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Tuesday, December 2, 2003
How radio can unsuck itself 
| | My morning cup of radio is ten minutes of NPR while I make coffee. It's like my morning newspaper scan, only with less information over a longer period of time. I think of it as information fishing; most of the time nothing happens, but every once in awhile something challenging and rewarding comes along. |
| | Well, yesterday morning's four-hour drive gave me a chance to hear more than the full two hours of Morning Edition. I heard the whole thing, much of it twice or more. |
| | (Credit where due: all those features have their own permalinks, making Morning Edition's site something of a blog.) |
| | All good stuff. Important stuff. Award-deserving stuff. |
| | Most of it bored my ass off. |
| | By the time we got to San Luis Obispo I was craving Howard Stern, my customary NPR-overdose antidote. But there appears to be no Howard between San Francisco and Los Angeles. |
| | I often like listening to sports talk on the AM band. It's shallow but engaging, like sports is supposed to be. Since it was still night for most of the trip, I could get KNBR/680 from San Francisco, and KEPRS/1090 from Tijuana (functionally a San Diego station). But Sports bores my wife and kid, so we listened to oldies stations. The kid loves oldies, because so many songs have real tunes. His parents, however, are old enough to have heard every Motown and Beatles hit about fifty thousand times. If oldies stations played more than the same old stuff (like, maybe different old stuff), the stations would be more tolerable, but nooooo... Short playlists have been the staple on oldies radio for years now. |
| | Unfortunately, few of those stations have much more range than a foghorn. About the only single program source you can get for the whole trip is NPR. Having made the trip countless times, I know the drill: KQED/88.5 from San Francisco to Gilroy; KUSP/88.9 from Gilroy to Greenfield; KBDH/91.7 (a KUSP satellite) from Greenfield to Paso Robles; KCBX/90.1 from Paso Robles to Los Alamos; various KCBX translators through the Santa Ynez Valley up to the Santa Ynez Mountains north of Santa Barbara, then to KSBX/89.5 (a new satellite of KCBX) or KCLU's translator (which does pretty well with just 4 watts) on 102.3 as we pull into Santa Barbara. |
| | Nice to know this kind of stuff of course, but... why? Especially when it's so boring to one's ass? |
| | So I spent a lot of time thinking about What Wasn't Working Here and What Ought to Work for Everybody — meaning, what would it take to move this terrible industry into the 21st century, where pretty much every industry, commercial and noncommercial, finds itself sitting on the Net? |
| | [A digression.... There's a technology you may have noticed in some newer car radios, called RDS, for Radio Data System. Combined with EON, for Extended Other Networks, it allows listeners to stick with a program source even as station signals change. It's ideally suited not only to NPR, but to commercial stations such as KFOG/KFFG in the Bay Area, which run exactly the same programming on two different signals covering overlapping geographies. It can also set set your clock, automatically tune to traffic reports, and name the song you're hearing. A few years ago I looked up Bev Marks, the leading authority on the subject, and visited him in his home town in England. Even though American broadcasters had determined their own slightly deadened variation on the standard (RDBS), I thought RDS was right in line with where radio was going in the U.S. Naturally, few stations take advantage of any of its features — even just listing the call letters on RDS radios when they tune into the station.] |
| | I thought back to something that happened — or rather didn't happen — when I was sick the entire day before: I didn't listen to the radio. Not once. That was a huge break in practice for me. I'm not sick often, but when I am it's usually a good excuse to put on the headphones and scan the radio to see what's up. But not this time. That's because the day before — Saturday, while I was hanging out at the Monterey Bay Aquarium with three young boys — I had a realization. An epiphany, really. Here it is: Old Fashioned Broadcasting — AM, FM, TV, Shortwave... — is railroads. Internet Radio, by individuals and small organizations, is cars. We still have railroads, of course. But what cars did was give us a way to make our own transportation. To go where we wanted to go, in our own way, thank you very much. The same thing will happen, has to happen, to radio. |
| | The best radio we heard on the entire trip was on the laptop, while we were wardriving on wi-fi, scanning through iTunes' radio tuner (coincidentally tuned now, as then, to KUMR, the iconoclastic NPR station from the U. of Missouri). Its exemplar is Bill Goldsmith's Radio Paradise, about which I've written often. It's about as good as music radio gets. It deserves to be on the air, and on satellite radio. But the top-downers who run all bigtime broadcast radio in the U.S. — commercial and noncommercial, terrestrial and satellite — hardly know Radio Paradise exists. |
| | But they will, because the market will find it for them. You remember the market, of course. It's the basis of an ideal economy, no? Indeed, it is. But not because it puts the supply side in charge, which is what lots of folks tend to think market economics is about. No sir. Market economics is about real relationships between supply and demand — human as well as transactional ones. (Background: scroll down to Markets are Miracles, here.) Markets ultimately are about the valuable choices we present to each other. Not the big crushing the small, however tempted we are to believe those are the only worthy examples of "market forces" at work. |
| | What radio needs is choice at both ends of the supply/demand relationship. The NPRs and music stations of the world need more program, content and talent sources to choose from, and the listeners need more choices about where and how to listen to those choices. |
| | Okay... I gotta break to make breakfast. I'll finish writing this later. Meanwhile, here's the punchline I'll be coming to eventually: syndication + internet radio. |
| | Thanks. Now back to the rant... |
| | When people ask me about weblogs, and what makes them so different from ordinary web sites, I point to a single development that hadn't yet arrived when the Web was born in the mid 90s: syndication. Thanks to syndication, anybody can be notified about anything that's published. Or, for that matter, broadcast. Or even made available for broadcast. Sources that interest us can be aggregated and perused. Improvements and variations such as attention.xml can inform the choices we make, and even educate us about our own preferences. |
| | Why shouldn't radio be like the Net? By which I mean: every station, every source, is available everywhere the Net reaches. Local is still local. Hog prices in South Dakota will still be interesting only to people who are local to that topic. If I'm driving through South Dakota I might want to hear something else. Why not make it available? |
| | The cost of terrestrial broadcasting is enormous. AM transmitters take up acres of land, and more. (Such as the site for WBT in Charlotte, pictured at the top of this post. One of those distinctive Blaw-Knox towers was later replaced after it fell in Hurricane Hugo. Another was rebuilt.) FM and TV transmitters require tall towers or mountaintop locations, which often bristle with antennas. (For examples, puruse the amazing Fybush and Jim Hawkins sites.) Bear in mind that the biggest FM stations put out 100,000 watts or more of effective radiated power (energy concentrated toward the horizon); and TV stations range from the same level (for channels 2-6) to 316,000 watts (for channels 7-13) and even 5,000,000 watts (for channels 14 and up). The electrical and engineering costs are non-trivial. Failures can be spectacular. Meanwhile, the environmental impact obstacles get higher every day. Meanwhile most people get their TV through cable. |
| | One motivation behind the FCC's decision to relax media cross-ownership rules was saving what it calls "free, over-the-air television," which has been losing to cable for decades. But the real salvation will come from fresh new choices for both supply and demand. Not from protecting what's been failing for way too long. |
| | Big Rick Stuart, who I was thinking about when I wasn't listening this weekend, and who points this morning to news that Al Franken's new liberal talk radio network will be called "Central Air." |
| | John Grappone, the radio veteran and music authority made the Sunday paper, which I did read while I was sick (read it before it scrolls behind the costwall), because he got laid off when his station ("The Drive") changed formats. |
| | Brad Kava, my old friend and fellow radio freak, who writes about radio (among many other things) for the San Jose Mercury-News. I want Brad to start his own station on the Net. And a blog too. |
| | Eric Rhodes of RadioINK, to have the balls and brains to book Ralph Nader as the keynoter at RadioINK's Forecast 2004 event coming up in New York. Ralph is Public Enemy #1 against BigOwner Radio, and has already filed petitions to deny 63 Clear Channel licenses. |
Let's just hope they want to own it so they don't have to use it
There are responses to this message:Web logs versus Web pages, Marshall Burns, 12/3/03; 3:26:50 PM Re: Tuesday, December 2, 2003, Jim, 12/3/03; 2:19:41 PM Unsucking Radio, Steve MacLaughlin, 12/2/03; 10:46:09 PM Re: Tuesday, December 2, 2003 (Radio By RSS), Vincent Outlaw, 12/2/03; 12:44:28 PM
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