Static and the 7:15am newspaper delivery

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.