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Monday, December 20, 2004
A toast 
| | I'm on the last Linux Show right now. Hopefully it'll be back on the Web, in some form, eventually. Meanwhile, I want to pause to salute Jeff Gerhardt, who has kept that show going for several centuries of Internet Time. It's been a labor of love and faith and very hard work, and I want to raise a toast to Jeff and the whole crew. |
Rock on
| | I'm on the phone with Buzz, who's full of amazing ideas for What Can Be Done with podcasting. At the moment: Powered speakers in hotel rooms. Just plug in your .mp3 player. |
| | Buzz was a guest on G'Day World Podcast last week, by the way. Here's the file. He just treated me to a 3-way Skype conversation with host Cameron Reilly. I'm in California. Buzz is in Florida. And Cameron is in Australia. Looking at the globe, we're spaced like three holes in the world's bowling ball. |
| | Now I'll be on the show as well, it seems. We'll work out something for next week. |
Tower coverage test
| | So right now (9:49am, Monday), here's the news about the plane that hit KFI's tower exactly 24 hours ago: |
| | On Technorati (the blogosphere): The John & Ken Show. This is the only source that says exactly how KFI got back on the air. Not surprisingly, they're using their shorter back-up tower. From 90 miles away, it doesn't sound bad, considering. |
| | Anyway, I'm curious to see how reporting on this thing differs between mainstream and free-range journals. |
| | Why this story? Well, to old radio freaks like myself, it's not small news to hear that this big old tower got knocked down. I'm sorry two people died (the pilot and his wife, from Temple City, CA); but small plane crashes are common. KFI isn't. By several measures, the largest AM station in the country: |
| | - It's one of the original "clear channel" stations in the U.S. That means it operated at the maximum allowed power of 50,000 watts; and that no other stations in the U.S. and Canada could occupy the same channel at night, when AM waves bounce off the ionosphere and back to Earth at great distances from the transmitter. For much of radio's Golden Age (1930s to 1960s), clear channel stations served large portions of North America at night. WSM/650 in Nashville, for example, was more than the home of the Grand Ole Opry. It was the great wellspring of country music, because its signal at night blanketed the whole eastern U.S. That included what was called "white areas" not covered by any local stations. In those days much of the country's population was rural, and stations like WSM were cultural landmarks. Rock & Roll spread in a similar fashion, by the way. Not only did it take root in little local stations that couldn't compete with the big MOR ("middle of the road") stations (consider, for example, the fictional station in American Graffiti, staffed at night by Wolfman Jack), but big clear channel rockers like WLS/890 from Chicago and WABC/770 from New York served areas not reached by any local Top 40 station. My cousins in Graham, NC, for example, listened by day to WCOG/1320 from Greensboro and WKIX/850 from Raleigh and at night to WLS and WABC because the other two stations reduced their power at night. Even among these powerhouses, KFI was an unusual case. It was protected to the opposite coast. WHLO in Akron was a 1000-watt station on 640 that went off the air when sunset reached Los Angles. In New Jersey, where I grew up, I'd hear WHLO go off and the faint sound of KFI start coming through. By midnight my time, KFI had a listenable signal, even though another station in Cuba on 640 often came through in the background. What I heard radiated from the tower that went down yesterday. I still have KFI tapes somewhere, recorded in New Jersey in the early '60s, though hardly the time to find them. Today there are many other stations in the U.S. alone on 640am, although KFI still covers the whole Southwest very well at night.
- AM coverage in the daytime gets bigger as you go down the dial. That's because the waves are longer, adhere to the ground better, and slop over hills and mountains that slow or stop signals farther up the dial. KFI's 640 frequency is the lowest (and therefore largest) among all the original "clears." By day it reaches far into Mexico, central California, Nevada and Arizona.
- The ideal (most efficient) height for an AM tower is about 1/2 the frequency's wavelength. At 760 feet, KFI's is approximately a half-wave tower.
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| | This wasn't the first time a clear channel tower was brought down by a plane. In 1967, two New York landmarks — WNBC/660 and WCBS/880, both clear channel stations — were knocked off when the tower they share was hit by a plane. |
| | I'm wondering if KFI will rebuild the same tower in that location. On KCRW this morning I heard that some pilots consider the tower "hard to see." I'm sure relocation would be difficult, if not impossible. AM stations need ground systems with buried copper wire going hundreds of feet from their towers, in all directions. Ideally they sit on ground that's highly conductive. KFI's could be better (ground conductivity in the L.A. area gets better toward the coasts, especially on the West side, while KFI is far inland, just off the I-5 in La Mirada, on the Los Angeles/Orange Country border); but there probably isn't any land available, especially at an affordable cost. Interference with other stations on nearby channels might also result. |
| | The irony here, of course, is that the AM band is more than 80 years old, and the transmission systems were intended for a very different world. AM will be around as long as car makers build it into new cars. When will that end? I'll be asking that question when I visit CES for Linux Journal in a couple weeks (if I ever find a hotel, which is looking pretty tough right now). |
The baton passes
| | We have got to nurture the spirit of independent journalism in this country, or we'll not save capitalism from its own excesses, and we'll not save democracy from its own inertia. |
| | Moyers nails it. I'd say Read the Whole Thing, but I can't find an original (though there are lots of stories about Moyers retiring from TV). Jim's link is to a Yahoo News page that has, typically, gone away. Why does Yahoo still do that? |
| | Just as interesting is Michael Kinsey's Let's Face It, Blogs Are Better, his op-ed column in yesterday's Los Angeles Times. He almost gets to the right point... |
| | Most interesting, though, is how the Web enables people scattered around the globe, who share an interest in a topic as naturally uninteresting as the economic theory behind Social Security privatization, to find one another and enjoy a gabfest. Webheads like to call this phenomenon "community." I used to think that was a little grand and a little misleading. Populist electronic conversation mechanisms like blogs and Web bulletin boards are more about the opportunity to talk than about the opportunity to listen. But that may be true of physical communities as well. |
| | But then he goes sideways in his last remark: |
| | At least we're talking past each other in a glamorous new medium. |
| | Only in some cases, Michael. Where blogging matters — where ideas move forward and thinking gets done — we talk to and with each other. That's what makes blogging radically different from editorializing-as-usual. My favorite example of how this works came up after I wrote this: |
| | I find myself thinking there are three approaches to journalism represented here. One is the "cool" approach of traditional journalism, including network broadcasting (in which NPR is no exception). One is the "hot" approach of talk radio, which has since expanded to TV sports networks and now Fox TV. The third is the engaged approach of weblogging. What we're doing here may be partisan in many cases, but it is also inconclusive. Blogging is about making and changing minds. It's less about scoring points against perceived enemies (with certain exceptions, of course) than about scaffolding new and better understandings of one subject or another. |
| | People trying to explain their attraction to the weblog form say it's conversational, two way, personal, a medium for the individual voice-- plus interactive with our untold wealth in information, and fun. All true. Doc adds something: weblogging is an inconclusive act-- and that's attractive, part of the fun. |
| | The cool, neutral, professional style in journalism says: get both sides and decide for yourself. The hotter, more partisan press says: Decide for yourself--which side?--then go get information. The weblog doesn't want to be either of these, but it checks and it balances both. |
| | Until Jay wrote this piece, I had forgotten I'd even written that line. Yet now I understand what I said -- that is, the insights behind it -- better because Jay, and his readers, enlarged on it. |
| | See, what we need in journalism is more teaching and learning, and not just talking and listening. We need more out-loud thinking and re-thinking. We need to inform each other in the literal sense of the word, which is derived from the verb to form. Because that's what happens when we learn something from each other. We're formed by the experience. |
| | In other words, we are authors of each other. |
| | Think about it. Authority is the right and the power we give others to form us. Literally. When you say something that changes my mind, I've been reformed. |
| | TV news is killing itself not just by doing bad journalism, but by limiting its journalism to the container cargo concepts behind the whole notion of "delivering information." That's a one-way game, and the world is two-way now: peer-to-peer, end-to-end. This is more than the architecture of the Net. It's also a real marketplace, where the thresholds of conversation, relationship and enterprise are very low. |
| | These thresholds are so low, in fact, that it allows the demand side to supply itself. That may seem like bad news for Big-J journalism. But in fact it's good news, because the supply side is now bigger than ever. |
| | I don't have much hope for TV news (as we know it today), but I think in the long run the subject of that last paragraph is what will save newspapers, and transform magazines. |
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