Radio and the media revolution.
- Radio guys running newspapers.
Make that “ruining.” Check out Eric Alterman’s piece in The Nation.
- Pandora fans, rejoice. Radio guys: read, weep.
Pandora rocks the iPhone.
- Chicago Trib editors slip away.
I just saw in the New York Times that Ann Marie Lipinski, the Tribune’s editor, is resigning, saying
“…this position is not the fit it once was.”
Hardly surprising, and not the first Trib editor to “ankle.” (Love that word.) Sam Zell, real estate and radio mogul, who bought The Tribune Company earlier this year, has worked hard to create a hostile workplace for anybody used to the newspaper business and unfamiliar with the inner workings of the radio business.
Sam brought in his wild boy from his Jacor Broadcasting days, Randy Michaels, who brought along his whoopee cushions to corporate executive suites. Zell has set Randy and his gang loose on the newspaper business, which has not been known for placing promotion above content, as radio does. No wonder newspaper people are diving out the portholes. Cutting the budget is one thing. Sending in the clowns is another.
Not that newspapers don’t need a tonic. But the “creativity” that brought U.S. radio to its current pretty pass is not it.
Jerry Del Colliano, radio’s Jeremiah, thinks Zell and Michaels are staffing up to take over the crippled Clear Channel station collection, and their newspaper hijinks are just make-work activity to keep the boys busy until deals are made. I mean, how much harm can they do to the ink-stained corpse. I say, never underestimate the power of radio guys to devalue the china shop to a dollar store. If you get my drift.
- The Radio Guy Mind
The other day a friend of mine asked me, on behalf of a radio station manager he knows, if I could suggest a “radio news writing consultant.” Now, if you wanted to choose a specialty whose name simply shouts failure, you couldn’t do better than “radio news writing consultant.” I could go on with other examples, but I’m trying to avoid extreme sarcasm. I suppose I could show my eternal optimism and grasp this straw as a glimmer of interest in product development on the part of a radio manager. I suppose I should. But, it is also an example of the dominant radio management mindset — only a consultant could have the needed skills or knowledge. AFTERTHOUGHT: On the other hand, are there any “news people” or “writers” left in the known radio talent pool? I think not. I’ll consult this poor fellow: seek out fired newspaper people. Plenty of those around.
- The History of Radio in One Post
A couple of weeks ago I had the quaint idea to write the history of radio in MarconiDreams blog posts. Watching the business side of American radio huff and puff toward implosion, I’ve decided there really isn’t that much to it. I think I can do it in one post. Here goes:
Heinrich Hertz and others discovered that electricity radiates. Tesla picked up on it, too, only he wanted to do away with power lines and power the world wirelessly. Marconi immediately saw a worldwide wireless telegraph. Marconi and others developed vacuum tubes that turned sound into radio waves, and we soon went way beyond dots and dashes, talking and singing through the air, too. To avoid a new Babel of stations on the same wave, governments took control of this new natural resource. Britain invented the BBC. Most countries followed suit and kept radio for their own official uses. The free-enterprise U.S. handed out licenses to private station operators.
So, for the next eighty years, America had thousands of broadcast monopolists. Radio was a closed system — the only radio there could ever be, they thought, and the radio guys satisfied their caveman urges by beating up on each other, rather than other media. They dumbed radio down to formulaic, controllable monotones.
Then came digital technology, the Internet and cellular radio-phones. AM-FM was no longer the only show in town. Now, cell phones, mainly, are the new pocket radios — only they deliver everything — audio, video, and data, which is to say, every form of information. Marconi-style radio stations are no longer the monopoly deliverer of sound through the air.
The radio guys now, finally, see what’s coming, after a decade of denial. They conducted their big investment luau and wasted their time selling and buying an obsolescent technical infrastructure. Now the station collectors are stuck with a declining audience and many new, more attractive sources of sound. And the bean counters at the tops of these companies have no innovation skills, and no clue. End of history.
I believe a new history of radio could start now. But it’ll be written by new radio people, not now in the business, who may or may not step up and buy the devalued towers and studios, at the right bargain basement prices, and invent something exciting and new on the good part of what’s left — the only locally-originated electronic medium.
