What if I try to build a TV station for the Region and fail? How embarrassing would that be?
There is precedent, however. I have failed plenty of times before. As a matter of fact, I pretty much accept it as part of the process.
Think about this. You’re standing in the trading pits and somebody sells you a hundred five-year notes. The whole pit sees you buy the 100-lot. You look down to write it on your card and by the time you’ve done that, the market has whipped directly down. Now, outside of their own travails, plenty of traders are watching you as to what you’ll do next.
So you do what you’ve been trained to do – you raise your hands and try to sell your hundred lot at a loss of a ton of money. Quick. Within a minute you’ve bought and sold a hundred lot and lost a ton of money on it. And a bunch of traders watched you do it. There could be, if you interpret it this way, a public humiliation aspect to your loss of money.
This is a process that repeats itself many times in a trading journey. You receive trades that smell bad from the outset. You must get rid of them or they will become even more toxic. They could ruin you – if you can’t readily accept failure.
The real danger to a trader is if he or she says – “Ah, I’ll just wait until the market comes back. It always does.”
That’s not true. The market continues to move in one direction all the time. It could move in one direction so far that you lose all of your money on one trade. That’s called “blowing out.”
The key here is that you have to immediately admit that you took part in a bad trade and you have to get out of it now. End of story. You have to accept the failure and move on. If there was anything that I was good at at the Board of Trade, it was:
- seeing tradex forwards and backwards
- failure
It’s trading by a thousand failures. After a while, it’s not that you expect to fail, it’s just that you get nonchalant about it. You don’t even care that a bunch of people watch you fail. Sometimes, you wear your failure as a badge of honor.
This goes contrary to what happens in normal society. Amongst mortals, you’re not supposed to fail. And if you do, you try like hell to hide it. You might even avoid certain activities that might give you great satisfaction (or great returns) because there’s a chance that it might not work out. There is no exact word for this phenomena. I’ll simply call it “shit.”
It’s living a life not on the edge but on avoiding the edge. You see, the three or four of you who return to read my meaningless blog, it’s not, often, genius or innate abilities that drive people to great heights. It’s their ability to accept that there’s just as good of a chance that they might fail as succeed.
That said, here’s where we’re at with the extrapolation of the spirit of WJOB radio to WJOB TV.
We have introduced WJOBNetwork.com as a catch-all for all of the material that we produce and accept. The main ingredient is a website where we run all of the high school soccer, volleyball and football games. This is our own network. We go to a game, set up a bunch of cameras and switchers and stuff, and then stream the game to our own website and that of the IHSAA (Indiana High School Athletic Association).
We also stream my morning show “JED in the Region” to this website. We used to stream my show to Facebook Live video, but for reasons we already discussed, we now do it to WJOBNetwork.com. It’s so we can run TV commercials on my show eventually. We already run TV commercials on the high school games.
Also on the front page of WJOBNetwork.com is a feed from Facebook. A thumbnail of the last three or four videos appears in a box next to our proprietary stream of high school games and JED in the Region.
This is confusing, right?
That’s the reality of streaming video. It’s messy. Or “fractured,” as Chuck Pullen calls it. You create a stream and it could wind up at half a dozen different places on the web. Mere mortals (i.e. advertising buyers) have a tough time comprehending this.
So for now, we’re split. We stream about half of our content to our own network and about half to Facebook Live. And it looks messy on the front page of our new website, WJOBNetwork.com.
Underneath the live video are two “feeds” of information. One is for News/Entertainment and one is for Sports. This isn’t something that I set out to do.
I created the WJOB Netowrk to just do live video. That’s it. We’re good at live radio and live video. We are not good at scripted and/or edited radio shows and TV shows. We’re just not. It’s gotta be at least partly because I am trapped in the Now. The three or four of you know all about this. I don’t know how to get out of the Now so I broadcast radio, do TV shows and write this blog all in the now. It must rub off on the people who work with me. Except for a few exceptions, they have all settled into acceptance of the Now.
Anyways, two guys have been prompting me to take a longer view – Rich Christakes, who owns Alsip Nursery and John White, who has True Mountain web developers. I hired these guys to make us a website where we could create a video network. I showed them what TDAmeritradeNetwork is doing. They have a website that is just a screen that shows live video all day from 7am to 4pm, roughly the hours that most Americans trade.
It’s a great website and it’s how we started out a couple of months ago with our website.
But it turns out that we broadcast at all hours of the day and night. And there are gaps when we’re not broadcasting. So the TD Ameritrade model, although a good place to start, is not a complete model for a radio station trying to do streaming TV.
Rich and John point out to me that we already produce gobs of live, local content. They suggest to me that we repackage this content to be more palatable to consumers throughout the day.
In other words, say one of us does an interview with Senator Joe Donnelly, as I did yesterday. A lot of people will listen live to the interview on AM 1230 and 104.7 FM. And some will watch it live at WJOBNetwork.com.
After the show, however, few people will consume the interview in radio or video. That’s because when we’re done, what gets posted to our website is a two-hour video show. It’s a really long video. Even if you somehow know around when Donnelly was on the show, it’s still hard to maneuver the cursor to find the interview.
Few people are gonna go the these great lengths to watch the Donnelly interview, most likely just members of the his competitor’s team looking for stupid things Donnelly might have said. Other than that, there is no widespread distribution of what may or may not have been a good interview.
So our next step is to take our live video and transform it into bite-sized pieces for consumption by the masses. In other words, we take the file of the long-ass show and we edit it into shorter segments. We post those on our News/Entertainment feed or our Sports feed. These are what you find at the bottom of WJOBNetwork.com.
We just really started doing this yesterday. If you go to WJOBNetwork.com, you’ll see an edited version of the interview with Joe Donnelly and another interview with Olivia Longo, who is the coolest person in the Calumet Region. She told us about how she and her friend Cole went to homecoming at Lake Central. They ate a large order of McDonald’s French fries in the backseat on the way there. Olivia is perhaps the best spokesperson for the Downs Syndrome Association in America.
We cut a couple parts of this interview also and put it into the News/Entertainment feed. No one knows that we’re doing this yet, so it doesn’t have many views. Neither does the Donnelly interview.
The end game is to create “habitual viewing.” This is what we already do with radio, whether we intend to or not. Many Region people (maybe even the three or four you) get in your cars and instinctually turn on WJOB to see what’s happening. This is a ritual that has been passed along for generations – habitual listening.
Now, the challenge is to create habitual viewing. It’s a tall order. There’s thousands of websites vying for the attention of Region Rats. How we stand out, how we get people to return to us every day, is something that I haven’t totally figured out.
But Rich and John have. They suggest that if we step beyond live broadcasting and provide remakes of our existing content, more people will come regularly. I rejected this notion at first. Now, I’m all in.
So the routine, as of yesterday, becomes this.
- I wake up right about now, 4:22am.
- I do a three-hour radio and TV show
- Sfterwards, I sit with the editors and cut up the show into digestible pieces
This is the start of moving from the Now to the Then, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s much easier to just do your show and be done with it. It’s what I have done since I first sat for a three-hour show in 1985 and it’s what hosts have done at WJOB since 1924. Just do your show and move on.
We’ll see if this works or not. There’s no guarantee that it will. As a matter of fact, that’s part of the lure of doing it. I am not afraid of failure and I don’t think it’s some sort of romantic endeavor. I have enough stories of failure. I lost all my money twice at the Board of Trade. I don’t long for any more stories of failure that I can tell my grandkids before bragging how I finally hit the jackpot. I just want to create something beautiful and lasting for the Region It matters not how many times I stumble on the way to doing so.