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October 26, 2018
Especially (Not) For YouThey're remaking "Clueless," which came out in 1995, and the practically unanimous reaction on social media has been "no." That's been my reaction to every proposed remake -- no, the original was good enough. Never mind that the original "Clueless" was itself sort of a remake of Jane Austen; for a generation or two, the movie was, well, THEIRS. And a remake reminds us that 1995 was over 20 years ago and that there are adults today who are too young to remember the original. We get old, and we don't like being reminded of it.
But there's an answer to the "no remakes!" crowd, too. It's simple: These remakes? They're not for you.
That's a hard perspective to maintain, because it requires the individual to put themselves in someone else's mindset to evaluate whether something is good. We tend to think that everyone thinks the way WE do. And radio has been laboring under that impression for, um, forever. I can remember being excoriated by a general manager about one show, cursed out because he didn't think a show was funny, even though he was roughly 30 years older than the target audience. Another GM would tell me that his friends didn't like our station, again citing people who weren't who we were trying to reach.
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October 19, 2018
Getting NoticedWhat business are you in? Nah. Okay, partially nah. You're still in the business of generating content, and monetizing it. But defining what you do as "radio" or "podcasting" is missing the point. You're in the marketing business. That's because we're in the age of ...
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October 12, 2018
Don’t WannaI don't wanna talk about radio today. I don't wanna talk about the demise/scaling back/diminution of NextRadio. I talked about the problems with FM tuner chips in cellphones ad nauseam for years, from the elimination on many phones of the headphone cord antenna option ...
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October 5, 2018
Too HotThere was a piece by Tom Haberstroh at Bleacher Report this week, a story about the NBA's social media obsession and what compelled Philadelphia 76ers guard JJ Redick to delete his Twitter and Instagram accounts and go cold turkey, a phrase that's apropos because social ...
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September 21, 2018
Guidance From The AfterlifeHave you watched "The Good Place" yet? If you haven't or you're not aware of it, "The Good Place" is a TV sitcom, and since I'm not in the habit of recommending TV shows in this column, let me say up front that there WILL be a point to this that involves radio and I will ...
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September 14, 2018
Looking For Leaks In The LifeboatAnyone interested in where the podcasting industry is heading probably experienced a world-class case of head-spinning this week. We saw one of the giants of the current business, Panoply Media, abandon the podcast production and network business, choosing to dump the ...
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September 7, 2018
If All Else FailsThe first sign of trouble was the beach ball. If you use an Apple computer, you know the beach ball. If you use Windows or Linux, it's the little tumbling hourglass, or just a freeze. But whereas normally the beach ball -- also known as the "spinning pinwheel," or by ...
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August 31, 2018
Alternative TalkOver the years, I've written a lot about the wide, wide world of talk radio, literally about how wide a spectrum "talk radio" can and should cover and how there's room not only for traditional political talk but talk about all sorts of non-political things. That's how I ...
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August 24, 2018
The Reach ThingHere we go again. A report this week by Nielsen repeated the statistic that radio remains the number one medium for reach, which means that the reach thing is going to keep reverberating through the halls and conference rooms at every radio gathering for at least another ...
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August 17, 2018
New Radio, Who DisI still listen to the radio. Most people do, even if they won't acknowledge it. The industry beats everyone over the head with that "93% reach!" statistic, and, yeah, most people encounter radio in their daily lives, in the car or in a store or when the alarm clock -- ...
