MARCONI DREAMS

I’m thinking of folding up this site. Or, at least the blog part. Which, right now, is all there is. Every day I open up my email and find Jerry Del Colliano, giving the radio business (and the music biz, while he’s at it) an ice-water enema. Excuse my coarseness. They need it. Maybe we all need extreme wakeup therapy. We’ve let industries and authorities get away with some outrageous stuff over the past few years. But that’s another story. Jerry writes today about how stupid it is for Radio & Records, one of radio’s so-so trades, to withdraw its announced award of its Lifetime Achievement Freedom of Speech Award from Bob Grant, one of the longest-running talk hosts in the business, who, in the second or third half of his career morphed from a sensible voice of reason to an utter extreme right-wing fire-breather. The award announcement set the protestation industry ablaze, and R&R rocked back on its heels and collapsed. Jerry, rightly, calls them to task for this. And he does it con brio, while with equal energy affirming that he hates talk radio, with its extreme right and left bile, equally. So, I’m thinking of quitting. When Jerry’s back in the fray, talking turkey to media power, and, importantly, from his platform of professional success, which makes mine look like a three-legged stool, what do I think I’m doing, trying to talk publicly about radio? The problem is, until Jerry’s reemergence, presumably after the expiration of his no-compete contract with Clear Channel, who bought Inside Radio from him four years ago, there was no, zero, zip contrarian voices in about-radio’s knowledgeable orbit. Nobody with the guts to speak anything but radio Kool-Aid-ese. I must admit, other than water-cooler grousing, I didn’t open my mouth until I was completely out of radio. There’s absolutely no room for dissent inside that business, which was never known for job security on any grounds. Oh, well. I guess I’ll post here once in a while and try to build an audience for the time when my novel of the same name is done and I can use the site to promote it. For now, though, just take it as a given that every day I’m thumbing you over to Jerry’s site and saying, What he said.