Mission Statement

​It's 8:19am on Wednesday. I just finished a 2.5 hour morning show in which I interviewed interviewed Indiana attorney general Curtis Hill, fooled around with Dave Kusiak and Matt Reardon, and made fun of Matt Maloney, whom I traded with at the Chicago Board of Trade.

WJOB has been around for 95 years. I was thinking about this the other day while washing dishes. That's a lot of talk, a lot of music, a lot of death, a lot of celebration. It's all based on the Calumet Region of Indiana and Illinois, just to the south of Chicago. 

"What is our purpose? What is our mission?" While scrubbing chorizo from a frying pan, I kept running these questions through my head. I came up with this answer -

"Our mission is to represent the Region to ourselves. Sometimes we spank; sometimes we laud. Whatever it is, we strive to do it with a heart that is pure and full of love for the place we call home - the Calumet Region."

How's that sound?. It will have to stand for now. 

The real death of
radio comes
softly, like a feather
floating to rest on a
pile of shit.

On Monday, Virginia beat Texas Tech in overtime to win the NCAA championship. You heard it right here on AM 1230 WJOB and 104.7 FM. That marked the end of the basketball season.

It was a pretty good basketball season. Near the end of it, we finally finished our Amazon, Apple and Roku channels. That took a lot of time and planning and stuff, but people were able to watch high school basketball tournament games on their TVs in their living rooms. This went over very well. Tons of views. Sponsors loved it. 

The streaming video end of our business continues to grow. You can log on to our Facebook page to understand this or go to Amazon, Apple and Roku. Basketball helped with this momentum.

The questions going forward are - how do we build on the momentum? how do we get people to keep coming back during the day to check for new videos? how do we do this in construct with the mission statement at the top of the page?

Trapped in the Now
of golly gee
and Sham Wow. Release me
from time and I won't be
a mime or cow.

My answer is "News." 

Radio talk shows simply are not attracting widespread viewership. Tony Panek walking through a Toys R Us gets way more views than a great interview with an elected official. 

We've been doing some A/B testing with video. And it's becoming quite clear that short cuts out of an interview get way more views than the interview itself. In video, people want new and digestible bites. It's not like radio, where they come to us to guide them home from work. 

With video, they punch up a 30-second video on their phone and go on. Let's be one of those 30-second posts. And let's give them new information regularly throughout the day. That's my plan, now that basketball's over. 

I'm wasted and
I'm stuck at La
Rosas at lunchtime when
I should be firing up 
the jackhammer.

That's all that I got for you this morning. I have pledged to the three or four of you to chronicle the death of radio in all of its ugliness and the rebirth of local media in all of its splendor. To do this, I should follow the lead of video. Smaller, more digestible bites posted more often. You figure out the rest.