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Tonight's Emmy Awards opened with a segment celebrating the following:

a) A weird guy discussing his affair with a woman (now deceased) old enough to play his mother in a TV movie.
b) A woman celebrating her "fighting back" against criticism of her role as a single working mother who fathered a child deliberately out of wedlock.
c) An actor who served time for killing a man.

And they wonder why people say Hollywood is out of touch with the "red staters."

I felt sorry, however, for Ellen DeGeneres, who truly bombed with her monologue- no laughs. I won't liveblog this- the Phillies are on, and I have work to do- but I will also note that in the short time I watched, the number of truly cringe-inducing moments was increasing rapidly. Earth, Wind and Fire (how, er, cutting edge) and the awful Black Eyed Peas doing "September" with terrible "new" lyrics about "Desperate Housewives" and "Everybody Loves Raymond"? William Shatner wins? Jeremy Piven gets beaten by Brad Garrett? And the coup de grace, Donald Trump and Megan Mullally (in character, no less) singing the theme from "Green Acres"? It's fire-your-agent night for sure.

Gothamist's liveblogging it, if you're into it.

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This article caught my eye (hat tip: Romanesko):

Of all the jobs in the newsroom, some seem more likely to cause burnout than others. War correspondent. Obituary writer. City-council-subcommittee-on-zoning-beat writer. But sports reporter? That's what Scott Reinardy, an assistant professor of journalism at Ball State University and a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri-Columbia, found in a new study: high levels of emotional exhaustion and cynical attitudes toward sources, especially among young sportswriters at local dailies.

The study showed several reasons for the burnout, the main being the tough schedule and another being the disillusionment of meeting your heroes and discovering they're just, you know, guys. And that's true, but I think it's mostly the schedule. I get to see it close up at the stadium on a regular basis, and I can see it in the eyes of the writers and broadcasters this time of the baseball season, especially when the home team's losing. You want the season to end, end soon, end now. Each game is a drag on your energy, and you wind up rooting for games to go fast, as close to two hours as possible, and you curse the batters who foul off a lot of pitches or the pitchers who work deliberately, methodically, sloooooowly, because the more they do that, the later you'll get out of the place and the less you'll see of your family, your non-sports friends, the world. It's an insular, weird atmosphere. I can see why burnout's a problem.

But on the other hand, it's writing or talking about something you've always loved. It's not breaking rocks in the hot sun, even if it requires encounters with Jeff Kent. It's actually a pretty cool place to work, a pretty cool job to have. And your friends will think you're crazy for feeling like you've had enough.

Unless they've been watching the Dodgers lately. Then they'll understand.

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From the Loews Hotels website:

583 guestrooms, including 37 suites - all equipped with faxes, printer, and three telephones, including separate cordless and dual-line phones, a T1 line for Internet access, and a separate modem line.

The manager's statement to me upon my complaint that no printer is in my room: "I know you've probably noted that our web site says we have faxes and printers in every room. (Ed. Note: It's also stated in the Guest Services Directory IN THE ROOM) That is not true."

They offered to move me to another room. I told them I'm not moving. What's more difficult- moving someone with several bags' worth of stuff from one room to another, then having to clean the old room for another guest, or just walking into an empty room, unplugging the printer, walking it to my room, and plugging it in?

And I haven't even mentioned the operator who cheerfully informed me that I could rent a printer for $175. A NIGHT.

I've been a loyal, happy Loews customer for several years. They can't be considering losing a customer over a $49. ink jet printer, can they?

We'll see.

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The suits were in full effect this morning. It's hot and humid in town- less Indian Summer than a Summer that never bothered to end- and it's too damn hot for me. I brought a jacket, but I left it in the hotel room. Everyone else is in full Banker Regalia, which is because they're masochists, and also because they were here for the annual broadcast financing session, officially called "Broadcast Financing 2005: Radio on the Rebound." (Question: What is this "rebound" of which you speak?) A few people took off their suit jackets, but most left them on; they're interested in investing in radio, so you can't expect them to want to be comfortable.

These aren't really "my people." "My people" are the talent, the programmers, the people who work in radio because there's nothing else we can really do. Those folks generally skip this thing. I have to be here to cover it for All Access, but when I started coming in '86 or '87, I was on the corporate side, so I was a suit. It was only later that I realized I belonged with the misfits, because most of these guys are salesmen at heart, and I'm not. The morning crew today- the investors, the station owners, the GMs- these guys don't know me. I sat in the back of the room, taking notes, filing items for the site, being as inconspicuous as someone in a white shirt surrounded by guys in dark suits can be.

At heart, the people at the financial session seemed less like radio people than like people who intend someday to get rich, whatever the means. Radio's just a means to an end. It's like a Carleton Sheets graduate-level course, a room full of Men's Wearhouse suits wanting to be Armani. And a lot of these guys seem like guys who think they made a really grave error investing in radio.

One of the panelists, a banker, saud "I've been in radio business for a number of years." No, sir, you haven't been "in the radio business." You're a banker. You invest in radio. You've never run a station, never programmed a station, never been on the air or driven the van or answered the request line. That's "in radio." Crunching the numbers, that's not "in radio."

Or maybe it is, now. And that's a huge problem. The investors, the corporate guys, the lawyers think they're "in radio," but they're not, and one way you can tell is by the panel this morning. Not one of the financial guys spoke word one about what goes on the air, about HOW the stations make their money. It was all about inventory reduction and EBITDA and free cash flow. Programming and marketing and talent? Nothing. Public service? God forbid. They look at a station with a heavy local news commitment and community involvement and they see a station that could improve its cash flow this quarter by outsourcing news to a traffic service or just dropping it altogether. Why spend money on local news and talent? If you would ask that question- and everyone in that room would- you are not a radio guy.

Look, I understand it. I respect that these guys are looking at the radio business as a business. I get it. But if you want to understand what the problem in radio is, you need to understand that treating radio as a widget maker for the last decade has not been a good thing for radio.

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Too late for a full entry- I have to save it for tomorrow. Expect diatribes about radio sales and lost shirts. Separate stories.

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This is what I was going to ask the radio group heads on the panel at Thursday's NAB show when they were talking about how they like to have huge sales staffs and sales are so important to their business:

Why would you want to have 30 salespeople for a radio station fighting over limited business? How is that good for radio?

Why, if salespeople are so key to the business, do you treat them like crap? Why do you do things like cut commission rates when it will hurt the salespeople but help your bottom line for the quarter, like when Infinity cut fourth quarter commissions on Howard Stern sales because they're doing so well they want to "discourage" salespeople from selling Stern? Why are accounts ever turned into "house accounts" or lower-commission "repeat business" when it's the salesperson's efforts that made that client long-term to begin with- why punish the salesperson for doing the job well? Why is there almost no training of new salespeople- why are they thrown onto the street with an armful of media kits and no clue? Might that not be something to consider when you have salespeople gone 90 days after being hired?

Why, if you've been selling 60 second spots for years and telling clients that's the way radio works, are you now trying to convince the same clients to pay almost the same amount for 30s and claiming they work as well or better? Are you admitting that you've been ripping clients off for decades?

Why, in a discussion of the troubles state of radio and its future, was little attention paid to the value of talent? Is talent irrelevant to you? Do you even listen to your own stations?

But I didn't ask. I'm having enough troubles as it is.

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The third day of the NAB show was uneventful- no major news, except for seeing my boss suddenly appear on a panel (he was an emergency fill-in and acquitted himself very well indeed). Randy Jackson- Randy Jackson?!?- was the featured speaker at the official luncheon. We skipped that.

The overriding theme of the convention was fear- fear of satellite, fear of iPods, fear of the future. And the response was an odd mix of defiant bravado and abject terror, voiced in terms of "the other guy sucks": satellite's bad, satellite's evil, satellite ought to be regulated, satellite gets all the breaks, satellite gets all the good press, satellite has no business plan, iPods can't give you emergency information, iPods can't give you personality, iPods can't give you new music. I heard very little positive about anybody or anything, save for the industry's patting its own back for the Katrina coverage. If WWL didn't exist, they'd have had to invent one to justify the industry's existence.

Is radio doomed? No, yes, maybe. No if it realizes what its strategic advantages are and what its strategic advantages aren't. Radio can Jack all it wants, but it has to realize this: it can't outdo satellite for music, can't outdo iPods for music, can't outdo anyone for music. Satellite has commercial-free music with great variety. iPods serve up purely the music the user likes, nothing more or less. If radio plays the music card, it loses.

Personality? There ya go. Radio SHOULD have learned from 25 years of Howard Stern that high-profile, talented, funny, outsized personalities are their winning play: attract the most creative, talented people and let them work unfettered to become stars that can't be heard anywhere else. But they won't do that. They'll hire people and make them fit a "wacky" formula with "wacky" fake names and "wacky" bits strangely similar to "wacky" bits the PD heard worked in another market. Or they'll hire better talent and sell them down the river the moment some crank complains to the FCC. Either way, a young comedic talent good enough to be a calling card for radio ends up frustrated, or decides to find some other line of work. And we get an endless procession of Morning Zoos and Jacks and More Music In the Morning. And radio suffers.

And then we sit in convention hall meeting rooms discussing how shorter commercials are the answer.

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