Tag Archives: Radio Iowa

“Can you put the president on the Internet?”

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It was 28 years ago, most likely the spring of 1996, when I was plundering around our newly obtain Apple Power Macintosh 9600 in my tiny office at the center of Learfield Communications, the operator of Radio Iowa, the Missourinet, and numerous collegiate sports radio networks based in Jefferson City, Missouri.  My little company, Echo Communications and jointly formed a partnership with the regional radio giant called Straylight and we had set about to build websites and streaming audio programming around Learfield’s properties using the recently invented Progressive Networks Real Audio player, later dubbed simply Real Audio.

The room, probably not more than about 10′ x 10′, had a rack of low-end Compaq desktop computers in one corner, a high-end Compaq Proliant Server running Windows NT 4.0, and my desk in the other.  On my desk was this beautiful new machinery from Apple Computers, the last of its generation it turned out that I had first seen Steve Jobs announce in person at the Moscone Center only a few years before to a crowded room full of hypnotized zealots. I was one of those zealots.

This PowerMac on my desk was the crown jewel of our little high tech setup, as we had outfitted it with a special graphics card that had to be purchased separately (a first for a Mac).  I had waited for the graphics card for weeks; without it the computer was useless and could not even show a boot screen. But properly configured with the card and a beautiful 17″ Sony Triniton monitor and the latest version of Adobe Photoshop, it was truly a bicycle of the mind.  With this machine and some rudimentary HTML skills, we created the marvels of the New Media age: websites.

What was special about the websites that we produced with Learfield’s award winning news and sports programming content is that ours had something that almost no other had: live streaming audio. Through our partnership with Learfield, we wired in audio feeds from our satellite connections just on the other side of the wall where I was hacking out the little Netscape and Internet Explorer buttons that told our visitors which browsers our pages could best be “surfed” on.

We had built RadioIowa.com as a place to feature the award-winning news programming created under the leadership of O. Kay Henderson, whom we just called Kay.  I had had the pleasure of meeting Kay and her team of journalists at their offices in Des Moines.  We were already publishing her stories on the website and we had been able to use our new Real Audio technology to include features from the recent Iowa Caucuses.

While I can’t remember exactly which website project I was working on that day — I had driven to Jefferson City from Columbia where I was still a Computer Science student at the University of Missouri — I will never forget the day or the precise moment when O. Kay Henderson and I made history.

I think actually from a news perspective it was a pretty routine day.  Apparently — I knew little of these things at the time — President Clinton had signed a very significant piece of agricultural legislation known as the Freedom to Farm Act which was a big shift in how farmers would receive subsidies from the U.S. Government.  Big news in Iowa and for the nation, but for me, I was completely clueless.

But as a 23 year old who had experienced the Presidential Election of 1992, the appearances of then Governor Clinton on Arsenio Hall Show, the live saxophone performances and the momentous energy among his supporters, I knew something of Mr. Bill Clinton.

When I picked up the phone, it was Kay asking me in an excited voice, “Allen, can you put the President live on the Internet right now?  I’ve got him on the line.  He’s just become the first president to digitally sign legislation.  We can make him the first President live streamed on the web.”

I was speechless, nervous, and nearly fell out of my chair.  “Of coursee!  Give me two minutes.” (In radio, you have about 10 seconds before the moment has passed.)

I fired up the Real Audio service and hoped that our T-1 connection would not be giving us any problems today.  We needed that ultra-high bandwidth connection (it cost us a few thousand dollars a month to lease the line) to support up to 100 (one hundred!) live listeners at the time.

Of course I had no time to get the word out that we would be live streaming.  No Google existed.  No social media.

The radio listeners wouldn’t know we were online and they would already be hearing the interview anyways.

But we DID IT!  “Mr. President, can you hear me?”  Yes I heard him say.  Then I muted and Kay did her magic, as she had done with Mr. Clinton many times before and as she would continue to do with other powerful leaders the rest of her career.

I never streamed a President again after that.  I did stream Margaret Thatcher as she spoke on the anniversary of Winston Churchill’s speak in Fulton, Missouri in the website we built called “Words On the War”.

But I’ll never forget that day we put the President online.  A blip for him and perhaps not even a memory for Kay, but it’s etched in my mind forever.

— Allen Hammock, July 4, 2024

More on Learfield’s online adventures: Learfield and the Internet (1995-2005)

Iowa PBS announces new Iowa Press moderator

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(Press release) Kay Henderson, the dean of the Iowa Capitol press corps and long-time guest panelist on Iowa Press, will be the next host and moderator of the Iowa PBS public affairs program. Henderson replaces David Yepsen, who retires from the Iowa Press desk on September 10, 2021. Her first formal broadcast as host will be Friday, September 17.

“Kay is already a member of the Iowa PBS family,” said Molly Phillips, executive director and general manager of the statewide public television network. “She has capably subbed as host and has been a regular second chair at the Iowa Press desk. She’s participated in countless campaign debates over the last three decades. We couldn’t ask for a stronger, more esteemed and experienced journalist to continue the Iowa Press legacy.”

Henderson first appeared on Iowa Press in October of 1987. For the past 20 years, she has been the national political director for Learfield news networks in Iowa, Missouri, Minnesota and Wisconsin. She has served two terms as president of the National Association of State Radio Networks’ news directors group. Henderson was hired by Learfield in 1987 as a statehouse reporter for Radio Iowa, a statewide news and sports network serving more than 70 commercial radio stations. She’s been that network’s news director since 1994 and will remain in that role alongside her new weekly assignment at Iowa PBS.

“It’s an honor to be invited to take on this new role,” Henderson said. “Watching Iowa Press hosts Dean Borg and David Yepsen guide the program over the past 34 years has given me a glimpse of the responsibilities ahead. I’m humbled by the opportunity and excited about the task of helping Iowa Press move into its fifth decade of service to our viewers.”

Henderson received the Iowa Broadcast News Association’s 2002 Jack Shelley Award, an annual recognition of “outstanding contribution to the cause of professional journalism.” The list of Shelley Award recipients includes the late Dean Borg, who retired as Iowa Press host in 2016, and the late Dan Miller, the long-time Iowa PBS general manager who was an Iowa Press producer early in his 37-year career with the network.

“After three decades of Iowa public affairs coverage on radio and on Iowa Press, Kay Henderson is the backbone of political journalism in this state,” said Andrew Batt, Iowa Press senior producer. “Our viewers have found Kay to be a trusted source for news and information throughout annual legislative sessions and nearly 20 election cycles.”

Henderson’s first salaried job in journalism was a three-month summertime stint as managing editor of the Lenox Time Table, the weekly newspaper in her southwest Iowa hometown. In addition to her work in Iowa broadcasting, Henderson has appeared on the PBS NewsHour, NBC’s “Meet the Press” and ABC’s “This Week” as well CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

O. Kay Henderson: On the campaign trail. Again.

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Tonight’s PBS Newshour featured a segment that included an interview with my friend and former co-worker, O. Kay Henderson. I’ve known Kay for 32 years and — coincidently — she’s mentioned in 32 posts on this blog. I think I can safely say there is no one alive today that knows more about politics in Iowa than Ms. Henderson. It’s the only job she’s every had. She started covering politics while she was in college and came to work for Radio Iowa when she graduated and has been doing it ever since.

RadioIowa.com

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My next “small histories” project will be an Internet timeline showing when and how the company I worked for viewed and used this new technology. We registered our first domain (Learfield.com) on August 30, 1995 but didn’t do much with that (corporate) site. In July of 1996 we created a site for one of our news networks (Radio Iowa) but I don’t recall what kinds of content we were posting in those early days.

By November of 1999 we had gotten the hang of things and were putting up a lot of news (text and audio). The Iowa Caucuses pulls lots of attention to the state every four years and our network created a feature called Campaign Countdown. Our website made it possible to extend the life of the stories we fed via the radio network and reporter O. Kay Henderson cranked out a LOT of stories and interviews, all of which went online.

As we moved and updated servers and software, much of this content was lost. Or so I thought. While poking around on the Internet Archive WayBack Machine this weekend I found the Campaign Countdown reports.

The design of the website is nothing to write home about (that’s on me) but he history is real and — thanks to the Internet Archive — preserved. (I made a donation and hope you will, too). From this screenshot (partial) of our Affiliates page and you can see that about half of the stations had websites in 1999.

In my experience, radio stations were slow to embrace the Internet. There were a lot of reasons for this. Some good and logical, some not. Most of the programming on small market stations was music and licensing and technical issues made it impractical to “stream.” I’m not sure we had that word in 1999. And why, many station managers asked, should I go to the expense and effort of creating a website when everyone we care about (advertisers and listeners) can hear our programing on the radio? Duh. And nobody was going to listen to music on a computer. (iTunes, the iPod, and XM Radio came along in 2001. Podcasting in 2004)

Radio by any other name would sound as sweet

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Mark Ramsey was listening to Fresh Air on NPR the other day and heard Terry Gross reading the credits, which included a reference to “the Chief Content Officer.” That what most stations call their “Program Director.” (A job I once held)

Mr. Ramsey also mentioned that back in July National Public Radio annoucned it would hereafter be known as NPR. It’s been National Public Radio since 1971 but switched tothe acronym because –according to the Washington Post– “Its news, music and informational programming is heard over a variety of digital devices that aren’t radios.”

Hmm.

Our company operates several news networks, including:

Radio Iowa
Wisconsin Radio Network
South Carolina Radio Network
Nebraska Radio Network

We (not me) came up with Radio Iowa back in 1996 and thought it was pretty cool at the time. Like, “Radio Free Iowa.” I was not involved with nameing the others.

We have websites, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages but are first and foremost radio networks.

If someone were starting a new radio network today, what would they call it? I have no idea.

What does it mean with the doctor tweets “oops?”

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I got a call this morning from Matt Kelley, a reporter for Radio Iowa (one of Learfield’s news networks). He was working on a story involving Twitter and he wanted to check a couple of terms. Here’s the story (minus the audio):

A Cedar Rapids medical center plans to use the social media tool Twitter to broadcast a surgery to the world next week. Doctors at St. Luke’s Hospital will perform a hysterectomy, and other procedures, as people who’re interested follow along via web browser or mobile device. Hospital spokeswoman Sarah Rainey (RAY-nee) says it’s an educational opportunity.

Rainey says, “We have marketing consultants who will be in the operating rooms with the surgeons as the surgery takes place and as the physician communicates exactly what he’s doing, we will have our consultants tweeting, or typing in conversation to bring it to the outside world.” She says two doctors will be performing the operation on a 70-year-old woman using robotic surgery techniques. The play-by-play will be sent out over the micro-blogging service in messages of 140 characters or less.

“He’ll be talking about how the anesthesiologist is now placing the patient under sedation and here’s my first step, so he will be talking as he goes through the procedure,” Rainey says. “You’ll hear him say, ‘Scalpel, please,’ or whatever he may need to instruct the O-R team to help him with.” She expects a wide host of Iowans — and people around the globe — to follow the surgery, starting at 10 AM next Monday.

She says they’re targeting people in the Twitter audience, roughly between the ages of 25 and 45. “We’re looking for people that just might want the opportunity to go into an O-R suite and see what happens without visually seeing all of the stuff that maybe they don’t care to see,” Rainey says. The hospital recently featured a “webcast” of the same type of surgery so anyone in the world could watch it live over their computers.

“With the webcast, you actually got to see everything that was going on in the O-R suite,” Rainey says. “It might be cutting open the patient, it might be a little blood, it might be the suction part, so for some people it might’ve been too much. Tweeting, on the other hand, is communicating through emails and tweets so it’s a little gentler on the eyes.” She says St. Luke’s will be the first Iowa hospital to “Twitter-cast” a surgery. To follow it, go to the hospital’s website “www.stlukescr.org” and click on the Twitter icon.

My friend David insists this is a “gimmick” and nothing more. That nobody would have the slightest interest in following this procedure on Twitter. I’m not as convinced.