Tag Archives: Jeff Jarvis

Can radio go home again?

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Jeff Jarvis is doing the Snoopy Dance over this story in the NYT about Clear Channel:

Clear Channel, the poster child for evil media conglomerates, bought up stations and sucked cash out of them but now there’s not much left to suck. Consolidation is the act of a dying industry. Well, broadcast won’t die. But it sure as hell won’t grow.

I was in a lot of small and medium market radio stations before and during the The Great Consolidation. I saw a lot of locally owned stations get gobbled up by Clear Channel. I thought it was a bad idea then and haven’t changed my mind. But I’m a “hometown radio” guy. Local ownership. Local programming. I want to see the station owner at Rotary.

But it’s all moot now. The Internet and related technologies have changed the media landscape forever. I’m not sure radio can go home again. I hope so.

“There is no online department. It has ceased to exist.”

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Jeff Jarvis points to examples of how some newspapers are trying to survive in the online world:

DelawareOnline is reorganizing the paper’s newsroom to be platform agnostic. A few years ago, only four people could post on the web but now 50 can and the number of web updates skyrocketed. They are a small paper and so they are not throwing staff at this; they are throwing simplicity at it: They are using iMovie and GarageBand to produce multimedia. He said that they have had four people leave because multimedia is not for them. I see that as a very good thing. Welcome to the future, newsroom. Says Paul: “There is no online department. It has ceased to exist. We are the online department. The newsroom is the online department.”

News organizations that are unable or unwilling to grasp this and make the transition will die.

6% of U.S. adults are listening to podcasts

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Jeff Jarvis pulled a couple of stats from the latest Nielson report on podcasting. 6 percent of U.S.adulst (9 million people) have downloaded podcasts inthe last 30 day. The most successful podcasts are getting two million downloads a month. It has occurred to me that the same people (in my world) that pooh-pooh such reports, are the same people that insisted “this Internet thing” was nothing more than hyped-up fad that would soon fade. If you want to understand why people are creating and listening to podcasts, read The Long Tail.

We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation, defined now not by our geography but by our interests. (Pg. 40)

A co-worker recently observed that most of the podcasts he has listened to were boring. That’s like saying most of the books in the library are boring. I think that will change for him as he finds more and more podcasts dealing with things that interest and entertain him. It’s no longer necessary to watch/listen/read boring stuff. For the first time in recorded history, it’s possible to find all thing things (and only the things) that interest you. I’m sure glad I didn’t miss this.

“Everybody is a network”

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“Networks are about sharing now; they used to be about control. Networks are two-way; they used to be one-way. Networks are about aggregation more than distribution; they are about finding and being found. Networks are now open while, by their very definition, they used to be closed. You join networks and leave them them at will; you can join any number of networks at once and content can be found via any number of networks, there is no practical limit. Networks used to be static. Now networks are fluid.” — Jeff Jarvis

You need to read the full post to appreciate the point Jarvis is making. I’ve been thinking about how it applies to the various networks our company owns. And what does it mean to “own” a network? We have contracts with the radio stations that make up our networks. We own the satellite uplink and the downlink receivers that distribute our programming to those radio stations.

Our company has purchased other, smaller networks. And it was the affiliation contracts and the contracts with advertisers that we perceived to have the greatest value. Has that changed? Is it changing? Stay tuned.

On being normal

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“…learned that the people in front of me are going at their own speed, probably for a reason. They’re not trying to get in my way as I rush past. I need to stay out of theirs. And I need to be grateful that I can rush past again. I need to appreciate normal.”

— Jeff Jarvis

“…so freaking happy I can’t even describe it. And when I speak to a packed ballroom, like today, I feel reborn. It is pure joy, and I feel like the luckiest guy in the world. Every day feels like a gift now. And that, my friends, is the rarest neurological disorder of them all.”

— Scott Adams

Value of New Media vs. Old Media

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Jeff Jarvis on the the Rockeboom ad auction:

And here we have in a microcosm the explanation of why media is so horribly out of sync today: The public is valuing new media much more than the old, but the advertisers still value the old. Most every newspaper and in many cases TV networks and magazines have much larger audiences online, but the revenue for their old media properties remains much higher because the advertisers and agencies still value the old and the safe. They want metrics. They want control. They want guarantees. This, in turn, makes big publishers and producers play it safe because they don’t want to mess with the cash cow. And that means that advertisers miss the opportunity to reach a larger, younger, smarter audience in the new medium, which is — supposedly — what they’re dying to do. And that means that big media companies now face competition from a thousand Rocketbooms and a million Gawkers.

And if you are in the media/advertising business and you’ve never heard of Rocketboom or Gawker… you’re probably already screwed. Tick, tock…tick, tock.

Quoted by Jeff Jarvis

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Back in March I posted –somewhat giddily– about being added to Halley Suitt’s blog roll (I’m still there). Ms. Suitt was kind enough to say she stopped by smays.com from time to time. I suspect she was being kind, but still a thrill.

While he’s far less sexy than Ms. Suitt, Jeff Jarvis orbits in that same blogosphere firmament. His BuzzMachine is #49 on Technorati’s Top 100 Blogs (if you go in for such rankings, and Mr. Jarvis is not the sort to do so).

Today, while reading his latest post, I came across a quote that sounded strangely familiar. Mr. Jarvis attributed the quote to “A media exec even older than I…”

Good news: Jeff Jarvis read something I wrote and thought it worth pointing to (or someone sent him a link). Bad news: I’m older than Jeff Jarvis.

As I emailed Jeff (He’s just a kid, I can call him Jeff), this is like being in the audience at a Bruce Springsteen concert and hearing the Boss shout out, “Steve Mays is somewhere in the house tonight!”

Jeff Jarvis: “Trapped by history”

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“When you think about it, satellite radio and iTunes are the best positioned in the new world for pay content … Print content is pretty much all free by now. Networks and cable and program producers and all bound up in their mutually destructive deals. But iTunes enables the sale of content and Sirius is producing content worth paying for and neither is trapped by their histories. — Jeff Jarvis

Our company has the multimedia rights for 19 of the biggest and bestest colleges in the country. Would those legions of fans pay $.99 for some video highlights from Saturday’s big game, if they could do it quickly and easily and have them download automatically to their video iPod? Ch-ching!

Journalists like control

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“You’d think that all those years of probing, criticizing, attacking, and lampooning others would give them Teflon skin. But, no, like a schoolyard bad boy, if you confront them and criticize them back, they turn either weepy or prickly. Can give, can’t take. That is not so surprising, after all, when you realize that this is really an issue of control. In the closed worlds of the newsroom, the page, the show, and the media conference, journalists are in control. In the wide-open world of the web, they’re not. And that’s a tough adjustment for some.”

— Jeff Jarvis thinks journalists have thin skins and explains it as a matter of control

Jeff Jarvis: Don’t own the content. Don’t own distribution

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Another thought-provoking post by Jeff Jarvis on the “value” of owning content or distribution:

Owning the printing press, broadcast tower, cable plant, movie theater, or chain of stores is a cost burden when your competitors and customers can, without friction, effort or cost, bypass your distribution and even your marketing. So don’t own the content. Help people make and find and remake and recommend and save the content they want. Don’t own the distribution. Gain the trust of the people to help them use whatever distribution and medium they like to find what they want. It’s hard for somone raised on the value of owning content and owning distribution to let go of exclusivity and instead value openness and participation.

I’ve been blogging long enough to buy into the idea of the web as a conversation but it’s a damned hard concept to explain. Much easier to grasp the idea of producing programming (content)…pumping it over some kind of distribution channel (radio/TV signal, newspaper, etc)…mixing in some ads…and feeding it all to the consumer (audience).