And by “work” I mean what?
I’m trying to figure out which direction to head with the media I’ve been able to coddle together. I feel as if I’m missing something, that there’s an opportunity out there and if I just look in the right direction, I will find it.
But to see the opportunity, you need quiet, at least that’s how it works for me. So I tried to get some quiet and wound up doing so much Christmas and family stuff I would have found more quiet by just going to work.
One of the things I’m trying to figure out is if I’m WJOB or I’m Jim Dedelow (JED). As the three or four of you know, I’m working slowly on my MBA and one of the classes I’ve taken is Digital Marketing with Matt Hanson. This exposed me to branding, and, more specifically, self branding.
The world has changed. In decades past, if you wanted to get your voice heard, you went to work for a media outlet or you wrote a book using a New York publisher.
Now you can bypass all of that and go directly to the internet. Open your keyboard and just start singing.
I don’t have any more on this. You can poke around this website and see what little headway I made over the holiday. What I should concentrate on right now is what I’m gonna talk about tomorrow.
Foremost on many minds is the upcoming congressional race around here. For 35 years, Pete Visclosky, a Democrat, has held the local seat in Congress. He won it in a hard-fought election in 1985 and has sat on it ever since. Pete seems like a decent enough guy with his heart in the right place. But that hasn’t stopped me from criticizing local Democrats for not taking him on.
Never mind. No one big ever had to take him on. Pete just grabbed some bench and now others can fight it out. A lot of people want that seat. Expect more hullabaloo tomorrow. I’m on the air from 6-9am.
One other thing I’ve been able to do over the break is work on our coming FM radio station. As the three or four of you may remember, I bought an FM in 2016. Per the FCC, I have to simulcast whatever we broadcast on the AM on the FM also – for four years. At the end of four years, you can broadcast whatever the hell you want on the FM. That date is June 23rd.
After much exasperation and several bouts of dead air, I have been able to broadcast via streaming from my house directly on to the FM station. And, by definition, since it’s not June 23rd yet, on to the AM station. Today I hooked up from my house and talked live and played some old flashbacks and a little music and other stuff. It was pretty cool. It gave me a glimpse of what radio of the future could look like.
One of the challenges we’re facing is studio time. As the three or four of you know, we built some dandy studios on the campus of Purdue Northwest. There’s robotic cameras, remote-controlled lighting, a cool set, sound insulation and more.
But the studios are more and more in demand for video. Most days I do the morning show with Ryan and Tony and then a bunch of people from the community come in and do their shows, all in video. It used to be that people would only do shows in the late morning. Now it’s most of the day and into the evening.
This puts a squeeze on radio shows. If we need the studios for video, how can we justify using only a portion of the main just to do a radio show? We could build a radio-only studio, but there’s not enough room at Purdue.
So I’m working on a system to go live on to the radio from wherever. I’ve been working with some guys at a streaming company in California. There’s several options. If successful, radio wouldn’t need the main studio as much and that could free up more time for video revenue, which is always more than radio revenue.
As a matter of fact, one of the reasons I gotta get this technology down is that we’re starting up a student-run PNW station. They won’t broadcast from our studios. They’ll broadcast from campus studios to stream on our internet platforms and to also go on the FM wave. It would be a complicated thing, at this point, to point several studios at different receiving points – an AM, an FM, different streaming points, websites, etc. I’ll figure it out. Just give me some quiet.
As the three or four of you know, this blog isn’t just for you. It’s also for broadcasting students 50 years from now at a small liberal arts college on the East coast. By then, the technological challenges that I’m facing will seem like kid’s play. So be it. For now, I’m gonna lay my head on the pillow and on the inside of my forehead I’m gonna draw a workflow schematic of how to broadcast from studios all over the Region. I’ll do that while you go to sleep. Good night.