The deregulation of radio was tough on good-neighbor radio because Clear Channel and other conglomerates were anxious to vacuum up every station in sight for fabulous sums of cash and turn them into robot repeaters. I dropped in to a broadcasting school last fall and saw kids being trained for radio careers as if radio were a branch of computer processing. They had no conception of the possibility of talking into a microphone to an audience that wants to hear what you have to say. I tried to suggest what a cheat this was, but the instructor was standing next to me. Clear Channel’s brand of robotics is not the future of broadcasting. With a whole generation turning to iPod and another generation discovering satellite radio and Internet radio, the robotic formatted-music station looks like a very marginal operation indeed. Training kids to do that is like teaching typewriter repair.
Category: Media
Mossberg: Guide to using RSS
Walt Mossberg provides a useful overview of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a method to scan sites quickly. (I use a wonderful OS X RSS newsreader called NetNewsWire). Local sites that provide RSS feeds include:
Apple’s latest OS, 10.4 has a handy built in RSS subscription feature.
Media Change: Rosen Connects the dots
Jay Rosen does quite a job connecting the advertising, authority/credibility and newspaper circulation dots between LA, Northern Virginia, Milwaukee and Dallas. Hugh Hewitt’s speech on circulation and advertising is well worth reading. Check it out.
Here’s a copy of the actual complaint (32K PDF)
Somewhat related, the Wisconsin State Journal (AP & WSJ Staff), while covering the Milwaukee Journal circulation lawsuit, mentions that “March 31, 2004, indicates that “other paid sales” accounted for 4.3 percent of the papers’ combined daily circulation and 1.5 percent of Sunday circulation.”
We live in interesting times.
Wood on UW Madison J-School Centennial Celebration
Scant mention of their current utility allowed for a more in-depth discussion of the future of blogs. All agreed — including UW alum and Denver-based professional freelance writer and communications consultant Kerby Meyers — that these blogs would only increase in importance, with the most interesting comment coming from Anderson. At one point, he succinctly summed up the current power and immense potential of blogs.
“In our coverage you would have a first day story and then a second story,” Anderson said during Saturday’s discussion.
More on the Circulation Lawsuit Against the Journal-Sentinel
Newspapers & The Tipping Point: Memories of My Paper Route Days
I remember the first day of my Milwaukee Sentinel paper route. It was March, 5:00A.M. The 32 papers were dropped on a corner near my home. I drove my bike, picked up and counted the papers, placed them in my paper “bag” and slid up the hill while it was snowing that cold morning years ago.
I delivered them, biked home and enjoyed a warm breakfast.
I also remember my dad driving me around once each week (early!) with the extra large Sunday edition packed high in our station wagon’s back seat. 132 copies on Sunday.
I also learned about selling newspaper subscriptions and collecting money. The subscription game was, in hindsight rather classic. Give some young kids a prize (“whomever sells the most at tonight’s sales rally, gets a football”). The memory of that evening is clear. I won the football. I had to sell rather hard to get that last sale – the local sales manager drove me to a friend of my grandparents to make that last sale. It’s interesting to think about these things today, 30 years later, in 2005, the internet era.
At the time, I did not grasp the far reaching implications of that last minute sale that gave me a football. Paid circulation was everything. The football was a cheap bonus to motivate the kids in the field. Today, the newspapers offer deals via direct mail, if at all. They’ve lost the family ties (I don’t know how to get it back and I don’t think it’s coming back).
Years later, it seems that few young kids are delivering papers any longer. That income earning opportunity may have left years ago, gone to those old enough to drive cars (and cover a larger area faster than a kid on a bike). I wonder if this loss of a classic early job with its family/community ties (Sunday’s heavy paper required a parent’s support via a car) was one of the many 1000 cuts that is laying the newspaper gently down to die, as Jay Rosen says.
Paper Route links at clusty. Paper Boy Blues The Tipping Point
This is a tipping point
Shorewest sues Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel over circulation inflation.
Alliant Energy’s Erroll Davis on Humility in the NYT
as told to Eve Tahmincioglu:
Enron made me very angry. We are all paying a tremendous price for the screw-up.
These are powerful positions we executives hold. I have $8 billion at my disposal. We don’t have that many checks and balances on us. You can lose perspective and start to think you’re royalty. I think of these guys with their $10,000 shower curtains and I say to myself: “I could understand how they could do that.” But I also understand why you shouldn’t.
If you lose track of where you came from – and surprisingly, a lot of these people came from humble beginnings – you lose track of your moral compass, what work means to the average employee.
Davis’s Wisconsin based Alliant Energy has been in some hot water over investments in Brazil and a Mexican resort. Interesting to see this in the NY Times. I wonder if this piece was “placed” by a pr firm?
Unread & Unsubscribing
The circulation of daily U.S. newspapers is 55.2 million, down from 62.3 million in 1990. The percentages of adults who say they read a paper “yesterday” are ominous:
- 65 and older — 60 percent.
- 50-64 — 52 percent.
- 30-49 — 39 percent.
- 18-29 — 23 percent
Americans ages 8 to 18 spend an average of 6 hours and 21 minutes a day with media of all sorts but just 43 minutes with print media.
The combined viewership of the network evening newscasts is 28.8 million, down from 52.1 million in 1980. The median age of viewers is 60. Hence the sponsorship of news programming by Metamucil and Fixodent. Perhaps we are entering what David T.Z. Mindich, formerly of CNN, calls “a post-journalism age.”
Weinberger Dumps a Mainstream Media TV Gig
David Weinberger (activist blogger):
It’s an interesting experience: You get to hone a topic to 90 seconds, memorize it, and talk into a camera in an isolated room. Plus, they send a limo for you. (It’s possible they pay, but I forgot to ask.) They’re nice people and were happy with the two pieces I did for them. But…
They want reports on what moderate left and right wing bloggers — “Nothing out of the mainstream,” the producer told me yesterday — say about a “major” topic. What the hell does that have to do with blogging? And when two of the producers yesterday independently suggested that I report on the blogosphere’s reaction to a Vietnam veteran spitting on Jane Fonda, I blurted out — because the flu had lowered my normal Walls of Timidity — that this wasn’t a job I’m comfortable with.