Tom Boman, VP Operations, Learfield Sports


Tom Boman is Vice President of Broadcast Operations for Learfield Sports. He and the people that work with him are responsible for all of the game broadcasts and coaches shows for many of the top colleges and universities in country. He’ll be overseeing broadcasts for 130 schools this fall.

Based on my 40 years in and around radio, I’d say sports play-by-play announcer might be the most coveted — and hard to get — job in broadcasting. And Tom knows as much about what it takes to land one of those jobs as anybody. If you’ve ever wanted to be a “sportscaster” or know someone who does or if you just like listening to sports on the radio, you might enjoy this interview. It runs 20 minutes.

Derry Brownfield Show: World Wide Web

The Internet has become so much a part of our lives it feels strange to say/write the word. Hard to remember a time when it was new and strange. The interview segment below is from 1996 and is a tiny time capsule from those early days of the “world wide web.”

On September 11, 1996, Allen Hammock was the guest on Derry Brownfield’s radio show to talk about the Internet and the “World Wide Web.” Allen and his partner, Dan Arnall, had recently joined Learfield Communications to “explore opportunities” on this new thing called the Internet. Allen and Dan were recent graduates of the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO. They created the first websites for our company and worked with our IT department to stream audio for our various radio networks and programs, including The Derry Brownfield Show. This 13 minute segment (edited from an hour-long show) touches on: Personal Communication, Privacy and Security, computer viruses, and getting “on” and “off” the Internet.

On November 22, 1996, Derry did a follow-up show featuring Solveig Bernstein, talking about privacy (and other topics) on the Internet (still newish at the time). Ms. Bernstein was the Assistant Director of Telecommunications and Technology Studies for the Cato Institute.

Senator McCaskill honors Bob Priddy


“He’s a journalist and I’m a politician and if you’re a journalist then you don’t make friends with politicians. You keep your distance because you have to be objective and you have to be willing to ask questions that you know is going to irritate them.”

Apart from the tribute video (and Bob), there was only one speaker at Bob Priddy’s retirement dinner this past Monday. U. S. Senator Claire McCaskill. She was very good.

For those who know Bob and couldn’t be at the event, you can watch it here.

Bob Priddy: How it began

In December (2014) Bob Priddy will retire from his job as news director of The Missourinet. The network’s first and only news director. In this interview Bob talks about how the network began; interesting people and big stories; politics and history. I was privileged to work with Bob for almost 30 years and he’s one of the most talented and interesting people I’ve met. The interview runs just under half an hour. Hardly enough time to reflect on his amazing career.

iMovie on the iPad

I’ve had the iPad2 for a while but hadn’t gotten around to doing any video, so I sat down with Jeff Moore, one the sellers for our company. He’d just returned the World Pork Expo so I asked him a few questions about the event.

I thought audio and video quality on the iPad was pretty good (I typically do a shitty job with lighting). And iMovie has some very nice features. I was a little disappointed with the title options but that might be just my lack of familiarity with the app.
Here’s a pretty good demo of the features

Murals by Rebecca


The brief (4 min) video above is with a co-worker who paints wall murals. She thought a video might help show-and-tell her art. I mention this here because it was just so easy to do with iMovie and the Comic Book theme added a little pizzazz. I need to check to see if there are more themes out there. I’m surprised that Apple only provide half a dozen.

Lesson learned from this mini-project: Edit out my questions wherever possible.

Bob Priddy gets props from national news org


My friend and colleague Bob Priddy received some much deserved recognition at the opening session of the the Radio Television Digital News Assn/National Assn of Broadcasters annual meeting.

Bob, a 27-year member of the RTDNA board, is stepping down this year and they gave him not one, but TWO awards. The John Hogan Award, named for the founder of RTDNA, is given for distinguished service to the organization. The second award, the newly introduced Bob Priddy award, was presented to Priddy and will now be given to board members who exemplify Priddy’s distinguished and consistent service to RTDNA.

Bob is probably the best reporter I’ve ever met. More importantly, he is one of the best people I have ever met.

Video Affiliate Advisory


I love this idea. The head of affiliate relations for Learfield Sports (Keith Kowalski) posts a brief (60 sec) video, explaining a new text alert service for keeping radio affiliates up to the minute on changes to broadcast times due to weather. Nothing fancy here. Just pointed the Flip camera and popped the advisory up on YouTube. Our sports ops folks are making excellent use of their website (WordPress) which serves 40+ networks.