Category: media blog

I fell behind on my podcast listening over the holiday break. Part of that was not going for any long runs or spending much time in the car. This morning I caught an episode of The Wolf Den that I really liked.

I’m fascinated by the way technology is changing media consumption. This podcast gets into how distribution models have changed, and how much easier it is to get things out there now without owning say a television network.

I’m a fan of both these companies (oh the amount of times I tried to get approval to hire Chris Hardwick), so check out Adam Sachs, CEO of Midroll Media (Earwolf, WolfPop) and Adam Rymer, president of Nerdist Industries.

Here’s a good read I saw on LinkedIn

Is Social Media Ruining Comedy? – The New Yorker.

I could probably do half an hour on this but

PSEUDO-YES – when Chris Rock can’t “work out” it’s a problem

NO – the career acceleration people have seen in the last decade, the ability to get material out there quickly.

The No far outweighs the Pseudo-Yes.

Wow this made my day.  A friend sent me this video of the WOR studios back in 1984 (the boards hadn’t yellowed yet.)

I cut my teeth in radio a little after John A. Gambling retired, and first learned from Bill McEvily who was John A’s producer and was retiring right as I was coming on.  My first days in radio were from this exact vantage point and I assume it was that exact phone.

We would do the logs by hand. We’d tape the Saturday show (shhh it was pre-recorded, don’t tell anyone) and meticulously check each other’s timing. I’d punch a number in the clock, say “8:16:37” and John R. would agree or not. Once we agreed we’d then do something like “ok, one minute weather, two and a half spots” and punch in “8:20:17” and agree again or not.

Assuming that the live Saturday weather and news folks stayed on time and hit their marks everything worked to perfection.

How nice to see everyone de-aged thirty years and those old studios again. Man, what I wouldn’t do to frustratedly throw a cart across the room again.

Enjoy!

Oh, there’s a young Howard Stern in here talking about his show on WNBC. Wolf man Jack is the default thumbnail but hit play.

Another good link from Slate (below).

This is one of my favorite things to illustrate to the students in my radio class at FDU.

Consider: For $39,000 in annual electricity costs, Power 106’s broadcast tower can reach 15 million people in Southern California. There are no incremental charges involved—when an additional person tunes in, it doesn’t cost the station a dime. Not so on the Web. Each time you click a streaming radio channel, or download a podcast, it’s as though you’re making a collect call. Somebody’s paying to send all those data packets your way. The more people tune into a streaming broadcast, the more the broadcaster must spend on servers and bandwidth

via The future of terrestrial radio in the age of podcasts..

This is smart.

“Pandora on Xbox One takes advantage of all the functionality the platform has to offer and our team built the application to look amazing on the biggest screen in your home,” the company wrote in a blog post. That includes the ability to snap Pandora to the side of your TV screen and keep listening to your stations during gameplay

via Pandora’s new Xbox One app lets you listen to stations while gaming | The Verge.

I am a huge fan of Bob Hope, was fortunate enough to interview his daughter Linda a few times, and I got to work with the Hope Estate on a handful of projects (sidebar – it’s really weird not to be working on Bing Crosby Christmas Radio this year).

When I speak about Hope I remind folks not to judge him by some very-late period NBC special but to watch film of Bob doing the old radio show.  I love that 70 years later I can laugh at a joke about the Governor of Ohio, or the local military base commander because Bob would make it so relatable.

The article linked below is really good, and I am reading the Zoglin book on-and-off as time allows.  One thing that grabbed me about the article is the below, a point I had never made on my own.

It got to a point, as early as the 1970s, where even the savers were more than Hope was willing to go through with. “His delivery…was growing more rigid and imperial,” writes Zoglin: “the joke, the stare, the laugh, the next setup. No more ‘savers’ when he stumbled on a line, or when a joke fell flat – or much acknowledgement of the audience at all.”

via Hope-Less: How Different Would Standup Be Without Bob Hope? | Splitsider.

And yeah, that was going on in the later specials.  Rat-a-tat-tat, take a beat, repeat.   Still quite funny, but didn’t have the duck and roll that he had in his youth, and he didn’t use his facial expressions quite as much.

You can almost hear Bob doing a 2014 Christmas special and riffing “hey did you see that Sony Pictures pulled the movie The Interview?  Yeah it turns out (whatever the punch line to this joke is.)”  And what’s amazing is if you do those lines in Bob’s voice in your head, it’s somehow funny even though I didn’t write a punch.

Good stuff.  Might have to break out the Hope DVDs later.

Wow this is way cool.  Hopefully someone is hitting record on a device.  I’d love to air this somewhere someday (and willing to face the rights/waivers it would take).   Someone please get all the waivers signed tonight 😉

Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul will take on the role of Luke Skywalker in director Jason Reitman’s one-night-only live-read of The Empire Strikes Back this Thursday, while fearsome Whiplash star J.K. Simmons will let the hate flow through him as Darth Vader.

via Who has Jason Reitman picked for The Empire Strikes Back live-read? | Inside Movies | EW.com.