"I have to be wrong a certain number of times in order to be right a certain number of times. However, in order to be either, I must first make a decision." Frank N. Giampietro

"You have not done enough, you have never done enough, so long as it is still possible that you have something to contribute." Dag Hammarskjold

"A trifle is often pregnant with high importance; the prudent man neglects no circumstance." Sophocles

Today's image: untitled by Hanna L. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing.

Doing the homework for an upcoming talk and noticed more than one canard needing attention. Allow me to take this opportunity to disabuse you of three patently false notions. With apologies to Adam and Jamie let's get on to some myth busting...

1. The youth no longer listens to radio (alternatively, youth listening is in serious and irreversible decline).

Busted. Not supported by the facts. One example. Radio programming ace Brian Kelly has gained reach among Milwaukee youth improving his 12-17 cume persons rating book after book. The most recent numbers, Fall 2008, show Brian's 103.7 KISS FM posting an increase in teen cume rating of over 36% compared to the earlier Spring numbers. Further, Brian's team continued to deliver exceptional adult numbers. #1 Adults 18-34, Adults 18-49, Women 18-34, Women 18-49 and Women 25-54. This is only part of the story. 103.7 KISS FM captured the highest share of Women 18-34 of any station in the nation delivering an incredible 25.6 share. Those Gen X and Gen Y women are obviously tuned in and happy. But it's the combined performance of 103.7 KISS FM and sister station 99.1 WMYX that is truly amazing. Brian Kelly has built much more than two successful radio stations, he's built and leads a team and they're on a mission to create killer radio from scratch every single day. Clearly, it's working. Word to the wise: take notes.

2. College students have no interest in or involvement with creating radio.

Busted. Facts counter the argument. Exhibit A: WSUM FM, the student radio station at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Hundreds of students are seriously engaged and involved in playing radio. In fact, there's a waiting list to participate. Best of all, the station sounds great. Don't take my word for it, listen in, they're streaming, here.

3. CBS is making a major strategic error in LA. The abandonment of talk on FM and the debut of a new Top 40 music format.

Since I was not invited to be a party to the discussions concerning the business objectives of CBS Radio in LA please permit me to speculate. Having given this matter considerable thought, Dan Mason and his team have come to believe that they have a better than even chance to win, to be in a better economic position because of the changes.

But wait, there's more. Some experts are suggesting talk is the single best long-term strategy for winning on FM and some LA market watchers are claiming that KISS FM is practically invincible. In their view CBS is walking away from the future of FM and taking on a fool's errand. Let's take these down in separate responses.

Busted. While the "all music formats on radio are dead" meme is said by advocates to be stuff born of pure critical thinking, it ain't necessarily so. Please see #1 above. Music radio is very much alive and well and profitable. The gang that's pushing to get music off of FM stations, those calling spoken word programming the only true salvation securing radio's future are promoting a thesis that's too clever by half. Among pubcasters this flawed notion is taking on the authority of a pragmatic sanction (i.e., industry consultants and thought leaders supported by the research demanded we do it). Music isn't what's getting radio into trouble or putting it in harm's way. My sense remains that responsibility is one of leadership and a massive failure of imagination.

Busted. Incumbency is irrelevant. One need only recall the events of 1986. KISS enjoyed a 10 share and unprecedented success. Emmis launched Power 106 becoming the new market leader in less than one year. The sheer idiocy here is calling the new CBS music format a loser or a failed strategy when it has not yet been heard (as of this writing). Let's agree to follow the counsel of my longtime friend Rick Sklar and give the CBS gang the benefit of being on the air for a month before beginning to listen critically. Let's also agree to let the audience and advertisers weigh in before making any declaration.

Thanks for stopping by. Have a great weekend. See you next week in a brand new show.

"Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why." Hunter S. Thompson

"Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools." Marshall McLuhan

"As a rule, what is out of sight disturbs men's minds more seriously than what they see." Julius Caesar

Today's image: 007 by honan4108. Amazing. Thank you for sharing.

The media player wars

Ephemeral solutions

Art as metaphor

Dave Winer, quoted in a new writing [Who controls your data?] by Doc Searls, says "The tech industry is organized around the concept of wars...if there's money to be made in controlling users, there's been a war to lock those users in...Having seen a number of these wars, and seeing each of them end not in triumph, but irrelevance, I believe we're getting closer to the end of the warfare defined by social networks...Open is a funny thing, you can't be partially open. You can't edge your way toward open. You can't be open and hold the valuable stuff in reserve for yourself." Brilliant.

My thought is the big media companies are engaged in a war of media players. Resources are being dedicated in yet another protracted online battle, the spoils being the solution needed to cut the Gordian knot known as lock in. The rules of engagement are clear - the best walled garden wins. The flaw is in the logic driving these efforts. Media companies are focused on developing a unilateral advantage based on remaining solely in the import business (i.e., importing viewers and listeners). This mindset fails to recognize the increasing irrelevance of the home page and the need to develop new business models based on getting into the nascent business of export (i.e., exporting content). My suggestion here is we are reaching the point of incremental optimization as it relates to Web 1.0 and need to get serious about concurrent Web 2.0 development. Broadcasters no strangers to "live" have an urgent need to focus resources and share of agenda on the "Live Web."

The latest generation of media players deployed by big media continue, by design, to perpetuate the walled garden and with it the mythical quest for lock in. To prosper in the coming sea change, one in part driven by social media, content needs to be digital, discoverable, export friendly and truly platform agnostic. Today's media player solutions are ephemeral. The latest player initiative by CBS Radio while a step in the right direction is just that - only a step. There are miles to go before they sleep and please read that as praise and no disrespect for the nothing less than jump to light speed made by Dan Mason and his colleagues. The CBS Radio initiative seems fundamentally distracted, it's perhaps an elegant present day solution to one of yesterday's problems - online streaming. One hopes there's something Media-Web 2.0 cooking in the digital kitchens of Quincy Smith.

While we're talking CBS let me set the record straight and give Dan Mason some credit he is not getting elsewhere. It has been proffered that Dan's CBS could care less about appealing to the youth market, this is suggested within the context of the larger imperfect argument that the youth no longer listen to radio. Patently false on both counts. During Dan's watch CBS has started up stations targeting youth - Houston and Portland being two recent examples. This is to say nothing of the successful youth targeted stations he continues to support. Proponents of this defective argument are quick to cite the return of WCBS-FM as the defining moment of the Mason presidency when the facts more fairly suggest that was but one defining moment. Stay tuned.

The majority of American youth still listen to radio and being told by their elders that they do not only serves to confirm what these digital natives know instinctively to be true - their grandparents really are a clueless bunch. Permit me to disabuse you of the pure nonsense that states one can only program with any success to the "available" older audience. Radio Disney Q.E.D. Further, in my book the "available audience" is defined as any person with respiration, heart beat and the strength to operate a radio and assistance can be provided to the latter. My sense is Dan being a smart guy, a good business person, wants every cohort possible tuned into at least one CBS station (or product of CBS Radio provenance no matter the delivery platform). Closed circuit to the wags - we live in a world of AND not OR. The zero sum games of yesterday are alive and relevant only in your own head.

Going forward, what next? Rather than using war or any other military metaphor please allow me to introduce another. I've often wondered what metaphors are used by the military since common sense would suggest they must use something. General Sir Rupert Smith is author of a new book The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World [Amazon info]. In this important work Sir Rupert argues a revolution, a new paradigm must occur in our conception of war. This follows earlier seminal writings on the subject of 4GW (Fourth-generation warfare) including the remarkable writing of Col Thomas X. Hammes - The Sling and The Stone [Amazon info]. Sir Rupert introduces art as metaphor, specifically he uses the Impressionists, those guys who once broke all the rules of academic painting.

He makes the point that the Impressionists were trained as Realists and became Impressionists. They used the same paint, the same brush, the same canvas and the same objects however they expected a different outcome. They re-created the sensation in the eye. They were hated for it, their work dismissed. What media needs now in my view is to break free of a confining and limiting mindset, a perspective that is in fact a major obstacle to real innovation. The broadcast business model is operating past its best used by date.

We have no lack of critics, modern day aspiring Lewis Leroy types more concerned with preserving the status quo of best practice than giving consideration to the new and appreciating any taking of calculated risk. Critics preoccupied with moving a tweaked, optimized version of some preferred celebrated past forward rather than being obsessed with competing for the future by way of innovation including abandonment. These critics will no doubt find fault with any and all attempts at radical re-invention but re-invention and innovation are the must haves no longer optional. Simply put they are the price of entry in a new game that is already in progress. The dogs bark, but the caravan is moving on. Best to keep the wise counsel of William Gibson "...the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed."

Damn the rule takers, let the rule breakers and rule makers unite to make amazing things happen. Let the messy stuff of creative collaboration and innovation begin in earnest. Let us stop wasting valuable time trying to get better and let us start making those investments needed to get different, dramatically different. Let us paint!

Bonus: twictionary

Music video: Duffy, the 23-year-old Welsh pop singer is the goods. Check her out via YouTube.

Congrats & cheers: Microsoft Research opens WorldWide Telescope to the public. Very cool [Related video - Scoble interviews Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay project leads at Microsoft] Sam Zell on his flawless sale of Newsday. Sprout on their raise and using their product (below) to make the announcement and advance the demo - savvy! Finally, upon his departure from Bear Stearns, we salute Vic Miller. Vic's performance was exemplary, he brought honor to his firm, credit to his profession and insight to those of us in measured media made better by his consistently cogent observation. Best wishes, Vic - may all your dreams come true.

"Men count up the faults of those who keep them waiting." French proverb

"The net of the sleeper catches fish." Greek proverb

"The silent dog is always the first to bite." German proverb

Today's image: Hot Club lead guitar by slambo 42. Cool shot. Thanks for sharing.

Started The Craftsman, the new book by Richard Sennett. Richard is professor of sociology at NYU and The London School of Economics.

"The carpenter, lab technician, and conductor are all craftsmen because they are dedicated to good work for its own sake. Theirs is a practical activity, but their labor is not simply a means to another end. The carpenter might sell more furniture if he worked faster; the technician might make do by passing the problem back to her boss; the visiting conductor might be more likely to be rehired if he watched the clock. It's certainly possible to get by in life without dedication. The craftsman represents the special human condition of being engaged."

"All craftsmanship is founded on skill developed to a high degree. By one commonly used measure, about ten thousand hours of experience are required to produce a master carpenter or musician. Various studies show that as skill progresses, it becomes more problem-attuned, like the lab technician worrying about procedure, whereas people with primitive levels of skill struggle more exclusively on getting things to work. At its higher reaches, technique is no longer a mechanical activity; people can feel fully and think deeply what they are doing once they do it well. It is at the level of mastery, I will show, that ethical problems of craft appear.

The emotional rewards craftsmanship holds out for attaining skill are twofold: people are anchored in tangible reality, and they can take pride in their work. But society has stood in the way of these rewards in the past and continues to do so today. At different moments in Western history practical activity has been demeaned, divorced from supposedly higher pursuits. Technical skill has been removed from imagination, tangible reality doubted by religion, pride in one's work treated as a luxury. If the craftsman is special because he or she is an engaged human being, still the craftsman's aspirations and trials hold up a mirror to these larger issues past and present."

The Craftsman, Chapter One, The Troubled Craftsman. Amazon info. My thanks to radio programming ace Tom Teuber for the tip on professor Sennett.

Bonus: Charlene Li, a Forrester researcher, has written an interesting post, The Future of Social Networks: Social networks will be like air. Read her post here. Related slides from her talk are here. She suggests in future business models "Each person will have their own 'personal CPM'" endorsing a notion put forward by JWT's rock star of trendspotting Marian Salzman - my sense is Charlene and Marian are exactly right. Kudos, Charlene! Well done.

Closed circuit to Sean McManus: Now that you've decided to look for a new EP for The Early Show, you and Rick Kaplan should take a meeting with Michael Rosenblum. My suggestion is any further attempts to "get better" in order to close the gap on NBC and ABC will not be productive. Think "get different" and reinvent the breakfast show. Michael can help. P.S. He once worked at CBS.

Congrats & cheers: Dan Mason leading CBS Radio in joint streaming venture with AOL, CBS will manage ad sales across the combined 350 audio channels. Smart, innovation via creative collaboration. Steve Friedman and Nanci Ross launch consulting firm Vir2L Media.

Charlie Rose interviews Chris Anderson curator of TED



Charlie Rose interviews Chris Anderson of WIRED Magazine



Charlie Rose interviews Michael Arrington of TechCrunch

"The idea seems absurd, but I can find no flaw in it." Johannes Kepler

"Between the idea and the reality. Between the motion and the act. Falls the shadow." T.S. Eliot

"If I don't know I know, I think I don't know." R.D. Laing

Today's image: Blowing in the wind by Zamm. Great shot! Thank you for sharing.

Last of my eight to watch in '08: Richard MacManus & Dan Mason.

Richard is editor of ReadWriteWeb and one of the brightest of today's thought leaders. When Richard says something is important you can bank it. From Richard's list of 2008 predictions..."The online advertising market will consolidate, after the spate of acquisitions in 2007. CPM will continue to dominate for media brands and CPC for niche sites, although there will be experimentation in VRM and other forms of highly specific targeting of ads. Privacy issues will prevent the latter from becoming mainstream though. The much-hyped CPA (Cost per Action) will continue to be a pipe dream, because publishers simply don't want it."

Dan is CEO of CBS Radio. 2008 will be his first full year leading the charge and it's fair to expect nothing less than amazing things. Dan Mason is the goods and this second tour at CBS is just what the company needed. (FD: I have served as a consultant to CBS and to Viacom. Have also worked for Dan. I would include him with the great bosses it has been my honor to serve including the legendary N.L. Bentson, the incredible A.B. Hartman and the great SGM George A. Warren)

Six of the eight previously mentioned - Rob Barnett, Thomas P.M. Barnett, Joseph Jaffe, Michael Rosenblum, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer. It is my suggestion we all can learn something from each of these guys. Please suggest your ones to watch via comments.

Movie of the year: Juno. Diablo Cody rocks! She just missed being on my eight to watch. A writer you will be hearing about (and reading), gifted.

Blogger of the year: Steve Dahl. The Chicago media rockstar is playing at the top of his game.

Blog to watch in '08: jacoBLOG. Fred Jacobs and crew are posting thoughtful stuff well worth your bandwidth (and it keeps getting better - add it to your reader today).

Asked & Answered: Which video ad format will become dominant? Liz Gannes polls the experts here.

Bhutto's assasination: Thomas P.M. Barnett weighs in here.

Congrats & cheers: Radio programming ace Harve Alan has joined the conversation. Check out his new blog here. Dave Winer debuts his latest product - FlickrFan.

"It is not enough to conquer, one must know how to seduce." Voltaire

"News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising." Lord Northcliffe

"You take one fact, turn it this way and that, look at it in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit. What you are seeking is the relationship, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle...In fact, it is almost like listening for the meaning instead of looking for it." James Webb Young

Today's image: a sure sign of winter-pocalypse by pixn8tr. Fine shot. Thank you!

Congrats & cheers: CBS Radio CEO Dan Mason for standing up and providing some long overdue leadership...

“Radio is king –- there is no media that can better deliver more targeted, personalized messages to audiences and advertisers"

Read more via Kurt Hanson's RAIN, here. Jeffrey Yorke also offers up the Dan Mason/UBS story via MediaWeek here.

The first tribe of wireless continues to suffer from a crisis of confidence, a tradition born of low expectations and poor self-esteem.

The original, and best of class, medium for reach, radio, created its own problems when it elected to become the first and only media to employ the value proposition of time spent. Radio wasted decades failing to learn, accepting the status quo, content with single digit shares of the ad spend. Each new management cohort ran their mouth about growing the pie. Remotes, endorsements, co-op, recruitment, vendor, non-spot, co-pros, event marketing, online, step right up, it's NTR du jour. These initiatives, however well intended, have failed to grow the business.

We have confused activity with progress

We can thank Arbitron for the coming measurement reboot (PPM) and the related new dawn of selling radio's heretofore most valuable yet hidden asset - reach. It's back to the future and Westinghouse NuMath (kudos to Jim Yergin the brilliant media researcher who first gave us a credible reach tool thirty-five years ahead of his time). Kevin B. Sweeney, founder of the RAB and my sales mentor, was also way ahead of the curve. Kevin taught us to use one and only one Arbitron data point - weekly cume. It was Kevin's notion to use our circulation number in making the case against the dead tree guys. On the day job we continue to employ, teach and coach Kevin's legendary and very effective four-point pitch. Kevin's consultive selling template is still valid, robust as ever. Truth be known too many are merely talking a good game and as my friend and former partner the great Joe L. Floyd used to say "Talk is cheap, whiskey costs money."

Price has become an objection because we have failed to articulate value

The single biggest challenge facing the radio business is remaining a relevant (i.e., valued) advertising and marketing platform. While the radio business continues to produce impressive margins and free cash it has failed to show growth and growth is the bitch goddess of Wall Street. Absent real growth the radio stocks remain unattractive, poor investments. No amount of creative financial engineering will save the radio stocks. The publicly held radio outfits have to save themselves and the work that really matters must happen in the field. The catalyst Farid needs to drive CDL up (free and clear of being a penny stock) resides within his sales organization, or not.

What is demanded today is the ability to consistently articulate and proof a credible value proposition. Facing another year of flat (or down) ad spend radio must reinvent sales. Our sales managers and sellers need a new format. Radio sales is beyond the point of effective reboot, what it needs now is a new OS. We must stop training sellers to make calls they're never going to make. Leadership must stop making excuses and start producing results.

A massive failure of imagination

Leadership must be held accountable for growing share, for driving topline, for producing results. As has been stated here previously, this is an issue of critical strategic importance. The mission and metrics must be focused on changing the denominator. Continuing to invest time and precious resources into driving the numerator simply will not get the job done, in fact, it's a potentially deadly error in judgment. It's not about getting better, it's about getting different. Radically different.

Whereas once upon a time you could count on the sales department to buy the time needed for programming to develop and deliver the numbers, today we too often witness the sales department killing programming. KOAI, Dallas is but one example. After a nineteen year run in north Texas the smooth jazz format was dumped because "sales couldn't sell it" or so I have been told. Iatrogenic format extinction. The error larger than blowing up a three share station the sellers have lost faith in might be keeping a one share station on life support - cluster detritus - because the costs of creating the inventory have been minimized (along with bcf expectations). Then again perhaps these are each results of a modern day Hobson's choice. (Disclosure: I once worked at KOAI).

Radio folks need to stop going to work everyday with the same tired single minded mission of killing the guys across the street. Radio folks obsessed with killing other radio folks is now killing the business where before this activity only suppressed the share of ad spend. Competitive media are not significantly involved in radio's revenue stagnation. The silo is being collapsed thanks to improvements in internecine warfare. Advances in competitive monitoring have actually worked to narrow the field of prospects limiting the acuity required to grasp and understand the full ad spend landscape. The danger here is as national advertisers move dollars away and local online platforms (e.g., Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Craigslist, et al) increasingly capture more local direct dollars - the nightmare squeeze play happens. Fighting for share of fewer and fewer accounts while failing to develop new categories...inertia, attrition and entropy take over (with assists from denial and genetic blindness). It doesn't have to be this way. Radio can and should be a growth business.

We need to face reality as it is, not as it was nor as we wish it to be. Radio enjoys an effective and powerful reach, what we lack are the evangelists who can tell the story, articulate value, under-promise, get the order, over-deliver, keep the client, grow the business and teach others how to do it. We can do this. Game on!

Earlier popular posts on sales here, here, here, here, here and here.

Beauty and truth in physics
Murray Gell-Mann

"A theory appears to be beautiful or elegant (or simple, if you prefer) when it can be expressed concisely in terms of mathematics we already have."

Have a wonderful weekend. See you next week with a brand new show.

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Every job is a self-portrait of the person who did it. Autograph your work with excellence; go for greatness." Johnny Martin

"We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible." Chretien Malesherbes

Mr Softy gets Face time: Kudos to Team Redmond on getting the deal done. Seems most folks were dead wrong when they gave the advantage, and best odds, to Google. Now Microsoft wins the day with $240 mil in equity and an exclusive third-party ad deal. The quick back of the envelope arithmetic says Facebook's evaluation is in the $15 billion range. My sense remains there are major three players in the ad space (and more to be named later). Google leads. Microsoft is the fast follower, as ever. Yahoo is the sleeper. What is your Mountain View strategy? You do have one, don't you? Your last meeting in Redmond was when exactly?

The wayback machine: It was way back in the winter of 1996 that my then employer purchased hundreds of copies of a hardcover book written by the founder of MIT's Media Lab. Among our professional staff the book was a big hit. Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte is an edited version of eighteen articles first published in Wired. We sent the books to major players in the broadcast space our clients included. Over a lunch in his office I presented a copy to Dan Mason. The difference between Dan and others that were provided with the reading? Dan spent the time to read it. In fact, years later he told me he had studied it. Smart guy. Today, I noticed that Michael Rosenblum, another smart guy, is chasing Negroponte's writing with his latest post Internetski here. Kudos Michael, right on the money! Closed circuit to NAB staff: Book Rosenblum for the Spring show, now.

Doing the right thing: For eight years in a row, no less. Jeffrey P. Myers founder of PSP (also a pal and former CBS colleague), continues to do exceptional work. His firm helps organizations to improve their performance by developing their people. Great to hear that the RAB has again engaged Jeffrey. This time around he and his team will present materials from PSP's celebrated Media Sales Institute.

Congrats & cheers: Programming ace Tom Poleman signs again with CC and remains ops manager of Z100 and SVP, Programming for CC properties in the city. Beantown's Baron of wireless networks Gary Bernstein named programming prexy for Syndication One. Chicago entrepreneur and wireless whiz Chris Witting launches TalkZone.com a 24/7 online talk radio net. Programming ace Andy Bloom returns to the wireless dodge to helm product at WIP. Wunderkind Jamie Friedman named associate publisher for Pursuits, WSJ's new glossy book.

"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important." Bertrand Russell

"From birth to age 18, a girl needs good parents; from 18 to 35 she needs good looks; from 35 to 55 she needs a good personality; and from 55 on she needs cash." Sophie Tucker

"Tradition is what you resort to when you don't have the time or the money to do it right." Kurt H. Adler

From the open letter to Dow Jones shareholders by Brad Greenspan...
"Every company and individual makes strategic mistakes over a long career. It always happens. But the big winners historically are the companies/individuals that learn from these mistakes, make changes, and have the courage to make another bet on themselves, their employees, and their portfolio of assets." The entire text here (WSJ sub). Over at CNBC, The Brain (aka David Faber), says the deal with Murdoch will be signed tonight.

400 year death spiral continues: Dead tree guys keep selling those ads. September fashion books are setting record high ad pages. Harper's - 360, W - 477, Elle - 598, Vogue - 727 (incl Fashion Rocks supplement in both Vogue and W estimates).

Mixing metaphors: Tom Asacker offers up a good post on brands, marketing and metaphors...

"It is compelling, and much simpler, to view a brand as a fixed and valuable asset, like a piece of real estate. One that simply requires protection and promotion. Instead, today's brands should be thought of as perishable assets, like salad bars. They are marketplace offerings, which need to be constantly reinvented and refreshed to remain relevant. Make no mistake about it. That's the metaphor change that will turn marketers into leaders." Read Tom's entire post here. Kudos Tom, well said. Brands are alive in the moment and related within the context of a dynamic marketplace. Winning brands are not static. The best brands are much more like fashion than architecture, soft v hard, alive v dead, moving picture v snap shot.

The Sumner show - Les is more: Q2 CBS earnings call this morning. Sumner set the stage, introducing Les as the "best executive in the media industry." Les said "technology is our friend" going on to chat up the last.fm acquisition ("a community around content") and other interactive initiatives. In his division by division review Les praised Dan Mason for his "swift and decisive changes" related to the radio group's New York portfolio saying that Dan was a "programmer at heart." Les indicated the NFL cpms are up double digits. Scatter up consistently. Same TV station sales down Q2 (taking out NCAA - flat). Les on Google radio and TV inventory sharing: "We're in discussion with everybody over everything, all the time." On the balance sheet - $2.8Bil in cash. My sense is Les is doing a great job. Thanks to Dan Mason, CBS Radio should enjoy a great 08.

Bonus: searchCrystal. Compare, remix, share. Very cool.

Congrats & cheers: Rob Barnett launches his new venture My Damn Channel. But wait, there's more - throwing down with Rob are Harry Shearer, David Wain, Paul Reiser and Don Was. Okapi Venture Capital is backing. CBS Radio's Mark Edwards, delivers good books for KEZK and KYKY. Elizabeth Guider named top editor at The Hollywood Reporter.

"What can we do to improve ratings and revenue?" Dan Mason

The first week of Dan Mason's watch at CBS Radio and his focus is on the fundamentals. Ratings and revenue. Driving the toplines. Putting authority and responsibility right where it should be - the local market. Bravo Dan!

Congrats & cheers: David K. Rehr on his excellent address yesterday. To NAB staff on getting NBC back into the fold.

Congrats & cheers: Les Moonves on a great hire. Dan Mason on an incredible opportunity. Google, the 3:14 easter eggs on themed personalized pages - genius!