Photo:Italy June 2007 by Dave Winer Great shot Dave! Thank you.

If you use RSS, enjoy a blog or a podcast you may wish to thank Dave Winer. He was involved in bringing us all three (among other things). Dave is one of the most authentic voices on the web. Follow his adventures on the continent here.

"Nothing is cheap which is superfluous, for what one does not need, is dear at a penny." Plutarch

"We are shaped and fashioned by what we love." Goethe

"The great menace to the life of an industry is individual self-complacency." David Sarnoff

KSFX Redux: Tom Teuber checks in with news from Tom Yates. We now add the name of another late 1970s GM - Paul Cassidy, former GSM of KLOS. Yates says Paul returned to LA joining Century's KWST after his bay area stint. Thanks to the Toms.

Borrell Associates: Local online to reach $7.5 billion, up 31.6% from last year. The new projections suggest the dead tree guys are winning, leading with a 35.9 share of the local online. Pure play internet folks (Google, Yahoo, et al) place with a 33.2% take. Yellow pages show with 11.7%. Local magazines 9.2%, TV 7.7% and radio 2.2%. Broadcast has some serious catching up to do. Example - WaPo now generates about 11% of their gross revenues online. Broadcast continues to lag due to a leadership problem. We need to stop expecting our main channel sellers to get the job done. Nothing will substitute for fielding a team of dedicated online sellers. Continuing to move forward assigning our sellers the burden of an online budget will not deliver the results, will not improve share. Seriously, it's time to get serious about the web. Very serious.

Broadcast enjoys the unique advantages of reach, influence and targeting. Our continued ubiquity is contingent on our ability to get our programming on every possible platform. The rights and fee issues related to streaming are subordinate to the far bigger picture, the strategic matters at hand, getting into and winning the new game.

Big doings in French Lick! The Mid-States Broadcast Futures Summit happens in July at the French Lick Resort Casino. A historic collaborative gathering of the first and second tribes of wireless sponsored by the state broadcaster associations of Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. I have been honored by an invitation to participate. Lindsay Wood Davis will lead a discussion of "radio's best practices." I will join in the candid conversation along with Dean Sorenson and Dave Shepherd. Should be lots of fun. Lindsay Wood Davis has set up a blog and invites your comments. Check it out here. See you there!

Photo:

Gull

by

Ron Fell

Very cool shot.

Bravo Ron. Thank you very much!



"The world is not perishing for the want of clever or talented or well-meaning men. It is perishing for the want of men of courage and resolution who, in devotion to the cause of right and truth, can rise above personal feeling and private ambition." Robert J. McCracken

"One nice thing about silence is that it can't be repeated." Gary Cooper

"Don't follow any advice, no matter how good, until you feel as deeply in your spirit as you think in your mind that the counsel is wise." David Seabury

Back to the countdown: Jim Smith again answers the call checking in with the name of our missing KSFX GM. "It was Joe Parish who replaced Don Platt in July 1979. Joe left to manage WPLJ at the end of March 1981, and Ron Denman moved up from GSM to replace him." Thanks Jim!

Congrats & cheers: Brad Saul on moving his First Access Bank project forward, he's now looking for investors; the first fully accessible online bank for people with disabilities is another big step closer to being a reality thanks to Brad. Robert F.X. Sillerman and his CKX gang. This guy is so money; the brilliant serial entrepreneur is going private - and taking Idol, Elvis and the Champ with him, stay tuned. Mark Masters, Jim Watkins and the TRN team on signing the great talent Phil Hendrie. Smart, very smart.

Strategic opportunity: What Phil Hendrie does is uniquely entertaining - sui generis - one of one. Therefore, his act is the perfect fit for evenings or late nights especially on stations like WCKG. What talk stations need at night is not yet another network pundit reheating the issues of the day (e.g., Glenn Beck) but rather a fresh and very different pov. That's what makes Phil's act so engaging, the show is totally original. Talk programmers should recognize this as an opportunity to drop the me-too and wannabe shows. All you need do is listen for what's not there. The object of the exercise is to create contrast. How, exactly, is what you are now doing dramatically different, arresting at a visceral level and authentically unique when compared to the other options available to your listeners?

Consider another perspective.

The legendary programmer Bill Stewart talking with Claude Hall about the incredible overnight success of WTIX..."Storz put on what was really the first music station in town. It was singularly successful because no one else was doing anything even remotely like it." (My emphasis) The old school fundamentals still apply - carefully study the market, discover what everyone else is doing, then do the opposite, put on offer what is not there, ensure that nothing is even remotely like your programming. Signing Phil you pull away from the pack. My sense is adding Phil Hendrie represents a genuine game-changing strategic move. Stop being concerned about getting better and start obsessing on getting dramatically different. "Less Clausewitz, more Sun Tzu" to quote Thomas P.M. Barnett from an earlier post. In the case of this opportunity, being brilliant on the basics, as ever, yields the best ROI. (FD: I have previously served as an adviser to TRN)

James Carville speaking this morning on Russert's MTP about the possible run of Al Gore in 2008..."Running for president is like sex, you don't do it once and forget about it."

Bonus: Bruce Rave offers up his latest Go Deep - the 5/31 webcast is highly recommend - find and listen here. Bravos Bruce!

"This is Tom Donahue, general manager of station KSAN in San Francisco. If the disc jockey you're listening to at this moment has not played a rock n roll record in the past ten minutes, please send me his name and he will be fired."

Tom's "Fire the DJ" Legal ID

One of the dramatic differences in great radio stations is their attitude. There is a measure of delight and surprise in listening to a station that does not take itself too seriously. Great stations have a perpetual sense of good humor about themselves. The Tom Donahue Fire the DJ legal ID is a perfect practical example of this refreshing, playful and creative spirit at work. Another example, the famous sign-off of KSAN gnus guy Scoop Nisker..."If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own."

Attitude!

This is not a life saving hospital, we're not looking for a cure for cancer, it's only a radio station. It's show business. On with the show.

It was Tom Donahue who wrote the seminal FM rock radio manifesto, the 1967 Rolling Stone piece "AM Radio Is Dead and Its Rotting Corpse Is Stinking Up the Airwaves." He wrote "The disc jockeys have become robots...performing their inanities at the direction of programmers who have succeeded in totally squeezing the human element out of their sound...They have succeeded in making everyone on the station staff sound the same - asinine. This is the much coveted 'station sound.'"

Back to our rock radio inquiry - more on KSFX thanks to Ron Fell. Tom Yee a former KSFX staffer shared this info with Rosie Lee Allen...

The KSFX PDs while Tom was there. John Catchings, Sean Conrad, Gloria Johnson and Jim Smith. The GMs during Tom's run were George Yahres, Don Platt and Ron Denman. Also, there was another GM between 1976 and 1983 but no one is able to remember his name.

Bonus: 1977 Pacific Bell Yellow Pages, San Francisco Radio Stations