Letters to the President
From The Huffington Post: “In his first week as president, Obama asked his staff to select 10 letters a day for him to read from among the tens of thousands that were flooding into the White House. … Fourteen months later, Obama still takes 10 letters (including e-mails and faxes) with him when he heads upstairs at the end of each weekday. He personally writes back to three or four.”
My suggestion posted here in March of 2008:
“President Obama reads, answers and acts on one email –from an American citizen– every week. Let’s say, on Friday. Here’s how it might work:
Anybody can email the president once a week. Yes, people will try to find ways to scam this but you can deal with that. On Friday morning, 10 emails are selected at random and forwarded to President Obama’s in-box. He looks through them, picks one and responds –personally– to the sender. If action is required, the email is forwarded to the appropriate subordinate who has to DO something because the president –and the country– will be watching.
My suggestion goes a bit further but the two are eerily close. And, yes, I did email my suggestion to the Obama campaign.
Video Affiliate Advisory
I love this idea. The head of affiliate relations for Learfield Sports (Keith Kowalski) posts a brief (60 sec) video, explaining a new text alert service for keeping radio affiliates up to the minute on changes to broadcast times due to weather. Nothing fancy here. Just pointed the Flip camera and popped the advisory up on YouTube. Our sports ops folks are making excellent use of their website (WordPress) which serves 40+ networks.
The Rainmaker: “You must be stupid, stupid, stupid.”
I don’t own a suit
I bought my first suits in 1971. A gray one and and brown one, both in a nice polyester blend. I was getting ready to start my ill-fated career as a U. S. Postal Inspector and the suits were exactly what you’d expect a fed to wear.
A year later I was a small town radio guy and the suits were traded for Hawaiian shirts and Levis. It was a dozen years before I again needed a suit. All the managers at Learfield wore suits in 1984. Even when calling on an affiliate radio station in Tarkio, MO.
Over the next 15 years or so, I accumulated about a dozen suits that you’d have to examine closely to tell one from the other. They’ve been hanging in my closet since I tunneled out of the executive suite and into cyberspace several years ago.
Today I loaded them up and took them to the local Goodwill. And it felt great. Oh, I’ll probably need a suit again some day (can you rent a suit?) But for now, it’s business casual on the dressy end and Hawaiian shirts and Levis the rest of the time.