9:12am on Memorial Day.
I'm sitting on the back porch. 65 degrees with a wispy breeze through the many trees that populate our small slice of heaven. Pretty soon they'll all drop their leaves and as I pull and pull again on a plasic rake, I'll curse every last one of them.
Time and place. This is what I've been thinking about lately. Anyone associated with 100 and a half-year-old WJOB has had to deal with a decent amount of tragedy lately. Midsummer it was my high school football coach, John Friend, who went on to be the athletic director at Purdue Northwest for several decades. Coach Friend was instrumental in briniging WJOB to the campus of Purdue Northwest, where we still are.
It took a year to develop a contract for a private media company to move onto the Purdue campus. Finally, I signed the contract and the contract went to the black hole of lawyers in West Lafayette. They sat on the contract for two months. I started to become paranoid that they weren't going to okay the deal of us moving onto Purdue grounds. If you're a longtime listener, you'll remember that I several times took it to Mitch Daniels when he was governor of Indiana. After two terms as governor, Mitch left to be president of Purdue. I figured that maybe he had a long memory and wouldn't sign the deal.
"Coach, I'm gonna pull my offer to move to Purdue. I'm tired of waiting," I told coach Friend. "This is ridiculous."
Coach Friend put his hand on my shoulder. "Jimmy - I'm gonna tell you something you need to remember, even after I'm gone. There's a right way and a wrong way and the Purdue way. You sit tight and have some patience."
Two days later the deal was signed. Why do think that was?
That was ten years ago. Coach Friend was still alive then. I'd interview him once in a while, but one of the many things I never got to in life passed me, and him, by. I had always planned to do a series of interviews with Coach Friend and Leroy Marsh. Between the two of them, they were the only football coaches in the first 53 years of Munster football. That would have been a good podcast. I never got to it. Coach Friend died over the summer... followed by Jeff Bridges... then Pedro and Tatiana. It's been a tough stretch.
... Switching gear... As you know by now, I own and operate one of the oldest radio stations in America - WJOB am 1230. I am proud that my wife and I rescued it from bankruptcy and returned it to what it has always been, which is the glue that holds together the Calumet Region. We talk, listen to each other, do a little news, cheer for high school sports, then go to bed and do it again the next day. It's been that way for a century.
But there's always been a piece missing from the media mileu for northwest Indiana - a TV station. We get our TV from a city and state that could care less about us. There's a good half dozen TV stations in Chicago and they take for granted that people in Indiana are gonna watch one of them. There's three quarters of a million of us.
When Covid hit in 2020, everyone went home from our studios at Purdue and I operated WJOB by myself. I got a waiver from the University to come into the building to broadcast. I was many times the only person on campus. It could get lonely, sitting in the chair and talking and singing and telling jokes and interviewing Infectious disease specialists and broadcasting the governor's address and then doing it again the next day. Once a week a woman would come by to clean. Every morning the mailman would put something in the mailbox.
One day the mailman dropped a check off from the federal government. A few days later he brought one from the state of Indiana. There was only one caveat - you had to keep your people working. So I got everyone on a Zoom and told them - "Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna build a TV station."
Complete internet silence. Several dazed looks on a screen. Finally, Ben Tomera, a longtimer at WJOB, spoke for everyone - "You're crazy."
Let's stop for a moment. I'm trying something different today. It's Labor Day. Leaves on the ground and squirrels running up and down all the trees. They're noisy. So is the weedwhacker two lawns over and the constant crickety creek crick of all of the grasshoppers. An single-engine airplane just went by on its way to Lansing airport. So, just because I have enough time to notice all of this, I'm writing out a script that I will soon read to you in my own voice, not an AI voice. Truth be told, I'm kind of hoping that AI advances to the point where I could just write the script and then a facsimile of me could read it to you, but we're not they're yet.
We've actually tried that. I read three minutes into an AI program and then the program read something back in what was supposed to my voice. The AI version of me didn't sound right. It was too polished. You should see me right now sitting in thermal pants, no socks, a faded sweatshirt, unshaven, wild hair and crazy eyes. I look like an old man typing in the back yard. We all age. It always ends horribly.
Ultimately, I'm actually writing out a blog and then reading it it to you later. What I'm trying to tell you is that it is quite a struggle to fulfill what I see as my position in the time and place continuum. Twenty years ago, my wife and I bought the local radio station, resurrected it, and made it sturdy enough to make it to cross the 100 mark. It's been a lot of fun and work. But WJOB is alive and in its second century.
Now, I'm laying it on the line to build a TV station for northwest Indiana. We took the PPP money and money from the state and built a TV station - JEDtv. I'm JED. That was my badge for 18 years at the Chicago Board of Trade. We chose that as a name. It's as good as any.
JEDtv is actually one of the most advanced distribution systems of any local media in America. We broadcast from studios at Purdue or at a game or press conference or wherever - and then we send it to the cloud, which is really Miami, and then Miami streams the content to eight different locations. Don't ask me to diagram it. It's Labor Day, for crissakes.
A few months ago an old associate from the Board of Trade called me.
"JED," he said. "How the hell could you afford to build that entire streaming video platform? I just priced it out and it's two and half mil - without content."
It turns out that when build a streaming video platform, you can get decent prices during a pandemic. We didn't know this at the time. We just called people up and got prices and then paid to get it done. And here we are - JEDtv. It's built. You could go right now and watch it. But don't do that yet, at least not until I'm done writing, er, reading this script.
So we've been doing this JEDtv thing for about three years, and it hasn't really hasn't taken off for news and talk. People are just too loyal to their Chicago TV statiopns. We are NBC Channel 5 people. That's because my wife's dad - Gonzalo, also known as Shorty when he was a foreman at Inland Steel - watched NBC Channel 5. So every night Alexis turns on the local news at five and Lester at 5:30. Everyone in the Region chooses 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, Fox, etc. They don't turn to us for news and talk.
But they are turning to us for something, and that is local high school and small college sports. It's booming. We stream all practical home games for 22 affiliates. That's a thousand games a year. For about 700 of these games, we use what is known as a focus cam. Go to a high school football game. Look on the press box. There's this five-lense camera attached near the top. That's a focus cam. It sends the game to us without an announcer and you can watch with just crowd noise and infrequent comment from the PA announcer.
For the other 300 games, we send out cameramen, producers and announcers and stream the game. We've also partnered with other media companies like the local public television station - Lakeshore Publie Media - and Regional Radio Sports Network, which is run by hall-fame-announcers Paul Condry and Mike Knesevich. By the way, if you're in media and you happen to come across this script slash podcast, you will not go wrong if you interview Paul Condry just for the hell of it. He's an American original. Pay no attention to the fact that he grew up in Hobart and lives in Mishawaka.
On Friday night, we ran seven streams simultaneously - six high school football games and a studio show from public television. I laid in bed and toggled back and forth between games, searching for the stream that was buffering or wasn't on at all. This was to be expected, by the way. For the past couple of years, every Friday night there would be some sort of technical breakdown and one of the games wouldn't get on the air. This was especially a problem when we were only streaming one game. When the game stream broke down, we had nothing on JEDtv but reruns of me interviewing a school superintendent or singing to passing semis.
But - if you can believe it - on the Friday night going into Labor Day, we were able to push out seven streams simultaneously. This is a huge credit to Sam Michel, Rob Aguirre, Peter Krukowski, Josh Beauduy, John Mastej and a whole bunch more people including Sonny Santana, who helped build the whole system but on Tuesday morning starts at the Big Ten Network. Our loss is their gain and I'm all right with that.
There is a slight interruption as I type to you. My wife of 33 years - It was our anniversary two days ago, by the way - just brought the dog into the back yard to join me. On cue, she - the dog, not my wife - crouched in the appropriate position and did her morning business.
"Clean that up before you come in," my wife of 33 years told me. As a celebration of sorts for such a colossal pile of gooh, another plane just flew overhead on its way to Lansing airport.
"Can you go to Strack's and get two pounds of meat and a couple of jalapenos. I want to make ground beef tacos," she tells me.
"Didn't you spend the whole day yesterday making food?" I ask. We had yesterday our two daughters over, a couple grandkids and son in law. We hung out right where I'm now typing, er, talking to you.
"I just made fajitas and rice and beans and salsa. I want to make ground beef tacos today. Are you gonna go get the meat or not?"
Of course I'm gonna go get the meat. Partly because my wife just related to me that our daughter cried this morning, rightfully so. My wife made a feast yesterday. This is what my Mexican-American wife of 33 years does when she has a holiday. She cooks all day, just like her mom did and her mom before that. At the end of the evening, we packed up most of the food and sent it with our daughter and son-in-law and two grandkids.
"You take the food. We'll just drop by tomorrow for leftovers," my wife said as they pulled out of the driveway.
"Okay. See you tomorrow." Everyone waved.
This, now, will not be the case. My wife slid open the sliding door and related to me. "Oh my god, our daughter cried this morning."
"What's up? Everything all right?" I asked.
"Yeah. Except that they forgot all the food in the car and it sat in the heat all night and they had to throw it away."
"I'll get dressed and go get ground beef," I said.
As nice as it is right now, slight breeze, sunshine, the end of summer - and as much fun as I'm having writing out for the first time a script for your enjoyment - I want to get back to time and place.
I somehow believe that it is my time and place to do something with this media that was dumped in my lap and this morning show that I reluctantly inherited and all of these schools that depend on us to stream their games. I'm not sure precisely what my, our, mission should be, but I suspect that it has something to do with building a sustainable streaming video network for northwest Indiana, one that, perhaps, could last a hundred and a half years. You never know. I'll talk, er, write to you later. I gotta go pick up some ground beef at Strack's.
I'm sitting on the back porch. 65 degrees with a wispy breeze through the many trees that populate our small slice of heaven. Pretty soon they'll all drop their leaves and as I pull and pull again on a plasic rake, I'll curse every last one of them.
Time and place. This is what I've been thinking about lately. Anyone associated with 100 and a half-year-old WJOB has had to deal with a decent amount of tragedy lately. Midsummer it was my high school football coach, John Friend, who went on to be the athletic director at Purdue Northwest for several decades. Coach Friend was instrumental in briniging WJOB to the campus of Purdue Northwest, where we still are.
It took a year to develop a contract for a private media company to move onto the Purdue campus. Finally, I signed the contract and the contract went to the black hole of lawyers in West Lafayette. They sat on the contract for two months. I started to become paranoid that they weren't going to okay the deal of us moving onto Purdue grounds. If you're a longtime listener, you'll remember that I several times took it to Mitch Daniels when he was governor of Indiana. After two terms as governor, Mitch left to be president of Purdue. I figured that maybe he had a long memory and wouldn't sign the deal.
"Coach, I'm gonna pull my offer to move to Purdue. I'm tired of waiting," I told coach Friend. "This is ridiculous."
Coach Friend put his hand on my shoulder. "Jimmy - I'm gonna tell you something you need to remember, even after I'm gone. There's a right way and a wrong way and the Purdue way. You sit tight and have some patience."
Two days later the deal was signed. Why do think that was?
That was ten years ago. Coach Friend was still alive then. I'd interview him once in a while, but one of the many things I never got to in life passed me, and him, by. I had always planned to do a series of interviews with Coach Friend and Leroy Marsh. Between the two of them, they were the only football coaches in the first 53 years of Munster football. That would have been a good podcast. I never got to it. Coach Friend died over the summer... followed by Jeff Bridges... then Pedro and Tatiana. It's been a tough stretch.
... Switching gear... As you know by now, I own and operate one of the oldest radio stations in America - WJOB am 1230. I am proud that my wife and I rescued it from bankruptcy and returned it to what it has always been, which is the glue that holds together the Calumet Region. We talk, listen to each other, do a little news, cheer for high school sports, then go to bed and do it again the next day. It's been that way for a century.
But there's always been a piece missing from the media mileu for northwest Indiana - a TV station. We get our TV from a city and state that could care less about us. There's a good half dozen TV stations in Chicago and they take for granted that people in Indiana are gonna watch one of them. There's three quarters of a million of us.
When Covid hit in 2020, everyone went home from our studios at Purdue and I operated WJOB by myself. I got a waiver from the University to come into the building to broadcast. I was many times the only person on campus. It could get lonely, sitting in the chair and talking and singing and telling jokes and interviewing Infectious disease specialists and broadcasting the governor's address and then doing it again the next day. Once a week a woman would come by to clean. Every morning the mailman would put something in the mailbox.
One day the mailman dropped a check off from the federal government. A few days later he brought one from the state of Indiana. There was only one caveat - you had to keep your people working. So I got everyone on a Zoom and told them - "Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna build a TV station."
Complete internet silence. Several dazed looks on a screen. Finally, Ben Tomera, a longtimer at WJOB, spoke for everyone - "You're crazy."
Let's stop for a moment. I'm trying something different today. It's Labor Day. Leaves on the ground and squirrels running up and down all the trees. They're noisy. So is the weedwhacker two lawns over and the constant crickety creek crick of all of the grasshoppers. An single-engine airplane just went by on its way to Lansing airport. So, just because I have enough time to notice all of this, I'm writing out a script that I will soon read to you in my own voice, not an AI voice. Truth be told, I'm kind of hoping that AI advances to the point where I could just write the script and then a facsimile of me could read it to you, but we're not they're yet.
We've actually tried that. I read three minutes into an AI program and then the program read something back in what was supposed to my voice. The AI version of me didn't sound right. It was too polished. You should see me right now sitting in thermal pants, no socks, a faded sweatshirt, unshaven, wild hair and crazy eyes. I look like an old man typing in the back yard. We all age. It always ends horribly.
Ultimately, I'm actually writing out a blog and then reading it it to you later. What I'm trying to tell you is that it is quite a struggle to fulfill what I see as my position in the time and place continuum. Twenty years ago, my wife and I bought the local radio station, resurrected it, and made it sturdy enough to make it to cross the 100 mark. It's been a lot of fun and work. But WJOB is alive and in its second century.
Now, I'm laying it on the line to build a TV station for northwest Indiana. We took the PPP money and money from the state and built a TV station - JEDtv. I'm JED. That was my badge for 18 years at the Chicago Board of Trade. We chose that as a name. It's as good as any.
JEDtv is actually one of the most advanced distribution systems of any local media in America. We broadcast from studios at Purdue or at a game or press conference or wherever - and then we send it to the cloud, which is really Miami, and then Miami streams the content to eight different locations. Don't ask me to diagram it. It's Labor Day, for crissakes.
A few months ago an old associate from the Board of Trade called me.
"JED," he said. "How the hell could you afford to build that entire streaming video platform? I just priced it out and it's two and half mil - without content."
It turns out that when build a streaming video platform, you can get decent prices during a pandemic. We didn't know this at the time. We just called people up and got prices and then paid to get it done. And here we are - JEDtv. It's built. You could go right now and watch it. But don't do that yet, at least not until I'm done writing, er, reading this script.
So we've been doing this JEDtv thing for about three years, and it hasn't really hasn't taken off for news and talk. People are just too loyal to their Chicago TV statiopns. We are NBC Channel 5 people. That's because my wife's dad - Gonzalo, also known as Shorty when he was a foreman at Inland Steel - watched NBC Channel 5. So every night Alexis turns on the local news at five and Lester at 5:30. Everyone in the Region chooses 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, Fox, etc. They don't turn to us for news and talk.
But they are turning to us for something, and that is local high school and small college sports. It's booming. We stream all practical home games for 22 affiliates. That's a thousand games a year. For about 700 of these games, we use what is known as a focus cam. Go to a high school football game. Look on the press box. There's this five-lense camera attached near the top. That's a focus cam. It sends the game to us without an announcer and you can watch with just crowd noise and infrequent comment from the PA announcer.
For the other 300 games, we send out cameramen, producers and announcers and stream the game. We've also partnered with other media companies like the local public television station - Lakeshore Publie Media - and Regional Radio Sports Network, which is run by hall-fame-announcers Paul Condry and Mike Knesevich. By the way, if you're in media and you happen to come across this script slash podcast, you will not go wrong if you interview Paul Condry just for the hell of it. He's an American original. Pay no attention to the fact that he grew up in Hobart and lives in Mishawaka.
On Friday night, we ran seven streams simultaneously - six high school football games and a studio show from public television. I laid in bed and toggled back and forth between games, searching for the stream that was buffering or wasn't on at all. This was to be expected, by the way. For the past couple of years, every Friday night there would be some sort of technical breakdown and one of the games wouldn't get on the air. This was especially a problem when we were only streaming one game. When the game stream broke down, we had nothing on JEDtv but reruns of me interviewing a school superintendent or singing to passing semis.
But - if you can believe it - on the Friday night going into Labor Day, we were able to push out seven streams simultaneously. This is a huge credit to Sam Michel, Rob Aguirre, Peter Krukowski, Josh Beauduy, John Mastej and a whole bunch more people including Sonny Santana, who helped build the whole system but on Tuesday morning starts at the Big Ten Network. Our loss is their gain and I'm all right with that.
There is a slight interruption as I type to you. My wife of 33 years - It was our anniversary two days ago, by the way - just brought the dog into the back yard to join me. On cue, she - the dog, not my wife - crouched in the appropriate position and did her morning business.
"Clean that up before you come in," my wife of 33 years told me. As a celebration of sorts for such a colossal pile of gooh, another plane just flew overhead on its way to Lansing airport.
"Can you go to Strack's and get two pounds of meat and a couple of jalapenos. I want to make ground beef tacos," she tells me.
"Didn't you spend the whole day yesterday making food?" I ask. We had yesterday our two daughters over, a couple grandkids and son in law. We hung out right where I'm now typing, er, talking to you.
"I just made fajitas and rice and beans and salsa. I want to make ground beef tacos today. Are you gonna go get the meat or not?"
Of course I'm gonna go get the meat. Partly because my wife just related to me that our daughter cried this morning, rightfully so. My wife made a feast yesterday. This is what my Mexican-American wife of 33 years does when she has a holiday. She cooks all day, just like her mom did and her mom before that. At the end of the evening, we packed up most of the food and sent it with our daughter and son-in-law and two grandkids.
"You take the food. We'll just drop by tomorrow for leftovers," my wife said as they pulled out of the driveway.
"Okay. See you tomorrow." Everyone waved.
This, now, will not be the case. My wife slid open the sliding door and related to me. "Oh my god, our daughter cried this morning."
"What's up? Everything all right?" I asked.
"Yeah. Except that they forgot all the food in the car and it sat in the heat all night and they had to throw it away."
"I'll get dressed and go get ground beef," I said.
As nice as it is right now, slight breeze, sunshine, the end of summer - and as much fun as I'm having writing out for the first time a script for your enjoyment - I want to get back to time and place.
I somehow believe that it is my time and place to do something with this media that was dumped in my lap and this morning show that I reluctantly inherited and all of these schools that depend on us to stream their games. I'm not sure precisely what my, our, mission should be, but I suspect that it has something to do with building a sustainable streaming video network for northwest Indiana, one that, perhaps, could last a hundred and a half years. You never know. I'll talk, er, write to you later. I gotta go pick up some ground beef at Strack's.
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