Radio for your car.
Facebook Live for your phone.
Amazon, Roku and Apple TV for your living room.
Laying in bed
on Saturday
morning listening to
the backyard birds chirp their
asses off. Why?
It’s probably time, since it is a Sunday night (Mother’s Day), to take stock of where we’re at on this media journey.
Radio – Yes, we are an AM station that’s been around since 1924.
- Hammond Tech’s 1940 state championship
- The 1956 Standard Oil explosion
- The ’70 and ’71 East Chicago basketball championships
- The 2008 flood
Think of all the stuff WJOB has chronicled. It’s up to me to continue it.
We have added an FM radio station. For one more year, we must simulcast whatever we broadcast on AM 1230 on FM 104.7 FM. It’s the rules. But at the end of this probationary period, we’ll have another whole radio station. What should we do with it? I’m thinking a rock station.
Careening toward
a black hole of
computer software and
Tinker Toys in a
discotech fog.
Facebook Live – As you know, because I keep telling you, we were one of the first local radio stations in America to do Facebook Live and other social streaming of video. If we keep it up, we could reach 10,000,000 views by the end of the year.
But how you make money off it? We’re getting some sponsors. But I don’t know where this will lead. Do you?
Amazon, Apple and Roku TV – This is another mystery. We spent the money and developed streaming apps. You can look at the CNN app on Roku and right next to it is the ESPN app and Netflix. And, if you download it in the right order, there is the WJOB Network app.
On that app you can watch a shit ton of local programming on your living room TV. How do you monetize this?
Same old dark at
3am with
it raining out and the
dog snoring yelps at the
edge of the room.
HeyJED – We have been working on this app for two years now. You download it, press a button, and you send me up to 22 seconds of audio, which we play on the radio. Somehow, I got Gavit senior Shamari Walker to believe in my hope that this app can save radio. He wrote the code. I gotta deliver on the vision.
Podcasts – Yes.
Blogs – Yes.
Streaming radio stations – Yes.
MBA – As of last week, I am now halfway through my MBA at Purdue Northwest. Like all students, I need a summer break. I don’t know if the MBA has made me a better businessman or not. But it has given me more confidence. Is that good or bad?
See how confusing it is. In an effort to honor my pledge of opening up about My Radio Life, I’ll tell the three or four of you this – I’m not certain which way to go. I don’t know where to focus. I have no focus.
After about a dozen years of trading in the pits, I figured something out. Every once in a while, you have to get quiet. You’re close to a breakthrough, or you’re early, or the market’s not moving anywhere, or you’re grieving – for whatever reason, you must reserve the right to get quiet.
lay down and wait sometimes it’s
ten minutes sometimes it’s years sometimes it
never arrives but you can’t rush it push
it
there’s no way to cheat or get a
jump on it you have to
lay down
lay down and wait like
an animal.
You can tell, because it’s so poignant, that this is not written by me. It’s Bukowski. This passage explains why he put “Don’t Try” on his tombstone. I pick up Bukowski reprints at Miles Books in downtown Highland. Jim holds Bukowski, Conrad, Kipling and Dickinson for me. Don’t ask. It never goes away.
The crux of the matter is this – what do we do this summer?
My initial reaction is that I am once again too early. I was too early in certain trading techniques that eventually took over, including computer trading itself. And I am starting to think that we’re a little early in the acceptance of streaming video at the local level.
You’ll go watch a movie on Netflix… but you still turn to cable, radio and newspapers for local news and sports. That’s changing, but slower than I would like. So the answer is laying down like an animal.
This endless search
for truth gets a
little old as whiffle
balls whiz by filled with lies
headed for Mars.
Happy Mother’s Day to all you mothers out there. I’ll tell you one day about the life and death of my mother. But be forewarned – it’s a Midwestern tragedy. It might tough to read.