Pictures from yesterday, for the record:
Vespa invasion at the 7-Eleven!
We were at the Starbucks next door when a hundred geeks on Vespas pulled into the 7-Eleven parking lot. Quite a sight.
Also quite a sight: Santa at the Promenade of the Peninsula:
Awwwww.
Was this the picture the Houston Chronicle wanted to illustrate that particular story?
Perfect.
We did venture out for Black Friday. I wanted to pick up Microsoft Office for the Mac, which MacMall had for $69 for the extended Expression Media full edition (the stuff you need, same as the Home and Student edition, plus some Picasa-like thing you don't need), and Fran wanted to pick up something at the mall. So after lunch (more turkey!), we headed up to Torrance and braced for the traffic, the lines, the madness.
Nope. No traffic at all. Plenty of parking. All the sale items were available without a problem. The cash register queues were short at MacMall and nonexistent at the mall. Target seemed busy, but there were parking spaces available. The Black Friday experience seemed... doable.
Every year, the retailers initially report big crowds, long lines, sold-out items. You get outrageous stories like the fatal Walmart stampede on Long Island and the shootout at the Toys R Us at Palm Desert. And then, a week later, when nobody's paying attention, they start to admit that the numbers aren't what they'd hoped. I've already seen reports claiming that business was brisk, but what I saw today indicates that we'll be hearing a different story in short order. That's not a surprise, considering the economy, but I think the disappointing numbers every year are because all of the news reports about the madness in the stores and the 4 am queues and the impossibility of finding a parking space scares people off. Is a $10 thumb drive or a $5 discount on Rock Band 2 worth that kind of nightmare?
So people don't go. And you can get good deals online, with free shipping to boot. You're better off staying home... unless the stores aren't that crowded and the lines are short and you can get in and out of the place in one piece and in short order. Which, at least around here, you can. Or could have, if you hadn't been scared off.
One of the things for which I'm thankful this holiday is that I'm not one of the many folks who are finding themselves caught in radio's industry-wide layoffs this season. Between the news we've already reported and the rumors we hear several times each day, it can really scare the hell out of you.
Which is why I was amused to see this ad pop up on my Facebook page:
Do other companies pay more? The better question is, are they hiring? The answer is too often no these days. I'd like to think it'll get better. I'd like to. But I'm not a PD anymore, whatever the Facebook ad engine thinks, and I'm happy doing whatever it is I do.
Anyway, today's not a day for industry chatter and economic misery. It's a day for good food and bad football, and, so far, it's holding up true to form. Be thankful you're not the Detroit Lions.
Making it to the end of the week is always a pleasure, and when it's a short work week, it's even better, because there'll be extra time to relax, and I just don't get that much leisure time. So here we are, Thanksgiving eve. Lord, do I need a few days without obligation.
I got a nice preview of tomorrow this evening, when Fran baked her patented Sweet Potato Pie and made Sweet Potato Cupcakes with the extra batter. Ohhhh, yeah. Throw in turkey, string bean casserole, mashed potatoes, and apple pie, and that's enough to make up for the frustration undoubtedly in the offing courtesy of the Philadelphia Eagles tomorrow afternoon. I can't wait. For the food, that is.
Enjoy your Thanksgiving. I intend to do the same.
This week continues to be lived in twilight, a semi-conscious state arising entirely from the fact that the work week will be short and, therefore, every day feels like Friday. Work proceeds, but in a weird, half-baked state. Nobody's head is in it. In my business, a significant number of the people with whom I deal, radio talk show hosts, are taking most or all of the week off. Getting anything done seems like a weak joke right now.
So the great accomplishment of the day was surviving a Costco trip. Costco was a necessary destination today because of the pie. Thursday is not a holiday without apple pie, and Costco's apple pie is essential. Tomorrow will be a mob scene at places like that, so we decided to do it today, and braced ourselves for big crowds.
And it...
...wasn't that bad.
It was busier than a normal Tuesday, but not that much busier. We found a parking space within minutes, the aisles weren't packed, and the queues at the checkout were actually reasonable.
Is that a sign of the bad economy? Maybe not. It's just one store at one time, nothing dispositive, nothing but a snapshot. Maybe people are waiting until tomorrow to buy Thanksgiving dinner makings. Or maybe it's the retail apocalypse.
Either way, I'm grateful we got our pie and got out of there. I'm serious. Gotta have that pie.
This isn't really symbolic of anything. And it's not even a really clear picture. It's just the remnants of the fire a week and two days ago:
One lone palm tree, fronds scorched off, trunk charred black at the top and bottom, surrounded by singed grass at the top of the hill. I noticed it while running today, on a lovely, cool morning that sharply contrasted with that Saturday morning not long ago. The picture's the best I could get with my cell phone, but you get the idea.
Nothing profound, just a tree and charred land, standing mute while everything around them proceeds as normal. Someone else can try to drag more meaning out of that.
The Eagles released me today.
I no longer feel compelled to watch. I no longer have to care. I knew the season was over before this week, but today's nightmare sealed it.
I'm sure there'll be plenty of quarterback controversy after the McNabb benching and Kolb playing the second half, but it doesn't matter. Yes, I'll listen to WIP tomorrow morning. It's over, though, for more than this season. And I'm free.
Season's over. Let 'em lose. Maybe Jeff Lurie will realize his team's now second in the city to the Phillies and maybe it won't just be a quarterback change and maybe they'll realize you can't win in the NFL without a fullback or tight end and maybe....
But we have plenty of time for that. It's basketball season now. Hey, Sixers won! I feel better now, really. Is it Spring Training yet?
=============
By the way, to the guy I just saw on KNBC-TV doing what he thought was a humorous highlights wrap-up of the day, benching McNabb for Kolb is not "going to a party with Heidi Klum and leaving with Rosie O'Donnell." If you're going to try sports comedy, at least do some homework. Geez. They have low standards over there.
The party? Nice.
Today? Did nothing of interest. Ran, worked, lunch, Target, dinner, TV. And now it's late.
Tomorrow? Not much planned. Work, football, um, that's it.
What an exciting life.
Busy tonight -- it's the All Access holiday party. Yes, it's early, but at least we're still having a party. Too many companies are skipping the festivities this year. I'm grateful to be with a company that's more than holding its own.
While I drive up to Malibu, I'll be contemplating the good reaction to yesterday's Letter, the Knicks' wholesale changes, and why I felt it necessary to snack on both french fries and frozen yogurt after lunch. It is not sitting well on my stomach. But it's Friday, I was hungry, and I was, um, stupid.
Now, I gotta go get dressed for the party. I can't go in my normal business attire; they don't look kindly at guys in t-shirts and shorts at that restaurant.
This week's All Access newsletter is about radio's response to my town's small fire emergency Saturday, which is to say it's about practically nothing:
This week, I want to talk about radio in emergencies. You might have heard about the little trouble we had with fires here in Southern California last weekend. For once, I found myself needing to rely on radio for information in an emergency, and the results were mixed.
I've spent the last few decades going to broadcasters' conventions, where you hear the top brass at the NAB crow about the importance of radio during emergencies like natural disasters. You hear about how radio is often the only source of important information for people who have no access to any other media. The power goes out, and all you have is a battery-powered or hand-cranked radio to find out what's going on. Hearing those guys talk about how radio comes through when nobody else can, you feel proud to be part of the industry.
And then your city catches fire, and you find out the limits of what radio does.
So the power went out at our house Saturday morning, and we thought that it was just another one of Southern California Edison's periodic equipment failures. I didn't think anything of it until a friend of mine called on the cell phone.
"I was worried about you guys," he said. "Are you all right?"
"Um, yeah, other than being without power. Why?"
"I heard you're having a wildfire."
Wait, what?
At that point, we detected no smoke. But I did hear a chopper off in the distance, and before long the distinct smell of ashtray wafted over the neighborhood.
I turned on the radio. My first choice was playing a syndicated talk show. Another station had an infomercial. Visions of Minot came to mind until I hit one of the all-news stations going wall-to-wall with fire coverage. I heard that Sylmar was burning up and a mobile home park had been destroyed, but Sylmar's a long way away from us. After about a half hour on that fire, I finally heard a brief report: A fire in Rancho Palos Verdes -- my town -- was being battled by local firefighters. No word on containment, although the crews appeared to be getting the upper hand. No word on exact location. And then they went back to Sylmar, and another fire broke out in Yorba Linda, and that was about it for my town.
What did I need from radio? I wanted to know exactly how close the fire was. (Turned out that it was roughly a mile, maybe a little less, from our house, which is too close for me) I wanted to know whether we needed to evacuate. (Turned out we didn't) I wanted to know if roads were closed. (Turned out they were, for a while) Nobody told me any of that, because to Los Angeles radio, we weren't even a secondary story. We were barely tertiary. When more telegenic and spectacular flames started consuming homes in Yorba Linda, they never mentioned Palos Verdes again.
But I don't blame the stations in L.A. for basically ignoring us. The big stations have to concentrate their dwindling resources on whatever the biggest stories are. The fire near my house was of primary concern to maybe 10,000 or 20,000 people. The other fires concerned a lot more people and threatened more homes (and kicked up a spectacular amount of smoke and ash). I understand that. But I still needed local information, and I didn't get it from radio. That's because there is no such thing as truly local radio in a lot of suburban areas. Sure, there are stations licensed to towns in our area, but those were long ago targeted at the much more lucrative L.A. market. It didn't have to be that way, but when people started buying suburban stations for way-too-high prices that mandated getting big market rates for advertising, there was no way that a station would concentrate on this area anymore. You can't pay the debt service if you're charging mom-and-pop rates. And that doesn't even cover the cutbacks in news staffs; if this happened in a smaller market, there might not have been anybody around to cover it on a weekend, period.
However, it's not like the competition does any better. Television is no different: The TV station licensed to my home city airs no local programming at all, just brokered ethnic programming and infomercials. The L.A. stations barely mentioned our fire, had no information at all about it, and didn't send crews down here. Our local cable system aired absolutely no coverage of the fire; While flames burned a few feet from City Hall, the local-origination channel carried a weeks-old videotape of a high school football game. Our local weekly newspaper's website sported three-day-old news. Our local daily paper put up a blog post with some information about an hour and a half after the fire started, but you'd have needed a sherpa to find it; the front page was filled with coverage of the fire 60 miles away.
So if the fire was headed towards us, we really had no way of knowing it. We had no place to turn for information. And that's because there's not enough money to be made for radio, the primary conduit for information in a power-out emergency, to serve us.
I don't know what the answer is. Internet streaming may be the answer someday, if you can get access on your cell phone when the power's out, but that's not yet economically viable. Closer, but not yet. Maybe, if some of the present large station operators end up broken up by financial troubles and fire sales (pardon the expression), someone who gets a bargain might pick up a moved-in signal and refocus it on the underserved suburbs or rural areas. Maybe the FCC should actually require stations to do more for their communities of license than mumbling the name in the legal ID. I don't know. All I know is that when I was growing up in the New Jersey suburbs in the 60's, we knew that we could turn to the local 1,000 watt daytimer in any emergency to find out what to do. Today, despite an explosion of new media, I don't have that option and I'm not alone.
You can't blame me for being annoyed.
Anyway, that was my problem this week. (I should also mention that some of the L.A. radio stations provided flat-out great coverage of the larger fires the rest of the day Saturday and all day Sunday) Your problem, besides the value of your brokerage accounts and retirement funds, is to get material together to make great radio, and with the election over, you need Talk Topics at All Access News-Talk-Sports now more than ever. That's where you'll find things to talk about like brainworms (ew), Malibu sewage (ew), a driving dog, a Louisiana Nazi, a girl who spent four months without a heart and lived, some real mystery meat, confirmation of a particular testicular rumor regarding Hitler, another cheerleader hazing story, smelly soccer shoes (ew), the end of another major magazine, turkey abuse, how US Airways lost grandma, a particularly entertaining intern meltdown, a very honest golfer, assault with a deadly sandwich, a disturbing woke-up-during-surgery story (ew), Donovan McNabb's little overtime misunderstanding (groan), and rat trouble in Brooklyn (ew), along with a distressingly large number of items about the economy and the rest of All Access with the industry's best/fastest/most reliable news coverage, columns, ratings, jobs, and much more, all free.
Since there won't be a column next week due to the holiday, have a happy and safe Thanksgiving. Remember, you can always start your diet the next day.
The blog has been suffering lately because I just haven't had the time to devote to it while doing things that actually make me money. Once again, I'm wondering whether it's all worth it.
The thought arose again while reading about the demise of Fire Joe Morgan, the wonderful sports blog hanging it up after several years. The guys who do it, including "The Office" writer/Mose Schrute-portrayer Michael Schur, have decided that the site has pretty much run its course and, well, there are other things to do, like Schur's job on the spinoff show. They built FJM into quite a popular site, often quoted at Deadspin, but it became "a time/work luxury we can no longer afford." And so, they'll leave the ripping of Bill Plaschke to others.
Well, yeah, time/work luxury, all that. I'm already working from 3:30 am to late at night most days, and it's leaving me drained and without a lot to say. I've wanted to pick a subject and stick to it -- sports memorabilia, old obscure TV, radio criticism, whatever -- but I just haven't had the time. I don't even have the time to scan more of my old programs or TV stuff.
But I'm not giving up entirely, not yet, even though it seems likely that my work duties will be expanding in 2009. I may even get around to doing the video and audio and even cartoon stuff I've been threatening to do. I just need some time. I'm exhausted and wanting for inspiration, but I'm not ready to hang it up yet. So I won't.
And, at the very least, "The Letter" will continue to appear here, and... well, I can't go any further with that. Let's just say that there definitely won't be less of "The Letter." (Hmm) And I'm still not ready to concentrate on one topic, not after almost six years of attention deficit disorder fun. So...
So, I'm still here, for now, but contemplating changes. We'll see.
I don't wanna write right now. I wanna sleep.
So I will. Sleep, that is.
Two days after the fires broke out in Sylmar and Corona and Yorba Linda and Brea, I walked through the front door this morning at about 4:30 am and the sky was clearer than I have ever seen it here. Stars filled the sky; constellations I could not begin to name were everywhere. As the sun came up, the sky turned a brilliant blue. The air did not smell of smoke. Tiny bits of ash occasionally stirred in the air, but only a distant brown crust over the ocean, shrouding Catalina, bore any remnants of the inferno of the weekend. By the afternoon, aided by sea breezes, even the ocean crust was gone from the Catalina Channel. The TV stations were mostly back to regular programming.
We're ending another day of the fire disaster, and it was indeed a disaster. Hundreds of homes were destroyed, lives disrupted. For those directly affected, this will be a heartache that will last a long time, maybe forever. But a few miles up the road, life goes on. It was going on when the fires were out of control, and it goes on now. That's something that always throws me; even on 9/11, when the towers were collapsing and the world was thrown into chaos, there were almost certainly people even just a short ride away who just went on with their business. After a few days, a lot of people went back to their daily routine. Humans are adaptable. We manage to come back from a lot. We take a licking, as John Cameron Swayze would say, and keep on ticking.
That is to say, today was pretty much a normal Monday here. That it was normal is astounding considering what it was like on Saturday or even Sunday. We just manage to... manage.
It still smells like smoke here.
There's the occasional ash flurry, too.
Even the air inside the YMCA when I went to get at least some exercise in this afternoon was smoky and unhealthy.
Oh, and we don't have A/C, but we can't leave the windows open because of the lingering smoke and ash from fires that are at least 40 miles or more away from here.
This can't end soon enough.
The first indication that something was wrong came at about 10 or so. I was sleeping in for once; I was not feeling well, and I decided to skip running this morning and rest. The power cut out, abruptly shutting down the white noise machine that accompanies our slumber; it cut back on, then off, then on, and so on through about four cycles before staying off. I called Edison and reported the outage, and they told me that there was a widespread outage and to be patient.
Well, okay. And then I got a call from John:
"Hey, I just wanted to make sure you were OK."
"Um, yeah, we're OK, just without power. Why?"
"I heard on the news that there was a fire in Rancho Palos Verdes."
Oh.
But I walked outside and there was no smoke. I didn't hear fire engines. No evidence. And then a chopper flew past, and I realized it was on.
Getting information was tough. The radio didn't have much. KNX did, after a while, mention it, and said that it was probably going to be under control soon, but only gave the location as "off Hawthorne Boulevard," which could have meant anything. I checked the web: nothing. Zero. Nothing on the Daily Breeze website, which featured the Sylmar fire instead. Nothing on the PV News website, which hadn't been updated in several days. Nothing on the web anywhere. Eventually, the power popped back on, and Palos Verdes got two mentions, one in a crawl on KCAL-9 that said we had a fire, the other being a chopper shot on Fox 11 that showed a plume of smoke coming from the peninsula. Finally, a note hidden in a corner of the Daily Breeze website said that the fire was nearly contained and no longer a threat. The TV stations turned their attention to the Corona/Yorba Linda and Brea fires, and that was that.
We decided to get out of Dodge for a while in search of air conditioning and to run a few errands. Stupidly, we drove east to Long Beach, and discovered that the air was worse over there. The fires were blowing ash directly towards our destination. I've been here for many fires over the years, and this was... well, I took a couple of pictures to try and demonstrate...
Here's one, driving east in Long Beach on Pacific Coast Highway, the sky bifurcated brown and blue. It was darker in reality than this picture indicates. It was about 1:45 pm at the time:
Standing in the Walmart parking lot in Long Beach Town Center, the ash was flying like snow. There was ash in the road, ash coating everything, ash landing on my arm as I took this picture. Yes, that's blue sky in the distance, brown sky above. It's 2:30 pm:
People were walking around wearing masks or covering their faces with their shirts pulled up like Mort in the Bazooka Joe comics. Smoke was everywhere. And it hung in the air all afternoon.
Right now, the air seems a little clearer here at home, but we're hardly out of the woods. It's still hot, it's still unbelievably dry, and it's still Southern California.
No, we're not near the fires. That's roughly about 90 or 100 miles up the coast from us. But there was a haze over the ocean, and I imagine that some of the brown gunk hanging over Catalina drifted over from Montecito.
Of course, the fires were huge news around here, even though they were happening far enough away so that it seemed like it was happening on the other side of the country. Still, anytime fires threaten people's homes, it's another reminder that we live in a danger prone region of the state. There but for the grace of God and all that. And we get another chance to tell friends and family that, no, that's not quite our neighborhood.
But in a way, it is our neighborhood. Everything around here runs the risk of being burned up at one point or another. We know it, We take whatever precautions we can, but the danger is still there. And we take no pleasure in seeing it happen to someone else.
That's why it was especially disturbing when, this afternoon, a very strong smell of smoke blasted through our house. I went outside to discover that the entire neighborhood smelled like the inside of the ashtray. I could hear a helicopter in the distance, and I could tell by the wind and from where the sound of the helicopter was coming from that whatever was kicking off the smoke had to be just to our west. But there were no flames in sight. I saw no plumes of smoke. A neighbor returning from picking up her kid at school told me that she had come from that direction and saw nothing. No fire trucks were dispatched. And as quickly as the smoke showed up, it was gone. It couldn't have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes before the air was clear again. We decided to go out to grab something to eat and maybe sit in some air conditioning instead of inhaling the smoke, and the smoke was gone. We drove throughout the neighborhood, with vistas that took in the entire coast from Long Beach to Malibu, and the only evidence of fire was that brown crust hanging over the ocean. We still don't know what caused the smell.
But I'm going to take the smoke as a reminder of what it is to live in a fire prone area. You hope that everybody else remembers to clear the brush on their property, you hope that people stop throwing lit cigarette butts out their car windows, you hope that the fire station two blocks away is always manned. But you're never sure what's going to happen. It's an interesting way to live.
This week's All Access newsletter is about rethinking radio as more than just, er, radio. Something like that. I have a cold, so I may not be thinking straight and I might have written about something else entirely. Let's have a look:
At a closed door meeting Thursday near Washington, 50 CEOs got together to try to figure out how to fix the newspaper business. They brought in a turnaround expert, and they locked themselves in a room to brainstorm. After all, who better to come up with ideas on how to revive a business than the people who were in charge as the business fell apart?
Think about it -- they blocked the doors to anybody who might have a different idea on how to run the business. It doesn't take an expert to figure out that a "crisis summit" like this is doomed.
Maybe we can take a lesson from their mistakes. One of the biggest problems with old media -- newspapers, television, and, of course, radio -- is a lack of vision twinned with a lack of understanding of how younger generations are consuming news and entertainment. Add to that the problems of being beholden to Wall Street, and the whole thing gets a little depressing.
It doesn't have to be this way. If the people who run radio do what the newspaper bigwigs are doing -- locking the doors and circling the wagons -- the end result is not going to be pretty. But radio is not dead yet, and there's time to open those doors. what would be interesting is for radio group heads to do the opposite of what the newspaper people are doing: bring in not just Internet gurus but actual, real people, the people they want to reach, those very same young consumers who aren't listening to radio very much these days. And look to other creative people -- within and outside the radio industry -- for ideas. Otherwise, you're just like the newspaper industry, filling a conference room with guys in suits discussing how to cut costs further to avoid going under.
One of the things you'll hear from industry leaders, of course, is that we're not alone -- business is bad all over, for everyone. They're right -- now, that is. But radio's been in the doldrums for longer than most other industries, and the problems aren't just related to the economy. I'm hoping that at some point, the leaders of this business can tell investors that, look, we may not look great in the short term, but we can't cut any more people, and, in fact, we need to dig deep and invest in the future, which does not mean HD Radio. It means... well, let me give you an example.
We've talked about the lameness of radio websites before. You know how so many station websites are more than a little embarrassing: outdated station schedules, a link to the stream, and a zillion ads given away as throw-ins by the sales department, all crammed into the corporate template. Many sites have no local content; many are never updated. What a waste.
And then you see how WEEI in Boston has gone out and hired name-brand sportswriters to create original content for its website, and how Rubber City Radio in Akron has a site that's akin to a newspaper without the print product but with up-to-date local news and audio, and how WDEL in Wilmington offers video news reports. And in those examples, you can see a future where radio stations realize that a website isn't a promotional tool, and it isn't a sales brochure. It's liberation. It's the ability to take an old media outlet -- the radio station -- and make it a competitor not to other radio stations but to newspapers, TV, the Net, everybody. You're not limited to a single radio frequency. You can now give the audience what it want, where and how they want it.
All of this does take money. And if the darkest projections hold true, it's going to be awhile before advertising reaches the level that can fully support some of these ideas. But the opportunity is right here, right now, and your station should be seizing the moment while one of your largest competitors -- the local newspaper -- is on the ropes and slashing jobs and content. Whether we're in a recession or not, people still want and need news, sports, entertainment, everything you already produce. And technology hasn't stopped moving forward. Now is the time for radio stations to take advantage of that technology to guarantee that they won't be left behind.
Of course, it's hard to do this when your news department has been cut down to one part-timer and a twelve year old PC. It's going to take a company with vision to do this on a larger scale. But I see newspapers marching like lemmings towards a cliff and I see opportunity. Besides, there are a lot of freelance writers who'd be happy to crank out fresh, interesting copy for your websites, like, say, guys who write columns about talk radio for trade websites. I hear they're quite good, and affordable, too.
While I'm being totally shameless, I might as well plug All Access News-Talk-Sports and the Talk Topics column, which you know about by now but which I'm still gonna plug because that's what I do. This week, you'll find items about Bond songs, park nudity, belly fat, unsupervised bailouts, economic optimism, economic pessimism, large fish, incessant hiccuping, website come-ons, a plastic surgery disaster, big balls o' twine, the problem with plug-in cars, foreclosures, calories, a bad reaction to macaroni, what's good (and bad) for your heart, a toddler left at Walmart, walking classes, depressed popcorn sales, and much post-election and economic trouble news. And there's an interesting "10 Questions With..." Radio America syndicated talker Greg Knapp and the rest of All Access with the industry's best/fastest/most accurate news coverage, columns, music charts, ratings, job listings, the Industry Directory, and more, all at the low, low recession-busting price of free.
Before I go, I do want to send my condolences to the family, co-workers, and many friends of Fox Sports Radio VP/GM/Executive Producer Andrew Ashwood, who passed away Thursday. Andrew was a booster of this column and supportive of our efforts for many years, and he is already missed.
So, wait, let me see if I have this right.
If I have a throat that feels a little sore way in the back...
...and my nose is running a little and my head hurts and I feel achy...
...that's not good.
It's probably a cold?
You sure it's not allergies?
Whatever it is, it's got me reeling a little.
I'm going to try and sleep it off. Somehow, I have a feeling that I'm not going to feel better in the morning.
Okay, so I have the FTP stuff configured on this machine, so we're good.
That picture was snapped by the iSight camera on the notebook while I tried to get something else working. It's a pretty good representation of the way I look when I'm annoyed. It's the Official PMSimon.com Look of Disapproval:
I think I can use this as an effective shorthand method of conveying a certain reaction to stuff, like... okay, let's try it out:
Andy Reid says that the Eagles just need to work on a few minor things and they'll be okay!
Cox Cable says I can save big money by signing up for its digital telephone service!
A big radio company insists that the latest round of cutbacks will help put the company and the industry back on the road to prosperity!
The Daily Breeze says that reducing the size of the paper into two thin sections on Mondays and Tuesdays are just a way to make printing more efficient and streamline the production and distribution of the paper!
The check is in the mail!
Oh, yeah, I can use this.
Tonight, I'm just screwing around with the MacBook Pro while decompressing from the day. I'm trying out different FTP methods right now. If a picture of me looking annoyed pops up below this, it worked:
Eureka!
The envelope showed up in today's mail. In the upper left, in black letters, above a window with a bar code in it: "SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA." Under it, "Office of the Jury Commissioner." On the right, over my address, in big red letters, the dreaded words: "OFFICIAL JURY SUMMONS ENCLOSED."
Here we go again.
I could have sworn that I served jury duty within the last year, so I shuffled through my paperwork to find the little slip of paper that says that I don't have to go back for another year. And I found the slip, but it turns out that that date was September 26, 2006. And that means that my two year exemption has expired. That means I have to go. That means I'm screwed.
I don't mean to demean the concept of jury duty. I know it's a civic duty. I have no problem with being required to do it. I do have a problem being the guy who gets called every two years like clockwork, when most of the people I know never get called at all. Why me? (I know. Why NOT me?) I know how this is going to go. I'm going to go down to the decrepit courthouse in Long Beach, I'm going to spend most of the day sitting around doing absolutely nothing, I'll get walked to a jury box, they'll tell me that they don't need me, and then I'll go home with another slip of paper that says I don't have to come back for two years. And, judging by my experience over the last decade, as soon as the two years is up, they'll call me back. Maybe they just like seeing my face around the courthouse. Or maybe they just have a very short list of suckers who they know they can bring in time and again every two years, leaving everybody else alone. I shouldn't feel like this is punishment, but in a county with so many people, for me to get picked every two years just seems like too uncanny to be a coincidence. And, as far as I can determine, there's no way to get off this list.
The actual week that I'm scheduled to go in isn't for another two months -- yes, it's Christmas time -- so I get to spend the next month and three weeks carrying around a sense of dread, waiting for that fateful weekend when I call in to see if I'm going to be called. My luck, I'll get on a trial, it'll last all week, and I'll be in there on Christmas Eve listening to testimony or, worse, sequestered. It can't be terribly amusing for the staff to keep bringing me back every two years just to sit in the jury selection room. They need entertainment. That would be it.
Unless I move....
It's been three years since Fran and I sat in a medical office while a nurse practitioner calmly told Fran that the diagnosis was breast cancer and I came very close to passing out. Three years ago today. It felt like we were embarking on a nightmare.
In some ways, we were. Certainly, for Fran, it was no fun at all. But it's three years to the day now since that happened, and this evening, we sat at a dinner table by the water in Redondo Beach at sunset and gazed across the table at each other and marveled at what's transpired over that time. It may seem strange for us to be celebrating on the anniversary of receiving very bad news, but making it through three years of the cancer wringer is, I think, as good a reason as any to be festive.
If I've learned anything in those three years, it's to cherish and celebrate every single day Fran and I are together. When your life with the one you love is threatened like that, and three years later you're both still here and still together and still madly in love, there's nothing more special than that.
So we celebrated, and, with your consent, I'm going to shut down this MacBook Pro and go spend the rest of the evening and all night long with Fran. Every moment with her is a gift. Three years ago, I knew that. Today, I know it even more.
It's been a long day and I will have something to talk about tomorrow. And I'm in the middle of simultaneously trying to fix a problem with Fran's aged Windows computer and vowing that I will replace it with a Mac one day soon. So... talk to you tomorrow.
Good thing it's the end of the week. This was a long one, and not the best, either, but at least it was interesting, And historic, of course.
And over, in a blaze of exhaustion and intermittent power outages and sinus headaches. I hope to be more ebullient next week.
This week's All Access newsletter grew from both my experience on Tuesday night and from some doom-and-gloom column I read elsewhere pronouncing old media dead again, plus the queues for newspapers that persist even today. Alas, it was only AFTER filing the thing in haste that I realized I had another related point that involved Google and stuff. Perhaps next week....:
This was a pretty good week for old, dead media.
Wednesday was the first day in a long time that newspapers, for example, were relevant. But it wasn't the great reporting or latest news that sold those papers; it was the souvenir aspect. Nobody on earth found out who had won the election from a newspaper headline, but you can't frame and hang a web page on your wall. (Yet.) So newspapers got a lot of attention, with people queuing up for blocks just to grab a copy of the paper with the president-elect's picture on the cover. That doesn't mean the print version of newspapers have a bright future; it just means that when something momentous occurs, people want a copy of the paper as a keepsake.
(And, yes, I DO own a copy of the October 30 Philadelphia Daily News with Brad Lidge and Carlos Ruiz on the front cover and Ryan Howard with the World Championship Trophy on the back. That was pretty momentous, too)
More interesting to me, however, is how people learned the result of the election. At the moment the election was called, I happened to be in a place where I was isolated from access to the news and my cell phone didn't have a signal. I heard the answer through a thick wall, from another office, where a bunch of twenty-somethings screamed in delight. They got the word from... Twitter? A website? Text messaging? No, they got it from TV. Old media. They SPREAD the word with cell phones and texts and Twitter, but they all were glued to the TV. The other stuff was secondary. Later, when Obama gave his victory speech, I was in another area where there were no TVs but there was a computer; one guy advised another to find the speech on the Net, but said to "check ABC first." And so they did.
What this means is that there are still roles for old media to play in the new technological landscape. However, the bonds between content and technology are now broken, which means... what? Well, that ABC thing might be a good example. People want the content, and they want it delivered in whatever way they can get it. The folks with only a computer didn't see that as a barrier to get that speech, and it wasn't. But they went to a familiar source, ABC, to get it. I have no doubt that the scene was repeated across the nation, with people saying "check CNN" or "Fox News should have it" and firing up a TV, a computer, a cell phone, and, yes, a radio to get what they want.
For news and talk radio stations, this gets back to your brand. Ask yourself this question: When election night rolled around, did people in your market instinctively associate your station with breaking news? It's something that I talked about in one of the very first editions of this column, way back in the Pleistocene Era. Something huge is happening: do people turn to you or someone else for the news, or for talk about it? And are you doing what it takes to earn that reputation?
That's one of the reasons why the cuts that slashed newsroom budgets throughout the industry were so short-sighted. If you own the news brand in your market, you can own it no matter what the medium is. Yes, that can include video, too, since your website has no audio-only restrictions like your broadcast signal does. Did your website carry video as well as audio of Obama's speech live? Why not? The point is that you want people to come to YOU for breaking news and discussion of it, too, and you need to be able to offer it in any form the listeners want, on any device.
(Sports works the same way. Even if you don't have the play-by-play, you want to be the station where fans turn to talk about the game and the team. Check the PPM numbers for some of the stronger sports stations the morning after a big local game; there's a spike every time. Own that sports brand, on the radio, online, everywhere)
(Oh, yeah, individual talents and shows can do this, too. If people react to every major news story with the thought "I wonder what (your name here) thinks about this," you win)
Anyway, you're probably still talking about the election aftermath, but there are other things going on, too, and for those, the best place to get what you need to do your show is still Talk Topics, the show prep extravaganza at All Access News-Talk-Sports. So far this week, you'll find dogs attacking postal workers, how not to clear cobwebs from your house, a gorilla getting a colonoscopy, another bad school bus driver, another chapter in the Yahoo!-Microsoft affair, a coda to the Bong Hits 4 Jesus saga, a good use for duct tape, Toby Keith's shaven armpits, why your next fast food order may come to you with the correct items and condiments, Turducken, an incredible run of golfing luck, a rhyming diet, and a lot of Obamamania and economic news, including the rapid growth of the retail chain "Going Out Of Business." There's also "10 Questions With..." KBOI and KTIK/Boise PD Andrew Paul (with nary a mention of "Smurf Turf") and the rest of All Access with the usual Net News and music and column and feature goodness, plus jobs and ratings and stuff. It's all free and updated all day.
Next week: I have no idea, but I do know that at least we don't have to talk about campaign stuff anymore. Although the 2012 race will probably be starting any day now....
I've been trying to do two things at once. I don't mean multitasking; I mean doing two separate things that require me to be in two places at once. It turns out that it's harder than I thought. And the sum of things makes it hard to find time to do things like, oh, sleep. Or eat properly. Or do well what I need to do well. Or allow me enough time to do... anything.
Is that cryptic enough?
So I have some decisions to make, which, naturally, revolve around money. You, of course, can help in this decision by sending me large sums of cash, anonymously, of course, so I don't have to write a thank-you ca... er, because you're humble and don't need the recognition. Yeah, that. For now, though, I'm going to have to bail and try to get some sleep. "The Letter" tomorrow, I hope.
Got out and voted today! Here's where:
It's a community room at a local church. So much for separating church and state. There were no lines, no waiting, nothing. Done in less than five minutes. Reading about all the crowds and lines elsewhere, I felt a little guilty.
Not so about the election, which I'm glad to see end. The partisan stuff has gotten way out of hand. This is the kind of thing I saw happening -- one day, there was a sign favoring the anti-gay-marriage proposition on the corner of Hawthorne and Palos Verdes Drive West. Today, here's what was in that spot:
Those are signs in favor of an animal rights proposition and for Obama. Where was the sign that was on that spot yesterday?
I'm not even in favor of that anti-gay-marriage proposition. I voted the other way. But I don't think that anyone should trash the other side's signs just because you disagree with them, much less replace their speech with your speech. It's possible to disagree on issues and not be stupid. But that's in short supply; I've been reading some of the stuff people -- my friends, no less! -- have been posting on Facebook about the election, dismissing those who disagree or who support another candidate in profane and absolute terms. Funny how most of the intolerance comes from people who pride themselves on holding "tolerant" political views.
So, I'm glad it's coming to an end, no matter who wins. Frankly, whoever gets in is screwed from day one, so I wish that person the best, even if I didn't vote for him. Watching the opposing party screw up in office may provide hours of schadenfreude, but, in the end, we lose.
DId I mention that this is going to be an especially busy week for me? It is. I have way too much work to do, in and out of the office, and no time to do it, so these posts will be abbreviated.
Oh, yeah, usually at this time every year, I tell you my views on the California ballot propositions. This year, t's easy. It's no on everything but that one for the veterans. Everything else, no. No on the bullet trains, no on the phony environmental propositions, no on the county sales tax hike for the subway to nowhere... er, Santa Monica, no to the gay marriage ban, no, no, no. Can't afford 'em and don't need to waste time with divisive social/religious issues. Just say no.
See? Easy.
I thought I'd just preserve some of the political sign scenes around here for posterity. In a couple of days, you'll never see them out on these lawns again:
Time is going to be tight again this week; I'm going to be a little extra-busy, so apologies in advance as I do the excuse thing again. As always, things that pay take precedence over things that don't. This, er, don't. So it has to take a back seat.
I'll get back to it shortly. I promise. With scans and photos and everything. I just need more time, that's all. Hey, we get an extra hour tonight -- that's a start, right?
