Another Black Day In Radio

It’s a vicious cycle. The woodman says to the stove, “give me heat”. The stove says to the woodman, “give me wood”. In the business of radio, it’s somewhat similar. At the very time radio programmers need to maintain their best talent, to differentiate their product from the competition, the owners are telling them to cut payroll. And the first to go, in far too many cases, are those who command the largest salaries because of their talent.

I can tell you all about that. Very personally.

A couple days ago, Clear Channel, the largest radio station ownership company in the known universe, fired 590 more people. They fired 1,800 people in January. Yesterday’s round of firings hit Madison, and one of the people they canned was a fellow whose very first job in radio was an entry-level position back in 1989. I know him well because I was the guy who hired him 20 years ago. He worked his butt off, and following the time-honored route, earned his way to a Program Director position several years ago. Now, he’s “on the beach”. Again.

Radio broadcasting is one of the few careers where firing is not really a black mark on your resume. There’s an old saw to the effect “you aren’t really a broadcaster until you’ve been fired”. It’s much like pro sports. For some players, things may not work out under a certain manager, but you flourish under another. Managers who fail in one setting, flourish under a different setting. Except the pay is orders of magnitude better, in sports. And there are far more incompetent radio managers than sports managers.

Radio is somewhat like baseball, in that you work your way up from the smaller markets (leagues) to the big time. At least, it used to be. Now, in markets like Madison, where the radio and TV people came from learning the ropes in smaller markets like Wausau and Eau Claire, they’re hiring kids right out of college or trade school.

Here’s the thing.

Bankers don’t know diddly squat about running radio stations. Or running anything else, for that matter. They know about leverage, derivatives, ROI, IRR, Accreting Principal Swaps, and a number of other arcane things that have little if anything to do with managing talent, and that’s what radio comes down to.

But bankers are calling the shots with broadcasters these days. From the idiots who paid waaaaaay too much to buy Clear Channel a couple years ago, to the morons who thought the way to make money in radio was to cut payroll, to the former owners who sold their businesses for forty pieces of silver, there are plenty of bozos to go around.

I’m saddened that more of my friends and former colleagues lost their jobs this week. But I’m even more sad that so many clearly incompetent people are at the top of the broadcasting industry right now.

Take Off The Gloves, Mr. President

President Obama should mince no words when telling the credit-card companies to stop jacking up the rates and jacking around the American consumer. Not only does he have the moral authority - and obligation - to lecture them, he has the legal authority and duty to step in and force them to change their ways.

Much ado was made about the President of the United States forcing the CEO of General Motors to step down a few weeks ago. “Should we have a politician dictating to private industry who should run the company” was the rant. No, we shouldn’t.

But President Obama, in the case of GM, the car-makers, the bankers, the credit card companies, the investment houses and anybody else who took bailout money, is much more than a politician. He is now a de-facto member of that organization’s board of directors, representing the interests of the American citizens whose tax dollars (and borrowed money) bailed them out.

He gets a say, and he gets a big say, in how they do business, in who runs their organization, and in what policies they follow in their business model.

Anyone who’s ever owned a business that borrowed money knows exactly how big a “say” the lender has in how you run your business…whether the lender is a bank, a venture capital group, or simply a person who owns a significant amount of your debt or equity. The level at which you can compensate your key employees, the earnings standards by which you are allowed to issue dividends, the amount of other debt you can carry, and the balances you must keep on deposit are all typically dictated by your lender, if your lender has even a moderate stake in your operations.

As taxpayers, we have a huge stake in the operations of the carmakers and financial houses of America. While we call them “bailouts”, they’re really LOANS. And anybody who’s ever taken a loan from a bank knows there are TERMS with the loan.

One of the biggest mistakes both the Bush and Obama administrations made with the bailouts was the failure to act like a responsible lender, and dictate clear terms with the loans. This failure to act as a responsible lender crippled their efforts to make changes in the culture of greed and excess that brought them to the brink of ruin in the first place.

We don’t even know what most of the banks did with the billions we gave them. Has no one in congress or the administration ever parented a child? Do they not know the difference between a request and a plea? If your kid says he needs to "borrow" 200 bucks for a brake job, a different set of principles applies than if he asks for a couple hundred bucks for Badger Hockey tickets.

So take the gloves off, Mr. President. Tell the credit card companies there’s a new set of rules. Tell them it’s NOT OK to double the interest rates on their cardholders, and that until they pay back the loans, you’re not just a politician - you’re a member of their board, and will act as such.

Even the Limbaughs and Hannitys should be able to understand it, if you explain it that way.

Fun (or not) With The Media

My weekend of disappointment in the local news media began Friday evening watching the six o’clock news, when I actually laughed out loud at what one of the local TV stations had done to a reporter who’s been a friend for years. In its zeal to warn us about the possibility of rain 250 miles from Madison, they’d unwittingly placed one of those “weather icons”…in this case, a cloud with a lightning bolt coming out of it….right over his FACE as he was attempting to give us an update on this coming weekend’s Mifflin Street Beer Blast.

Never mind that the rain we were being warned about was roughly over Rochester Minnesota, by gum the station was going to make us aware that it was going to be raining somewhere, and our lives wouldn’t be safe unless we saw that little cloud and lightning bolt thingy on the screen.
Saturday progressed with the litany of chores attendant to weekend living in our household, and we settled in to finally watch our DVD of “Doubt” around 8 o’clock, and retired thereafter. We had not exposed ourselves to a local weathercast, so we weren’t fully apprised of the hellacious weather about to break loose.

The full fury of the spring storm hit around midnight, with lots of wind, record rainfall, thunder and lighting galore. Our power went out around midnight and didn’t come back on until a little after 2 AM. When we finally got up Sunday morning, there was no coffee made. The automatic timer on the pot was confused by the long power outage.

There was no TV to be had, and no internet. Our cable company is also our internet service provider, and they were down. So we reverted to the trusty old radio in the kitchen, tuning in the only local station (of the 30 or so that call Madison home) that gives news on Sunday morning. Their top-of-the-hour newscast mentioned nothing about the storm or the cable outage, but we were treated to a story datelined Sheboygan, then one about some child in trouble in Green Bay, and then something about Madison, but I confess I don’t even remember what it was. Nothing that I cared to know about. Three short news "blasts", each about 15 seconds long.

Cable and internet service returned at 11:35, and by noon we were in the car running errands, and flipped on the radio station again to see if we could find out any particulars about the power and cable outage. Nope. This time, the story about Sheboygan, the story about Green Bay, and then about six sports items. TWO short news blasts, unchanged from two hours ago.

The power and cable outage - which affected thousands of people - was caused by some doofus clipping a power pole and leaving the scene. It took me about four clicks on the internet to find that out, this morning.

I could preach here about how the decimation of local print and electronic media newsrooms does take a toll on the product they put out, which consists largely of “wire copy” and maybe an item or two rewritten from a “news release”. But that’s another rant for another time. Weekends have always been the vast wasteland of local news, and since the 70’s broadcast news consultants have been preaching (to the deaf) that we should have our BEST people on, since there are so many more available viewers and listeners.

But top management has never understood what it takes to actually GATHER local news…like whether there was any storm damage, and why the power was out for such an unusually long time, and why the cable service was out for nearly 12 hours. The sort of stuff regular folks around Madison might want to know. Just stick a part-timer in there to “read wire copy”.

And the big bosses wonder why their circulation or audience is dwindling...as they consistently trim the news payroll to "save money".

Shred Fest

We’ve had Earth Day….and now, we’ll have Shred Day. The folks at AARP are putting it on “Shred Fest” across the nation, and in Madison, it’s Saturday from 9 to noon at East Towne Mall. The shredders will be right near the Culvers Restaurant, if you’re planning to navigate the giant mall area tomorrow.

The reason it’s important to shred your personal documents rather than just toss them in the trash is simple. There are some very dishonest people out there, and with the economy in the tank, there are more than ever. You can, of course, do your own “shredding” if you’re patient enough, but if you just toss that junk-mail credit-card come-on into the trash….you’re taking a chance that it may fall into the wrong hands.

Those reading this who think it’s extreme to take scissors to stuff like that, are those who’ve not yet had the “pleasure” of discovering somebody has either attempted to use your name and information to get cash, credit or merchandise, or that somebody has actually done it, and you’ve found out after the fact.

Several months ago my wife was on business for a week in New York City. Since it’s my habit to check our bank account on the internet every day, I thought it strange when the first day she was gone there was a charge on her debit card for a floral delivery service. The next day, there were charges for Chinese Tea, a make-up kit, and a battery-powered sweeping device. That was the give-away. I KNEW she’d NEVER order such a device!

I called my wife to make sure she hadn’t ordered these things on her Blackberry during a break in meetings in mid-town Manhattan - confirmed that she still had the debit card in her possession - and told her to use the debit card from our other bank exclusively, until I sorted things out.

The next call was to the bank, and by that time, whoever had her information had run up five more charges. They swung into action immediately to stop the charges, and since it’s a joint account I was able to swing by the bank and sign some documents stating that we did NOT make the charges in question. They made it as near painless as possible, and it never cost us a cent. We were lucky.

But I’m one of the very few, according to the bank, who monitor their accounts every day.
We never found out who got her debit card information. The bank issued her a new card with a different number, and we haven’t had any problems since, with that card. But a few weeks later, the bank sent me a letter saying there may have been a problem with MY debit card…and just to be safe, I needed to stop in and get a different card and number.

I guess you just can’t be too careful these days.

Getting Grilled - Again

A few days ago I wrote about the issues attendant to my 8-year-old behemoth gas grill, and my desperate attempts to bring it under repair. Suffice it to say the attempts have failed; the unwanted repair part, which I could not intercept, is now winging its way back to Texas; and the grill-shopping commenced.

Actually, we’re past the stage of “shopping” and have made the purchase, but not without a considerable amount of pain inflicted by the dweebs of American commerce.

After I’d gotten past the stage of confirming that it would probably be wiser to purchase a new grill than spend money repairing the old, I fired up my web-browser and got to work doing the first step of the acquisition process: research. I spent more time than I wanted browsing sites of merchants who sell gas grills, and narrowed it down to about four.

My wife, who does 99.99% of the grilling, on a phone call from Seattle where she was at a conference, expressed her confidence that I could pick out and purchase a grill, after we agreed on salient points like price range, size of primary grilling surface (a spec made deliberately difficult to ascertain by most grill vendors who list “total grilling surface“ prominently - including side-burner area and “warming racks“), and intangibles like esthetics.

Her confidence, of course, was not well-placed.

I set off to personally examine the models I’d selected from my online research, taking my trusty tape-measure to actually calculate the “primary grilling surface”. This led only to frustration and further confusion, as the models I’d selected varied greatly in how the “primary grilling surface” was laid out. Some were “deeper” than our old grill and not as wide; some were wider, but not as deep. Decisions! Which would she prefer - wider, or deeper???

I shot a note off to her Blackberry saying she’d need to “see the grills with her hands”, an inside joke between us, about buying things you “see” on the internet, print ads, or TV.

Upon her return, we went to the store, where she spied a floor-demonstrator model I hadn’t considered. It had a dent. Everything else seemed fine. The sales guy talked to “the boss” and said they’d knock off 150 bucks. DEAL!!! Doing one quick final inspection, I asked “where’s the hose for the feed from the gas cylinder?”. Uh-oh. Missing. Long story short, the great deal on the demo model was not to be.

We wheedled “the boss” (after several trips back and forth between the sales guy and “the boss” - sort of like the crap they always pull at the car dealerships) into providing free assembly of the same model grill, which was in a box in their warehouse. And, we made them check to make sure it really was there. Be ready in a couple days.

Oh yes, and delivery? Well, they don’t do that. But you CAN rent a pickup truck from them for a “nominal” fee. And they’ll even have one of the guys help you load it onto the truck.

I’m thinking Saturday morning my son and I can heft that sucker into the gaping maw at the rear end of my giant SUV, and beat them out of their “nominal” truck rental fee. I just need to do a little more measuring, to make sure.

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Earth Day

Wisconsin has a special connection to Earth Day, which was started in 1970 by Senator and former Wisconsin Governor Gaylord Nelson. One of the more interesting pieces I’ve read about this year’s Earth Day (which is today) was put together for Isthmus by Rob Zaleski, who for years wrote for the Capital Times.

Zaleski’s piece is well-researched and full of quotes from the new generation of environmental scientists at the UW. The gist of it is, there’s hope. In fact, the title of the piece is “Hope For The Planet”.

But, predictably, 12 words into the piece, Zaleski cites Al Gore’s Powerpoint-presentation-made-into-a-movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”, which has been picked apart by scores of scientists who have no axe to grind. Zaleski reminds us that Gore’s Powerpoint won an Oscar, as if to lend some credibility to the presentation.

Let’s talk about “science” and “consensus” for a moment.

In the mid-1800’s, the predominant theory about post-surgical infections was that they were caused by “a mystery gas in the air”. I’m NOT making this up. Along came a Glasgow surgeon named Joseph Lister, who theorized that post-surgical infections were caused by microscopic things called “bacteria”. The consensus of surgeons and scientists was that Lister was off his rocker. Lister sterilized his operating room and instruments with carbolic acid - the first person ever to do so - and suddenly, the hospital, which at that time was a place to die, became a place to be saved.

In the 1930’s, just as the Third Reich was rolling strong in Germany, a hundred German scientists signed a letter against Albert Einstein, proclaiming that his “theory of relativity” was a Jewish hoax. Consensus. (Einstein, by the way, said “if what they are saying were true, one signature would have been enough”.)

Science is not about consensus, whether it’s science about the environment, science about bacteria and infections, or science about time and space.

Al Gore, who is a politician, knows a lot about consensus, since much of politics is about consensus. So when he, and anyone else for that matter, talks about “the consensus of scientists” about global warming, it’s a political construct. It’s not science. Science is about objective truth and reproducible results.

In case after case of people like Albert Einstein and Joseph Lister and scores of other scientists, their names are household words precisely because they broke with consensus.
It would be too snarky even for me to question global warming in light of yesterday’s snow and the past month of below-average temperatures. I don’t have much faith in meteorologists and their ability to actually predict the weather, since they’re wrong so often.

But please don’t tell me that “consensus” has anything to do with truth, inconvenient or not.

Bowing and Shaking

So I’m supposed to think that President Obama shaking hands with Hugo Chavez is a bad and horrible thing, and that the United States does not deal with tinhorn dictators or leaders who were not duly elected by a democracy.

And these are the same people who want me to think that Mr. Obama is not a duly elected President, and there are questions about his birth certificate, and that he’s really not president because he’s really not a true American citizen and therefore none of the things his administration does are legal and we don’t have to obey them.

Say WHAT?

When the tea-baggers loitered at the state capitol last week, some had signs equating Mr. Obama with Hitler; one told us to beware his plan for white slavery; and we were advised that a lot of President Obama’s bailout money is going to people just looking for a handout.

OK, there was plenty of horrible rhetoric from the other side about President Bush. So I guess this is really just some sort of balancing act. There’s plenty of wackiness on both sides to go around.
I would think anybody who followed the news coverage the past few days would have realized that it was Chavez who was the publicity seeker who couldn’t seem to get enough face-time with the American President, angling for shots together, handing him some weird book, and having his people back in Caracas pump out tons of publicity about their encounters.

Personally, I’m far more annoyed that my President bowed to the Saudi King a few days ago, and that his press apparatchik back home in D-C pumped out a ton of obvious lies about how it really wasn’t a “bow” and that Mr. Obama had to bend down to shake the King’s hand, and blah blah blah….except the video of the event, widely available, showed the gesture clearly to be a bow and not a handshake.

Whatever.

I wouldn’t mind if the Limbaugh crowd crowed about our leader bowing to another leader, but this business of shaking hands with Chavez….not on my radar. Bigger fish to fry, and all that.