for a living. But there’s a bazillion cameras in the UK so there will be no shortage of video.

My AI will edit each day’s video into a montage (of sorts). Ian waiting for one of those big red double-decker buses; Ian trudging into the building where he works; Ian in his cubicle; Ian getting fish and chips from a curb-side truck; Ian (alone) in the pub, having a pint before going back to his ‘flat.’ Pretty much the same stuff every day with an interesting character tossed in from time to time. Or, perhaps, just a character.

Each ‘episode’ will end with one of Ian’s songs, like the one below. I’ll let the AI pick the tune, based on that day’s ‘footage.’ I’ll probably let the AI pick a name for the series but I kind of like, “How was your day, Ian?”

“I am a fair witness, not a participant.”

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“A fair witness is a character type from the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by the American author Robert A. Heinlein.”

“The novel tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians. The novel explores his interaction with — and eventual transformation of — terrestrial culture.”

“Several later editions of the book have promoted it as “the most famous science fiction novel ever written”. While initially a success among science fiction readers, over the following years word-of-mouth caused sales to build, requiring numerous subsequent printings after the first edition. Eventually Stranger in a Strange Land became a cult classic.”

“A fair witness is a fictional profession invented for the novel. A fair witness is an individual trained to observe events and report exactly what he or she sees and hears, making no extrapolations or assumptions. A photographic memory is a prerequisite for the job, although this may be attainable with suitable training.” Continue reading →

RadioIowa.com

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My next “small histories” project will be an Internet timeline showing when and how the company I worked for viewed and used this new technology. We registered our first domain (Learfield.com) on August 30, 1995 but didn’t do much with that (corporate) site. In July of 1996 we created a site for one of our news networks (Radio Iowa) but I don’t recall what kinds of content we were posting in those early days.

By November of 1999 we had gotten the hang of things and were putting up a lot of news (text and audio). The Iowa Caucuses pulls lots of attention to the state every four years and our network created a feature called Campaign Countdown. Our website made it possible to extend the life of the stories we fed via the radio network and reporter O. Kay Henderson cranked out a LOT of stories and interviews, all of which went online.

As we moved and updated servers and software, much of this content was lost. Or so I thought. While poking around on the Internet Archive WayBack Machine this weekend I found the Campaign Countdown reports.

The design of the website is nothing to write home about (that’s on me) but he history is real and — thanks to the Internet Archive — preserved. (I made a donation and hope you will, too). From this screenshot (partial) of our Affiliates page and you can see that about half of the stations had websites in 1999.

In my experience, radio stations were slow to embrace the Internet. There were a lot of reasons for this. Some good and logical, some not. Most of the programming on small market stations was music and licensing and technical issues made it impractical to “stream.” I’m not sure we had that word in 1999. And why, many station managers asked, should I go to the expense and effort of creating a website when everyone we care about (advertisers and listeners) can hear our programing on the radio? Duh. And nobody was going to listen to music on a computer. (iTunes, the iPod, and XM Radio came along in 2001. Podcasting in 2004)

Second opinion nets different diagnosis 88% of time

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“A new study finds that nearly 9 in 10 people who go for a second opinion after seeing a doctor are likely to leave with a refined or new diagnosis from what they were first told. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic examined 286 patient records of individuals who had decided to consult a second opinion, hoping to determine whether being referred to a second specialist impacted one’s likelihood of receiving an accurate diagnosis.”

“Among those with updated diagnoses, 66% received a refined or redefined diagnosis, while 21% were diagnosed with something completely different than what their first physician concluded.”

The study was published in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice.

Calculator Vault

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Apps like this have been around for several years but I wasn’t aware of them until this morning when a friend told me about Calculator Vault. Looks just like the Calculator app that comes with iOS but when you put in a secret sequence of numbers and symbols, it takes you to hidden folders where you can safely store those naughty photos. Apps like these became popular, I’m told, when teens started Snapchatting.

The Fake PIN features creates “a second PIN that opens a decoy KeepSafe for times when someone pressures you to open your KeepSafe. You can even put photos in your fake KeepSafe that are ok for others to see.”

The Secret Door feature will “masquerade your KeepSafe as another app. With Secret Door enabled, others will see what appears like another app when they open KeepSafe, but you will know the secret to reveal the PIN pad and open your KeepSafe.”

I’m told the only way you’d see these hidden folders — assuming you were looking — is from within the app. Yes, the NSA probably knows about these but your mom might not. You should tell her before she gets busted.

Flying about to change completely. Because of cars.

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10 to 15 years from now, the flying experience could look vastly different because of self-driving cars.

In Europe, high-speed rail wins 50% of all traffic when the journey length is less than 4.5 hours, according to the French National Railroads, and wins 90% of traffic when the journey is two hours or less.

Bags will get picked up in the city and travel separate from you and land at your destination. People won’t be traveling with their luggage. Perhaps it’s picked up by a self-driving car or a specific baggage robot instead.

And if an airline is controlling your ground transportation, it’ll be able to provide other services as well. “They come pick you up, they load your baggage, and potentially, your bag will be screened while sitting in the vehicle.

Teletype

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I recall visiting the radio station where my father worked and standing in front of the Associated Press teletype, entranced by the endless stream of words. Who was typing? Where were they? Did they ever stop?

Years later, as a young man, I got a job at the station and came to depend on the AP “wire.” It was our only link to real-time (I’m not sure that phrase even existed in 1972) news and information from outside our little town. The daily newspaper was tossed on the doorstep every afternoon (or you could get the Memphis paper a day late). The three national TV networks gave us a half-hour of national news each evening.

Our radio station didn’t have a national news network (until 1974) so we relied on the Associated Press newswire for just about everything throughout the day. During a live “board shift” we would dash to the AP teletype (in the transmitter room) and “rip the wire” which involved tearing a long strip of printed wire copy into piles of news, weather, sports, entertainment news, etc. If the paper jammed or the ribbon broke, we missed whatever was fed. If something the AP considered urgent was fed, an alarm bell on the teletype sounded.

A radio station had to have a wire service. Without it they were limited to playing records and reading local news and school lunch menus. The AP knew this and charged accordingly. Thousands of dollars a year. Contracts were for five years. But there was no alternative.

In 1984 I left the radio station to take a job managing The Missourinet, a statewide news network originating from Jefferson City, Missouri. I worked for (parent company) Learfield Communications for the next 28 years. One of the more interesting projects I worked on was the creation of a low-cost alternative to the Associated Press. We called it Learfield Data (later, Learfield Newswire).

I worked on this (along with bunch of other people) for a dozen years from the late ’80s through 2000. At one time we had 300 subscribers. When the World Wide Web became a reality in the mid-90s it was clear the days of wire services were numbered. Road kill on the Information Highway. You can read (PDF) the story of how it began and ended here: Learfield Data