Clyde Lear is blogging the history of our company, which he founded 35 years ago. This is a great use of the blog format and the idea was his alone. I’m helping get some of the audio added to his posts but this is his baby. And –as Clyde observed– if he doesn’t do it, it won’t get done.
His latest post includes a 10 minute air check –from one of our first radio station affiliates– of one of our first programs on Day One. Good stuff. Let’s give him lots of encouragement.
Radio Iowa News Director O. Kay Henderson (friend and co-worker) took part in the autopsy following Sunday morning’s debate by GOP candidates in Des Moines. The debate was hosted by ABC News’ This Week. Following the live broadcast, Kay and three other reporters (I think they were all reporters) appeared in The Green Room segment [video].
Update: Others featured in the video are Rick Klein, ABC News senior political reporter; David Chalian, ABC News political director; Holly Bailey, Newsweek; Rick Pearson, Chicago Tribune.
Radio Iowa is one of several state radio news networks owned by the company I work for. The first newscast went up “on the bird” on July 1, 1987. So the network is twenty years + 3 weeks old. I dug out the “start-up” file and took a little stroll down memory lane.
In the newsroom that first day: News Director Dennis Sutterer, O. Kay Henderson and Todd Kimm (Kay and Todd are still there, grinding out the news and sports). We leased two tiny rooms from an advertising agency in Des Moines. One for a studio…one for a very snug newsroom.
Planning for the network started in October of 1986. In February of 1987, we mailed our first packet of info to radio stations throughout the state:
“Radio Iowa will be Iowa’s first full-service, satellite delivered state news network. Headquartered in Des Moines, Radio Iowa’s three person news staff will cover the legislature and state government.
The enclosed packet includes brief descriptions of Radio Iowa programming; a schedule of feed times; affiliattion contract and clearance declaration; and a demo cassette.”
There was more, but you get the idea.
In March of ’87, Roger Gardner and I started in-station pitches. A few of the stops on that first swing: Bill Wells, KSO, Des Moines; Mark Mennick, WOC, Davenport; Kevin Kelly, WDBQ, Dubuque; Betty Baudler and Rich Fellingham, KASI, Ames; Larry Edwards, WMT, Cedar Rapids; Glenn Olsen, KQWC, Webster City; Mary Quass, KHAK, Cedar Rapids; John Carl, KCOB, Newton; Don Tool, KRNT, Des Moines.
I think we went on the air with 32 affiliates airing our reports.
David Brazeal (the Man Behind the Curtain at Learfield InterAction) points us to this entry in the Missouri State Fair Video Contest.
“Show us in 60 seconds or less how you are preparing for the State Fair by entering the “Preparing for the Big Show” video contest. Create your work-of-art, then post the video to YouTube with the tag “mostatefair”. The grand prize winner will have his or her video premiered before the Jason Aldean concert opening night of the Fair.”
When pros see stuff like this or the summer intern video I posted earlier… I’m sure all they see poorly shot/edited amateur video. When I see these, I think, “Damn, that’s clever!” Or funny. Or interesting. And I’m reminded that almost anyone can now play in this sandbox. I love that.
Our summer interns are packing up and heading back to school. One of their final tasks was to prepare a presentation on what they learned working for Learfield. The interns working in our Dallas office created a Powerpoint presentation which was, I’m sure, very… nice.
The Jeff City crew asked my advice and I told them Powerpoint is for losers. I suggested they produce a video and loned them my camcorder. I forgot to give them a mic so the sound is not all that it might be but their creativity and humor comes through loud and clear. Ladies and gentlemen… Coleman, Corey and Tyler.
The news division of our company is in the process of launching a new radio network called Living the Country Life. It’s part of a joint venture with Meredith Publishing, which created the magazine and TV show (of the same name).
We’re producing a series of daily radio features and our affiliate relations guys will attempt to get the new programs on as many stations as possible. Toward that end, we’ve produced demos, so radio stations can hear what the programs sound like. I’m getting to the point, hang on.
One of the producers popped in this morning and asked how quickly I could create a web page where they could post the demos (MP3 files) for stations to download/listen?
A few years ago, I would have parked the files on an FTP server or cobbled together something in FrontPage. A few more years ago, and we would have been mailing out CD’s (or cassette tapes!).
This morning it took about 15 minutes to pull together a nice little blog on Typepad. Our affiliate relations folks can now just email a link to a prospective affiliate. Such a site could easily become a cornerstone of our affiliate clearance effort. Fast, inexpensive, and no programming skills necessary.
I found a similar application for one our clients.
Children’s Trust Fund of Missouri has a 10 minute video on Shaken Baby Syndrome. You can order the DVD (for free, I believe) from their website, but what can you do with it then? Show it to your club or organization, I suppose. But why not make it easy for anyone with a web browser to watch the video.
So I put it up on Google Video and embedded the Flash player on their website and a world-wide audience is now just a click away.
This kind of stuff was damned hard or impossible, just a few years ago. And now, anyone can do this stuff. This is the real power of the web.
In 1981 our company began distributing our (news and ag) programs to radio stations via satellite. It was a big deal at the time because we were the first of the smaller, regional networks to “go satellite.” Uplink hardware was damned expensive. Downlink hardware at the radio stations was pretty pricey, too. But much cheaper (in the long run) than all of those point-to-point land lines.
For many years, having a satellite distribution system was a competitive edge. You had to have some way of getting the programming to the radio stations (and their listeners). No FedEx in those days.
In a few weeks, football season will get underway and we’ll be distributing play-by-play audio to affiliates of 35 collegiate sports radio networks around the country. Most of those via satellite. But for the first time, we’ll use live web streaming to deliver audio to the affiliates of two of our networks (Maine and Montana State).
This is possible because of increased bandwidth; better audio encoding; and a growing acceptance of audio (and video) online. If all goes according to plan, listeners won’t even be aware of how the audio gets from the stadium to their radios (or computers).
We could sort of see this coming but it was/is difficult to imagine a time when satellite distribution of audio and video could be replaced by the Internet (or even some Super Internet of the future). But it’s getting easier.
So what’s it all mean? It seems unlikely your “competitive edge” will be distribution. That’s probably been true for some time now. Having the good content will always be important. But if you are not the only source for the content… or the best source for the content… (to be continued).
Children’s Trust Fund of Missouri is one of our clients and, for the last few months, I’ve been helping them with a make-over of their website.
Their previous site was classic Web 1.0. It was designed by a company in St. Louis and any changes or updates had to be emailed to the developer who would, in time, make the change. Most of the “current” content was PDF news releases that weren’t very “new. The site was hosted on state servers. The CTF guys just were not happy with their site.
I persuaded them to try Typepad and incorporate a blog as their primary content element.
They took the site public at the first of the month and, although still tweaking some of the content, it looks and works great. And the best part… they are now in control. Paula and Alicia know how to add pages, maintain links, and manage the site top to bottom.
Kirk, the executive director, is finding his blogging feet and posting regularly. From his fingers…to the world. Boom.
We’ve shown them how to use Flickr, Google Calendar and YouTube. And all of this for a fraction of what they paid for their previous site, which simply wasn’t meeting their needs.
Helping folks like Kirk, Paula and Alicia tell their story is extremely gratifying. If Web 1.0 was selling fish, Web 2.0 is using great new tools for helping people learn how to fish.
The Learfield Sports Operations Center is a real thing of beauty. Great equipment, well designed. A really nice place to produce sports broadcasts. It wasn’t always so. My recent photo spelunk turned up this shot taken in the basement of Learfield’s former headquarters, an old house on McCarty Street. Kim Steiner (the guy in the photo) was about 5′ 7″.
In 1984, we began producing the broadcasts for Iowa State, Oklahoma State and Kansas. We already had the rights to Missouri and were producing those broadcasts in a studio shared with The Missourinet. Because there was absolutely no more room for studios, the engineers jammed some small mixing consoles into a corner space in the basement (where the engineers also lived).
Cramped, dusty and… dangerous. You could always recognize the new guys by the contusions and lacerations on their foreheads.
A lot of our company’s history is jammed into cardboard boxes and I stumbled upon a little piece this afternoon. This is a copy of an ad [larger image] that ran in Missouri Life Magazine, sometime in the early ’70’s.
Now Missourians from border to border know what their neighbors are doing.
They know what is going on in Jefferson City… in the major metropolitan areas… in the arts… in science… business.
They’re listening to their local radio station… an affiliate of the Missourinet.
The Missourinet is a statewide news network… very similar in operation to the national news networks. Some 40 radio stations carry its hourly newscasts. It has the state Capitol’s largest full-time news bureau. And each week its programs feature hundreds of on-the-scene reports from correspondents and newsmakers over the state.
Missouri + net? Get it? The official name of our company was “Missouri Network, Inc.” back then.