Spirits surround me.
In me, on me, in my throat,
on my soul.
In me, on me, in my throat,
on my soul.
I talk on the radio as if
I were alone in the studio,
producers on the other
side of the glass. They are
there. I am here. I am not
alone.
The ghosts of radio past
look over my shoulder.
Julian Colby, Larry Peterson,
Millie Pilot, Steve and Johnnie,
John Anostopoulis,
Harriet Pinkerton.
The Preacher.
These people came before me.
I worked with most of them.
They respected radio,
expected me to carry on the
spirit that is good and pure
and beautiful. That is WJOB.
It’s more than radio ghosts.
147 years ago my forefathers
brought forth on this Region
a new energy, conceived in
survival and dedicated to the
proposition that most men
are good, not deceitful.
Then there are listeners,
callers, fans, friends. They
expect me to safeguard the
spirit that is WJOB. It is good
and pure and beautiful.
It’s a lot of pressure. Sometimes
I just wanna lay down and take
a nap. So that’s what I’m gonna
do. Good night.
It’s 9:01am on a Thursday after the radio show. I rode my show to the Strack & Van Til studios on the campus of Purdue Northwest, talked for exactly two hours and thirty minutes, then got on my bike and rode home. I fried up two eggs over medium, toasted a piece of gluten-free bread, and poured some applesauce on my plate. It was really good. Round it out with a cup of tea.
The question now is to how to seize the radio day. The task in front of us is how to market radio and all of its tendrils to local businesses. As the three or four of you know, I set out with the “Three Marketeers” project for the summer of 2018. I hired three seniors in PNW Marketing. I asked them one question.
“Did you take Matt Hanson’s Ad Campaigns class?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re hired.”
For the past month, I have been working with Darya, Christina and Mark to develop an appropriate marketing strategy for WJOB. But there’s a twist. It’s not WJOB radio that we’re working on. It’s WJOB tv. Yes, you heard that right.
As the three or four of you know, we’ve been broadcasting on Facebook Live in video since it started in 2016. We’ve garnered millions of views. It could be argued that WJOB, in radio and video, is reaching more people now that it ever has.
But there’s a catch. We’re giving our content away to Facebook, which won’t allow us to run video commercials on their feed. This is a problem.
It’s also a problem that Northwest Indiana of 700,000 people or so doesn’t have a TV station. We get all of our TV from the seven networks in Chicago. It’s not fair to the consumer. And it doesn’t help the Region that we send all of our TV advertising to Chicago or, worse yet, to Comcast, which doesn’t invest squat in local programming.
That leaves me to fix the problem. The three marketeers and I have been developing our own TV station and figuring out how to market it. This is a big, big project. It’s taking up almost all of my time. To get a better handle on all that we’re doing, I do not plan on doing my morning radio show next week at all. I plan to work on the computer to set up the website, connect the live streams, build power points and so forth.
It’s a whole new world. We haven’t announced it yet, so I would appreciate it if the three or four of you who read my blog would keep your mouths shut. For now, I am headed to work out and then to the WJOB Strack & Van Til studios. We have our second client presentation of WJOB tv today.
… By the way, Matt Hanson, the Region’s top marketer, came in to our studios and critiqued our project. In the middle of his visit, I had to duck out to get interviewed by Connor Burge of the local public television station. It’s for a segment on “Prep Football Report,” which has been around for a long time.
The key message from Hanson is that we have to learn how to tell the story of local streaming TV. He said there’s a number of ways to go about it, but that there is a compelling story in that Alexis and I rescued WJOB from the scrap heap. A corollary is that we continue to thrive by innovating and using Purdue students to do it. Northwest Indiana’s first-ever 24-hour commercial TV station is just another chapter in the innovation.
I hope this slant works. I’m getting ready to present it in a couple hours to a prospective sponsor of WJOB tv, which doesn’t even really officially exist yet. So keep your mouth shut.
I were alone in the studio,
producers on the other
side of the glass. They are
there. I am here. I am not
alone.
The ghosts of radio past
look over my shoulder.
Julian Colby, Larry Peterson,
Millie Pilot, Steve and Johnnie,
John Anostopoulis,
Harriet Pinkerton.
The Preacher.
These people came before me.
I worked with most of them.
They respected radio,
expected me to carry on the
spirit that is good and pure
and beautiful. That is WJOB.
It’s more than radio ghosts.
147 years ago my forefathers
brought forth on this Region
a new energy, conceived in
survival and dedicated to the
proposition that most men
are good, not deceitful.
Then there are listeners,
callers, fans, friends. They
expect me to safeguard the
spirit that is WJOB. It is good
and pure and beautiful.
It’s a lot of pressure. Sometimes
I just wanna lay down and take
a nap. So that’s what I’m gonna
do. Good night.
It’s 9:01am on a Thursday after the radio show. I rode my show to the Strack & Van Til studios on the campus of Purdue Northwest, talked for exactly two hours and thirty minutes, then got on my bike and rode home. I fried up two eggs over medium, toasted a piece of gluten-free bread, and poured some applesauce on my plate. It was really good. Round it out with a cup of tea.
The question now is to how to seize the radio day. The task in front of us is how to market radio and all of its tendrils to local businesses. As the three or four of you know, I set out with the “Three Marketeers” project for the summer of 2018. I hired three seniors in PNW Marketing. I asked them one question.
“Did you take Matt Hanson’s Ad Campaigns class?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re hired.”
For the past month, I have been working with Darya, Christina and Mark to develop an appropriate marketing strategy for WJOB. But there’s a twist. It’s not WJOB radio that we’re working on. It’s WJOB tv. Yes, you heard that right.
As the three or four of you know, we’ve been broadcasting on Facebook Live in video since it started in 2016. We’ve garnered millions of views. It could be argued that WJOB, in radio and video, is reaching more people now that it ever has.
But there’s a catch. We’re giving our content away to Facebook, which won’t allow us to run video commercials on their feed. This is a problem.
It’s also a problem that Northwest Indiana of 700,000 people or so doesn’t have a TV station. We get all of our TV from the seven networks in Chicago. It’s not fair to the consumer. And it doesn’t help the Region that we send all of our TV advertising to Chicago or, worse yet, to Comcast, which doesn’t invest squat in local programming.
That leaves me to fix the problem. The three marketeers and I have been developing our own TV station and figuring out how to market it. This is a big, big project. It’s taking up almost all of my time. To get a better handle on all that we’re doing, I do not plan on doing my morning radio show next week at all. I plan to work on the computer to set up the website, connect the live streams, build power points and so forth.
It’s a whole new world. We haven’t announced it yet, so I would appreciate it if the three or four of you who read my blog would keep your mouths shut. For now, I am headed to work out and then to the WJOB Strack & Van Til studios. We have our second client presentation of WJOB tv today.
… By the way, Matt Hanson, the Region’s top marketer, came in to our studios and critiqued our project. In the middle of his visit, I had to duck out to get interviewed by Connor Burge of the local public television station. It’s for a segment on “Prep Football Report,” which has been around for a long time.
The key message from Hanson is that we have to learn how to tell the story of local streaming TV. He said there’s a number of ways to go about it, but that there is a compelling story in that Alexis and I rescued WJOB from the scrap heap. A corollary is that we continue to thrive by innovating and using Purdue students to do it. Northwest Indiana’s first-ever 24-hour commercial TV station is just another chapter in the innovation.
I hope this slant works. I’m getting ready to present it in a couple hours to a prospective sponsor of WJOB tv, which doesn’t even really officially exist yet. So keep your mouth shut.
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