All Blog Posts Tagged 'radio' (4)

REMINDER: THESE ARE MARK'S VIEWS . NOT WAMU's, NOT AU's, NOT ANY OTHER 'U's VIEWS. Washington's news-talk commercial radio station has an "Answer Desk" these days. I was hoping they would get my mortgage refinanced, my kids admitted to the Beauvoir School and arrange a climatic change to the pattern of mid-Atlantic Spring tornadoes. Sadly, they couldn't even answer the most fundamental of contemporary questions: "Can you catch swine flu from… Continue

Internet subscriptions are like getting a tattoo. Great idea at the time, but painful and frequently impossible to remove when you come to your senses. For some web-based businesses they appear to have become a perpetual sleeping earner, so long as the ancient art of stonewalling is part of your employee training. Years ago, I opened a modest AOL account. That was back when we all needed help navigating Al Gore's great new invention. The monthly deduction of $6.95 has lurked on my credit card e… Continue

A lot of our favorite shows would never have survived the "focus group" stage of inception. Car Talk springs to mind. Prairie Home Companion is another. Some hard-nosed statistician would have shot them down in flames. But by the same token, you can't just sit down and open the mic. These days, the least a successful start-up public radio production takes is a great idea. Try big resources, investment, and a high degree of blind faith. Not to mention gall, guts, opportunism, deluded optimism, s… Continue

The science of estimating the size of the American radio audience is getting a lot more complex and interesting, or a lot scarier, depending on your perspective. Arbitron, the company with a monopoly on measuring our listening habits, is rolling out its Portable People Meter, or as they said at its Washington, D.C. launch "technology is catching up with reality." Here's how it works currently: a couple of thousand people, a… Continue