Category: media blog

Slate posted a good series of articles about podcasts (presumably because they are diving in hard into the world of podcasting) that are terrific reads.  One point that always catches the ear of my college students is…

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..

I operate an on-line radio station at Alternative Sports Talk Radio and so far the costs to stream haven’t been a problem (would be a good problem to have.)

On the listener end, a year ago I would have stressed about data consumption.  However, my current AT&T plan is up to 15GB of data, and as I drive around listening to Alt Sports Talk I don’t really scratch the data limit. Not even close.  Not even within a long frisbee throw of 15GB.  So I think as consumers we will be OK and be able to walk around listening to online radio without worrying about hitting the cap.

Good stuff here.  These spots cut through.  Yeah on a podcast I could just hit the 30 second skip button but I usually don’t.  Back in the day Howard would turn a Snapple spot into twenty minutes of bashing Gary, but you sure remembered the name of the iced tea with the weird name.

“Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern were the characters, but they spoke very enthusiastically and ad lib about this product,” Deighton says. “When we choose to listen to someone and then that someone tells us that they like this product, it’s almost word-of-mouth from a trusted friend.”

via Podcast advertising: How Serial and other shows benefit from their rambling, unpredictable ads..

Click through for a good read.

With my professor hat on I have become even more attuned to how the media (of which I am part) reacts to things.

Last night at 8:13pm I texted a friend (also in the media) to tip him about the Sydney story which I had seen on twitter. I followed the story on twitter for a while, then found that CBS News online had a stream of Sky News which was streaming a local Aussie station.

Meanwhile I channel surfed.  Nothing.

CNN got a little interested for a while…then at 9pm they chose to air a show about dinosaurs.  MSNBC had on something about Pot Barons and Fox stayed in commercial long enough that I no longer cared what they might or might not have aired (it’s possible they did all-star coverage for 12 straight hours once that break ended, I don’t know).

My friend tipped me off that Reddit of all things had a cool page up through which I could track the story.  It had 20,000+ viewers (is that what we call them) last night and still 10,000 plus this morning.

Breaking news has a habit of breaking when it’s not convenient.  It doesn’t like to happen between 9 and 5.  It waits until the boss is unreachable, the main anchor is 2.5 hours away in the Hamptons, or 3 in the morning.

So on a Sunday night, the news channels aired shows about dinosaurs and pot.

The reason this bothers me is because when I was brought up in the industry I was taught about dependability and reliability.  If you call yourself a news station I kind of expect there to be news on when there is news.  On this Sunday night, nobody could be bothered.  Dinosaurs.  The news channel version of John’s Law of Cable Networks (every channel eventually realizes they should not bother and just show X-Files reruns.)

This morning this is BIG BREAKING NEWS STORY.

Why?

Because we’re all at work now and have to fill the airwaves all day.  There isn’t a dinosaur show scheduled.  We have morning shows and midday shows and talking head shows and by-golly we’re gonna fill that air-time.  Now it’s a BIG STORY with a big BREAKING NEWS logo.

It was last night at 9pm too guys.

…

Update 10:41am Looks like the story is resolving.  Just wanted to point out that this post was from 7:26 this morning.

This post was inspired by my daughter. We were talking in the car and I started doing a rap about how you make lists to get your magazine/newspaper/radio show/unemployed dad noticed – and then I decided I would make a “Top Comedy Albums of 2014” type list.

If you are stumbling across this list, I was VP Comedy & Entertainment for SiriusXM for 10 years before they eliminated that position earlier this year, so I have an affinity for this stuff, and it has been nice to see some people that have been on my radar crack through and have tremendous success.

So I started the list, and rather than make a Top 10 or whatever round number I just stopped when I stopped.  I’ve attached a spotify playlist for you to listen, and I started at #1 because why not lead with the best.

 

1.  Hannibal Buress – Live From Chicago

Let’s not get distracted by the Bill Cosby thing which I will address in a second.  This guy is hilarious.  From the first time I saw him in a small club in Chicago I could tell he was it.  Absolutely hilarious, and another in a long list of folks I wanted to hire if only we had had a little budget for development.

As for the Cosby thing.  Hannibal has addressed it in that it’s not like he went out of his way to destroy Cosby.  Some folks with smartphones filmed the bit and it went viral.  Hannibal is so so so much more than the Cosby Guy so hopefully it doesn’t distract from his talent.

 

 

 

2.  Weird Al – Mandatory Fun

I played the bejesus out of this this summer.  Never mind the jokes, just as music it’s a great album.  I chose the Lorde parody for this playlist because the second verse is so so so warped and I didn’t see it coming.  It demonstrates the difference between what the local morning DJ does and why Al is Hall of Fame.

Those were my Top 2 for sure, and in that order.

 

 

 

This next group are a bunch of folks that are really funny, been around a few years and deserve to be more famous.

Hari Kondabolu – Waiting for 2042

Myq Kaplan – Small, Dork and Handsome

Tommy Johnagin – Stand Up Comedy 3

 

Dan St Germain – Bad At The Good Times

And one more fellow who is definitely known and seems to show up in every sci-fi TV show I watch…but there is no denying he is hilarious.

Patton Oswalt – Tragedy Plus Comedy Equals Time

 

 

 

 

My apologies to any friends or non-friend comedians who may have released an album in 2014 that I didn’t include.  I don’t get very good record service here at home.

Enjoy the playlist, thanks for coming by and please check out my career portfolio including all the comedy stuff I did for the past ten years.

Two quickies this morning.

I was driving back from getting coffee, and pretty annoyed with my P2 and P3 station (as a WCBS-AM P1 I got what I needed but then didn’t need traffic a second time so went surfing) so I started really poking around.

I remembered there is this other station and manually spun my AM radio knob to check them out.  The point of the story isn’t to throw these people under a bus or suggest they suck – they are good people – the point is to illustrate what they are up against.

So here I am, exactly the demo they would kill to have (in terms of age, affiliation and geography), and I actually remember to tune them in….and….

BZZZZZZZZZ Static.

It was 7:08 in the morning,   I haven’t looked but I bet FCC Sunrise is 7:15 if not even 7:30.

When I had a radio station out on Long Island we had the same problem.  The signal was OK to pretty good when the sun was up, but during “nighttime” (including 7am and 5pm in the winter) it wasn’t.

So I feel for those folks.

When I got home the newspaper deliveryman was dropping off the paper across the street.  Newspapers are already hobbled by being what I will sarcastically call ‘two day old tweets printed on parchment.”  Nobody loved newspapers more than I did, but once I got my iPad it just made zero sense to me to get the print edition when I could read current news on my device.  Then you add that the parchment was delivered at about 7:15.  When I commuted to the city I was out the door at 6:45.  If I came home at 7pm and had the parchment with the 2.5 day old tweets – well, what use is that?  I canceled my subscription a few years ago and never looked back.

Both are up against the old “signal, signal, signal” problem.  That’s a hard one to beat.