My Radio LifeJED is me, Jim Dedelow,
owner of AM 1230 WJOB and 104.7 FM in Hammond, Ind. I host the morning show, do live videos, and write this blog. |
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This blog is about radio. I chronicle what it’s like to live a life of local radio. I talk about the death of radio and its rebirth into something else. Through it all, the three or four of you and I share a love for radio.
Cattails sway in the wind by a two-lane highway that leads to a gas station that is God's creation. You must, if you follow along, also share an interest in family. Radio and family go hand in hand. I am surrounded by a lot of both. It’s my responsibility to:
Both sides of my family have been around in this area for more than 100 years. In a couple of hours, I will stand outside of the Purdue CMEC Center and talk on the radio and on streaming video. This is the same road – it was a path then – that my ancestors walked down 147 years ago. They came here after the Chicago fire. This is a lot to carry around in early morning dark. I prance, gesticulating wildly, yelling at the stars. I wear a wireless Lavollier microphone that you can’t see from your car. To the naked eye, I look as if I’m hearing voices and screaming right back at them. Words follow me everywhere. I can't get away from “duck," "scaffold," and "transgression." "Truth" haunts me too. Family and radio. There are other things, like the Calumet Region in general, but for the most part, from the time I wake up until Alexis and I start snoring again, radio and family are on my mind. It’s 3:31 on the Monday morning after Easter. I have been lying in bed for an hour wide awake. I tend to toss and turn, so it’s best to just get out of bed and start writing to the three or four. I worry about radio. We are a media family that is going in two directions.
We are a 95-year-old media company that acts like a two-year-old. Island me, I want to be free, but Trump and A. O. C. won't leave me be. In or get the f--- out. Last summer, our initiative was to establish a streaming TV sports network. We did that. You can go over the old blog posts if you want to learn more about it. Now the question is - Where do we go from here? It took about ten years of trading to learn this, but sometimes you have to get quiet. It’s hard to explain… but sometimes you have to simply stand down before you can decide on your next step. This is where I’m at right now.
As the three or four of you know, I was pushed out of the Board of Trade by technology. For years, I yelled for dollars with the best of them. When computers came in, I didn’t adapt. Trading was headed for the cyber world and I fought it. I was eventually pushed out. A dinosaur. With radio, I am again faced with a dying institution. Whereas you used to trade with your hands, you now trade with a computer screen. Whereas people used to drive around listening to local radio, they can now drive around listening to Sirius, Pandora, podcasts, streaming audio.Where does this leave WJOB? Fortunately, the spirit of WJOB is proving fungible to the internet. WJOB is good and pure and beautiful. So are the people of the Calumet Region. For better or worse, they look to me to make decisions that will allow the spirit to guide us for another 95 years. It’s a lot to think about at 4:12 on the Monday morning after Easter. Time to eat a couple eggs and do a radio show. Tell me about your pain. Are we the same? Do we dare to compare? What is your game? I want to know.
1 Comment
It's 8:21am on a Wednesday going into the Easter weekend. I just finished a 2.5 hour morning show. Producers Sonny, Ryan and Mark forgot to put a tea on the table in front of me while I talked. I berated them afterwards.
Her daffodils are
dying from an April snowstorm that was not supposed to get here til November. There’s nothing to do but look out the back and listen to “Cold, Rain and Snow” by the Dead. Three inches on the lawn is as inspiring as it is exhausting. I worry about us as Americans. I really do. It goes way past the way we talk to each other and the way our leaders to talk to each other. It’s something deeper.
It’s easy to say that we freaking hate each other. That’s way too easy. There’s something deeper. I think we hate ourselves. I'm tired of feeling shitty about myself. Gray skies, Empty checking account, poor self image. |
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