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| Tuesday, July 10, 2007 |
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Old four eyes is back 
| | You'll see it before I do. Seeing as how I'm boarding a plane for London. |
Strongest verb too
First Halberstam, now this
| | I've never met Doug Marlette, but I know people who knew him, and by all accounts he was a great guy, as well as a first-rank cartoonist and fine novelist too. His latest novel, Magic Time, came out last sumer. Tour Dates being booked now, it says at that last link. |
| | Alas, it's tragic time instead. Doug was killed in a car crash in Mississippi yesterday. He was 57. Three years younger than I'll be in 18 days. |
Silver Sterling
| | Bruce Sterling: My karma ran over your dogma, and my cluetrain ran over your dogtrain. |
| | And my fave: What if he's right?" This uneasy reaction is the core pundit accolade. |
| | That's the nicest thing I've ever read before getting on an airplane. |
The roll (and role) of radio
| | This morning I was listening to the Dennis Miller Show on KTMS/990. The sound was buzzy, but better than yesterday when it literally sounded like a microphone was being held up to a table radio. (And perhaps that's what was going on.) |
| | He's very good, actually. A warm complement to the snarky stand-up guy who has spent most of his career on stage, in front of a camera, or both. |
| | Better yet, he actually podcasts all of his shows. Here they are. |
| | Ironically, the show starts with "Radio, a constantly changing art form... a medium that has been pruned..." In the case of KTMS, the pruning may be literal. KTMS now identifies its channel as 1490 more often than 990. More than one source tells me that 990 is for sale, and likely to go to Westinghouse/CBS, which will plow it under to open room for a larger signal our of KFWB/980, one of the CBS news stations in Los Angeles. |
| | If that happens, all the AM stations in Santa Barbara will be crowded at the upper end of the dial. In the radio biz, 1490 is considered the worst of the "graveyard" channels, occupied by hundreds of stations, none more than 1000 watts, all interfering with each other at night when AM signals bounce off the ionosphere. Yet the KTMS' signal on 1490 is the best in town, because it's a full 1000 watts, while the other two (on 1290 and 1340, all three sharing the same tower down in the city equipment yard) are considerbly weaker. 990 is a much better dial position. The 5000-watt daytime signal is better than 1490's, though the 500-watt nighttime signal disappears east of Summerland, along the coast. (1490 is audible down to Carpinteria.) The only other AM in town is the orignal home of KTMS, "Lazer 1250", with a 2500/1000 day/night signal from a site near the airport in Goleta. Though it's not saying much, that's the best signal in town, arguably. |
| | Radio and television stations in the past have been reliable sources of emergency information within Santa Barbara County. Residents were able to tune to a local radio station or turn on the television and hear and see emergency events occurring and get up-to-date information on what they should do and how to avoid areas where emergencies were occurring. The Grand Jury found that this is no longer the case. Santa Barbara County has no single designated 24-hour radio station that residents can tune to for accurate updated emergency information. In contrast, the County of Ventura has an agreement with one designated radio station to act as its primary source of emergency information for the general public. A hotline has been installed in the Ventura County Emergency Operations Center that goes directly to the radio station, providing fast broadcast of updated and accurate information to its residents. |
| | Santa Barbara County¹s local media networks have been consolidated or purchased by large outside network companies, many of which use prerecorded broadcasting and have reduced or no staff on duty during most of the 24-hour day. Often County emergency public information personnel at the scene of an event will send out an emergency news alert to the news media which may result in limited or no response. This adversely affects the ability of emergency personnel to notify the general public of major events affecting them and increases the anxiety and confusion of the public. Events like the La Conchita earth-slide and the 2005 Gaviota fire were examples of this problem. The public was uninformed and confused due to the lack of timely and accurate information about evacuations and highway closures. |
| | I believe in private enterprise as much as the next guy. But broadcasting is part of a fedral regulatorium that has progressively discouraged local ownership and civic responsibility. The only answer, I believe, is for the public to start their own station. That's why I wrote Lighting a fire for public radio in Santa Barbara. The same advice, by the way, could apply to many smaller cities that are underserved during the commercial radio die-off, and while the Net-based alternatives have not yet bloomed into the equivalent of what we enjoyed during radio's golden age — yet are well-positioned to give citizen journalists and local print publications a way to participate in highly-engaged local radio. |
| | TwitterGram has evolved into a podcasting platform for 20-second messages. You can subscribe to the feeds via iTunes or any other way you get podcasting feeds. |
| | This may sound trivial, but, think about such a service in the context of an emergency like Virginia Tech. In five minutes, from start to finish, using Twitter and Twittergram, one can set up an emergency broadcasting system that sends out text-message alerts and audio-alerts via RSS. With a little bit of preparation and planning, the channel can be set up in advance, allowing hundreds, even thousands, to subscribe to the Twitter feed (available via SMS, IM or Web) or, now, podcast feed. |
| | Perhaps, such a platform can become another distribution channel of the Emergency Alert System? I think others are working on SMS and email distribution of such alerts, but Twitter — and, at least conceptually, now iTunes and any other podcasting platform — can, via TwitterGram or a similar service, be a distribution channel for such alerts. |
| | Yesss.... And it could be a way to knit citizens with media at times of emergencies too. |
| | ...the concentration of radio stations in a few companies is not only a philosophical issue, but a safety issue as well. |
| | As Bill McKibben wrote in Harper¹s Magazine, December, 2003, "When a train car overturned in Minot, North Dakota, last year, a large quantity of ammonia spilled out, sending up a cloud of poison gas. Local officials quickly tried to contact the town's seven radio stations to send out the alarm — only to find that there was no one actually working in six of them. They were simply relaying a satellite feed from Clear Channel headquarters in Texas — there was plenty of country music and golden oldies and Top 40 and right-wing chat, but no one to warn about the toxic cloud drifting overhead. It's true that you can hear anything from anywhere at any time, but, oddly, it's gotten a lot harder to hear much about your immediate vicinity." |
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