John Oliver Has Given Us The Best Defense Of Newspapers Ever

By Kathleen Parker, Washington Post, 09 August 2016)

  John Oliver in 2014. (Eric Liebowitz/HBO)

Every couple of years or so, I feel the need to whine about the plight of newspapers. It’s August. I’m Trumped out. So today’s the day.  Except that HBO’s John Oliver beat me to it with the best defense of newspapers — ever. His recent “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” monologue about the suffering newspaper industry has gone viral in journalism circles but deserves a broader audience.  Besides, it’s funny.

Leavening his important message with enough levity to keep the dopamine flowing, Oliver points out that most news outlets, faux, Fox and otherwise, essentially rely on newspapers for their material. This includes, he says, pulsing with self-awareness, Oliver himself. He’s sort of part of the problem, in other words, but at least he knows it, which makes it okay, sort of.

The problem: People want news but they don’t want to pay for it.  Consequently, newspapers are failing while consumers get their information from comedy shows, talk shows and websites that essentially lift material for their own purposes.

But somewhere, somebody is sitting through a boring meeting, poring over data or interviewing someone who isn’t nearly as important as he thinks he is in order to produce a story that will become news. As Oliver points out, news is a food chain, yet with rare exceptions, the most important members of the chain are at the bottom, turning off the lights in newsrooms where gladiators, scholars and characters once roamed.  

Some still do, though most are becoming rather long-ish in the tooth. (You can actually get that fixed, you know.)  That any newspapers are surviving, if not for much longer in any recognizable form, can be attributed at least in some part to the dedication of people who really believe in the mission of a free press and are willing to work harder for less — tweeting, blogging, filming and whatnot in addition to trying to write worthy copy. Most of the poor slobs who fell in love with the printed word go unnoticed by any but their peers.

An exception is Marty Baron, the unassuming executive editor of The Post, recently featured in the film “Spotlight,” about the Boston Globe’s stories under Baron’s leadership uncovering sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. It’s a good movie, not just because of great casting and acting but because it’s a great tale about a massive investigative effort that led to church reform and the beginning of healing for victims. (Not to worry, my pay comes as a percentage of the money I make for the company. This won’t make a dime of difference.)

My point — shared by Oliver — is that only newspapers are the brick and mortar of the Fourth Estate’s edifice. Only they have the wherewithal to do the kind of reporting that leads to stories such as “Spotlight.” What happens to the “news” when there are no newspapers left?  We seem doomed to find out as people increasingly give up their newspaper subscriptions and seek information from free-content sources. And though newspapers have an online presence, it’s hard to get readers to pay for content.  As Oliver says, now is a very good time to be a corrupt politician. Between buyouts, layoffs and news-space reductions, there’s hardly anyone paying attention.

Except, perhaps, to kitties.  In a hilarious spinoff of “Spotlight” called “Stoplight,” Oliver shows a short film of a news meeting where the old-school reporter is pitching a story about city hall corruption. The rest of the staff, cheerful human topiaries to the reporter’s kudzu-draped mangrove — are more interested in a cat that looks like a raccoon.  And then there’s Sam Zell, erstwhile owner of the Tribune Co., who summed up the sad trajectory of the nation’s interests and, perhaps, our future while speaking to Orlando Sentinel staffers in 2008. When he said he wanted to increase revenues by giving readers what they want, a female voice objected, “What readers want are puppy dogs.”

Zell exploded, calling her comment the sort of “journalistic arrogance of deciding that puppies don’t count. . . . Hopefully we get to the point where our revenue is so significant that we can do puppies and Iraq, okay? [Expletive] you.”  Yes, he said that.  Moral of the story: If you don’t subscribe to a newspaper, you don’t get to complain about the sorry state of journalism — and puppies you shall have.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/john-oliver-has-given-us-the-best-defense-of-newspapers-ever/2016/08/09/ec04219e-5e6d-11e6-9d2f-b1a3564181a1_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1

Travel Agents

The Travel Agent Is Dead. Long Live The Travel Pro

(By Charlie Funk, Travel Weekly, 2 October 2013)

 

Have you noticed it too? Travel professionals are resurgent.  In the 2007 marketing plan we gave each of our suppliers, Sherrie and I stated that we believed online bookings that did not involve a live travel professional had peaked and traditional agents would be more involved in vacation decisions going forward.  Sure enough. It took a while, but travelers did begin seeking assistance of travel professionals again, a phenomenon noted by a fair number of reporting entities including CBS, CNN, Fodor's, Budget Travel, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Both PhoCusWright and Forrester Research detected steady growth in those leisure travelers who increasingly turn to travel professionals for guidance.

And to clarify, I'm referring to those travel professionals who help translate clients' ideas and dreams into reality in the form of a vacation that meets or exceeds expectations, not those who are primarily a booking- and payment-processing entity, a toll booth on the highway to a vacation.  Travelers are returning to travel professionals for four key reasons:

•Knowledge: Travel professionals have specialized knowledge of destinations, things to do, places to see, the best places to dine and more.

•Time: Consumers increasingly place a higher value on their time, where a five-minute call to a travel professional often avoids literally hours of mind-numbing online searches.

•Price: Travelers are more aware than ever that a travel professional has the same rates offered by a supplier.

•Advocacy: It turns out things go wrong on a trip: a missed flight, an unpleasant experience, an emergency during the trip and more snafus that require assistance. More and more, travelers have learned that without a travel pro, they are on their own.

These are the professionals who know they add value. Like the one who gives clients his unlisted phone number, charges a $100,000 fee to join and a $25,000 annual retainer. But they are also the ones who take calls at home, at 3 a.m., who take the time to counsel a client on what to do from the time they take the suitcase from under the bed until they put it back.

I've written here about the growing sense among this group that they must be in control of their business: how they go to market, how they develop and maintain their business model and which products they sell. Many have "taken a stand" to make their business profitable, even if it meant walking away from long-standing supplier partnerships.  Similarly, growing cadres of agency owners have decided that they don't have to do business with every person who calls or stops by. With increasing frequency I hear of and see reports from travel professionals telling of experiences with clients who just aren't a good fit for their business.

Many share common characteristics, the most frequent being a conversation that begins with, "What's your best deal on ..." I often wonder just how cheap a bad vacation has to be before someone can overlook all the problems and issues that arise from being price-driven, looking for the "best deal." More than a few agency owners tell me they have found that these bookings are typically very high-maintenance with zero loyalty.  Another frustration is working to find the best vacation value for a client only to have them book it direct with the supplier. More and more agencies have begun charging fees: some that are standalone and are not applied to subsequent bookings, others that can be applied. 

Perhaps the best example most recently involved a client who questioned the use of a travel agent when the same price was available direct and took exception to being charged a fee to make an airline reservation. This was, it would turn out, one of those final-straw situations.  In this case, the agency owner took the time to craft a 474-word email response to this "client" that touched on all the reasons mentioned above. It clearly set forth the benefits of using the agency's services. The part that I liked best was the closing. With the owner's permission, I quote it here:

"All that to say, if you are price-driven, and not motivated by good and reliable service or a corporate culture to go above and beyond for every single client, then I'm not the right travel agent for you anyway. We are grateful for the opportunity to have served you in the past, and we wish you the very best success and enjoyment in your future vacations."

That's right. The agency fired the client. Have you ever wanted to do that? It seems sometimes there just isn't another way to handle the situation.  What really prompted this column was the sense that travel retailers are obsolete, unnecessary, passe. Specifically, I was writing a response to President Obama's comment on the Sept. 15 edition of ABC's "This Week," apparently in an effort to explain stunted economic and job growth, suggesting that technology had eliminated so many jobs: "Technology. If you go to -- a lot of companies now, they've eliminated entire occupations because they're now robotized. We don't have travel agents. We don't have bank tellers."

I was all set to refute this latest statement. I had some surgically honed witticisms about who was handling all the planning for all those trips that the POTUS and family take.  But then it occurred to me: The president was partially right, because in the context in which "travel agent" was used it might well be a disappearing species indeed. We're no longer merely travel agents; we're professionals. I'm going to write my first letter to a president, thanking him for giving us travel professionals the opportunity to set ourselves apart from those all-but-extinct travel agents of old.

Charlie and Sherrie Funk own Just Cruisin' Plus in Brentwood, Tenn., and are members of the CLIA Hall of Fame.

Obsolete Or Defunct: The Disappearance Of Everyday Things & Businesses

Blockbuster's Last In-Store Rental Was 'This Is The End' (Of Course)

(By The Huffington Post, 11 November 2013)

Say what you will about Blockbuster, the company knew how to take a DVD, apply various corporate labelings to it and place it on a shelf.  So when the dying cultural titan (or evil corporate behemoth, depending on your personal experience) closed its in-house U.S. rental business this past Saturday, what was the final purchase? Perhaps it was some fabled flick, like Spartacus or The Godfather or something? Nope, it was that Seth Rogen flick you didn’t see- “This Is The End”.

 

Blockbuster Goes Bust

(By Serri Graslie, NPR, 08 November  2013)

Blockbuster was once the king of movie rental stores. At its peak, it had about 60,000 employees and more than 9,000 stores.  But after struggling for several years, the chain is breathing its last gasp. Dish Network, which bought Blockbuster in a 2011 bankruptcy auction, says it will close the remaining 300 or so company-owned stores by January.  On Twitter, it put out a call for "Blockbuster Memories."

But don't be surprised if you stumble across an open Blockbuster in Alaska or Texas. In those states, 26 stores are owned by the Austin, Texas-based Border Entertainment. They're among roughly 50 franchises or licensees that will live on after the parent company shuts down, becoming what are often called "zombie" stores.  Border Entertainment's president, Alan Payne, tells All Things Considered host Melissa Block that while business isn't what it was a few years ago, his stores are still profitable.  "We've managed to make it work," he says. "We've just been totally focused on what the stores could do that our competition could not do."  That means maintaining a large selection, keeping prices low and knowing your customers. In Payne's stores, an older movie that you wouldn't find in a Redbox kiosk costs only 49 cents a day, or 99 cents a week. 

Although Dish Network blamed the downfall of video stores on the rise of digital distribution, Payne says not all consumers have gone online.  "If you're sitting at home right now and you don't want to buy a movie, you want to rent one, the only place you can really do that is online," he says. "A lot of people don't know how to do that. And the ones that do, it would cost them $3 or $4."  And especially for customers in his Alaska stores, expensive Internet access might keep them from streaming movies online in the first place.

Payne says the final closures shouldn't make that big of a mark on his business. The stores will license Blockbuster's trademark, print their own materials and change out their computer system.  Getting movies won't be any harder, he says, because Border Entertainment buys them from a wholesale distributor. And sometimes, the company just sends a store manager out to buy multiple copies.  "It sounds crazy, but most mass merchants that sell movies sell them at cost," he says. "So we can go to Wal-Mart, for example, and we'll pay about the same price to them that we would pay to a wholesale distributor."

Payne estimates his niche business will still be good for at least another two or three years. The company currently has about 40,000 people coming through its stores every week.  "I don't have my head in the sand. I know that we're challenged by all the technology," he says. "But I haven't given up on the opportunity that it might flatten out at some point. So that's what we work toward — but we have to be realistic and realize that it is declining."  Ultimately, Payne says it's not just a good selection and low prices that have kept customers coming back to his Blockbusters as the chain dissolved around them.  "Part of why people come, obviously, is for the community experience of seeing friends and seeing our employees in the stores that obviously know movies," he says. "That's part of why we're still here, because a lot of people like that experience."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/11/08/243967587/blockbuster-fades-out-but-some-zombie-stores-will-live-on

 

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

The Blockbuster movie rental chain is breathing its last gasp. A few years ago the company closed thousands of stores, went into bankruptcy, then was bought by Dish Network. And now Dish says 300 remaining Blockbuster stores will be closed by early January. While the parent company is shutting down its stores, don't be surprised if you see the Blockbuster name if you happen to be in Alaska or Texas. They're Blockbuster franchises owned by Border Entertainment and those stores will stay open.

The president of Border Entertainment, Alan Payne, joins me from Austin to explain why. Mr. Payne, welcome to the program.

ALAN PAYNE: Hello. Glad to be here.

BLOCK: And along with stores there in Texas, you also have franchises in Alaska from Juneau to Kenai to North Pole. They have the Blockbuster sign I guess and they will stay open. So are brick and mortar movie rental stories still a viable business model for you?

PAYNE: Well, it's obviously viable or we wouldn't still be open. We're still profitable. The business is not what it was three or four years ago. It has declined but we've managed to make it work.

BLOCK: Well, how have you managed to do that because Dish says demand has clearly moved to digital distribution, people streaming movies and renting online. How do you do it?

PAYNE: We've just been totally focused on what the stores could do that our competition could not do. And that involves real low prices, large inventories that are tailored to the markets that we're in. And, you know, if you think about it, if you're sitting at home right now and you don't want to buy a movie, you want to rent one, the only place you can really do that is online. And a lot of people don't know how to do that. And the ones that do, it would cost them $3 or $4. So in our stores that movie rents for 49 cents a day.

BLOCK: Well, how will you keep getting movies if Blockbuster is gone?

PAYNE: Well, they've never supplied us movies and we've always bought movies through wholesale distribution. And in some cases for movies that are coming from studios that don't want to sell wholesale to us, and there are a couple, we actually go to retail stores and buy them.

BLOCK: You just go out and buy them and then rent them.

PAYNE: Yes, yes.

BLOCK: And that works? That's a model that works?

PAYNE: It sounds crazy but most mass merchants that sell movies sell them at cost. So we can go to Walmart, for example, and we'll pay about the same price to them that we would pay through a wholesale distributor.

BLOCK: Well, one thing I've read, Mr. Payne, is that at least in Alaska your business has helped because a bunch of people wouldn't have inexpensive Internet access. They wouldn't have the bandwidth to be able to easily stream movies. So they need to come to you to rent them.

PAYNE: Yeah, you know, one of our competitors obviously is online streaming. And that consumes a lot of bandwidth. So most of the Internet providers in Alaska, as I understand it, they charge more to heavy users.

BLOCK: Well, Mr. Payne, do you look forward and see an endpoint? I mean, do you assume that you can stay viable as a movie rental business indefinitely?

PAYNE: You know, the business is declining but it's slow. And I don't have my head in the sand. I know that we're challenged by all the technology. But I haven't given up on the opportunity that it might flatten out at some point, you know. So that's what we work toward but, you know, we have to be realistic and realize that it is declining.

BLOCK: Mm-hmm. You know, I wonder if managers of these stores are hearing from people who still like the notion that they can come in and maybe ask for advice about a movie or get something recommended by the person behind the counter.

PAYNE: Well, we have about 40,000 people through our stores every week through 26 stores. The stores are busy. Part of why people come obviously is for the community experience of seeing friends and seeing people, you know, our employees in the stores that obviously know movies. So that's part of why we're still here because a lot of people like that experience.

BLOCK: Well, Mr. Payne, thanks for talking to us. Best of luck.

PAYNE: Thank you.

BLOCK: That's Alan Payne, president of Border Entertainment which owns 26 Blockbuster franchises in Alaska and Texas that will stay open even after Blockbuster's parent company shutters hundreds more.

 

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=243967587

 

Your Late Fees Are Waived: Blockbuster Closes

(By Todd Leopold, CNN, November 6, 2013)
 

"Be kind, please rewind," the signs used to say in video stores, urging customers to return their rented VHS tapes spooled back to the beginning.  If only Blockbuster could rewind back to the 1990s.  That was the time when the video chain was the colossus of the movie-rental business, with stores in seemingly every city shopping district and suburban strip mall in America. Visiting the store was a weekly rite for many people, who would show up on Friday evenings to check out the latest releases, navigating a crush of couples and families who had exactly the same idea -- only to find out that the last copy of "Air Force One" or "The Lion King" had already been snagged.

That custom is now as gone as a world with three television networks, a UHF station's late show and a Zenith Space Command.  On Wednesday, DISH Network, which purchased Blockbuster in 2011, announced it was closing the chain's 300 remaining U.S.-based retail stores, as well as its distribution centers.  "Consumer demand is clearly moving to digital distribution of video entertainment," said DISH president and CEO Joseph P. Clayton in the press release about the closures. His statement echoes many from recent years about the migration of entertainment from physical objects -- CDs, DVDs, books, games -- to bits, bytes and pixels available on various screens and portable devices.

Blockbuster will continue its Blockbuster @Home brand to DISH customers, as well as its Blockbuster On Demand streaming service. And an additional 50 Blockbuster stores not owned by DISH will remain open for the time being.  The action was long expected. Blockbuster had been closing stores for years, as is obvious from the yawning vacancies still present in many of those very same strip malls. The chain was done in by Netflix, streaming video and a world of Internet options.

Reaction from that Internet was, of course, swift and pithy. Several posts on Twitter made fun of the store's late fees -- the bane of people who couldn't get their rental back in the standard 48 hours -- and the VHS tapes that made Blockbuster's name.  "I knew this day would come. I'm mere months away from owning a VHS copy of The Mighty Ducks without paying my late fees to Blockbuster," wrote Brian Essbe.  "Yes! All the Blockbuster Video Stores are closing! That means they'll never get back that VHS tape of Vampire In Brooklyn. I won!" added actor and comedian Paul Scheer.  Other commenters just shrugged. Many said they didn't even realize Blockbuster had any stores left.

At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster had more than 9,000 stores.  In a headline, The New York Times put it best: "Internet Kills the Video Store."  But Dan Herbert, author of the forthcoming book "Videoland" and a film professor at the University of Michigan, wants to praise Blockbuster, not bury it.  The stores were clean and family-friendly, with wider aisles and a bigger emphasis on movie selection than the mom-and-pops that dotted the landscape in the 1980s, he said.  "They really standardized video rental in general," Herbert said. 

As with many franchises, at its height Blockbuster often came in for criticism.  The chain put many mom-and-pop stores out of business. Befitting its name, it generally catered to a blockbuster mentality: Hit releases filled shelves by the dozens, but independent and foreign-language films could be hard to come by. The stores wouldn't carry NC-17 films at all.  And then there was the Blockbuster clerk, easily recognized in a blue knit shirt, who was often depicted as either clueless or snotty, depending on how frustrated you were on those crowded Friday nights.  But Herbert, a former video clerk himself -- though not at Blockbuster -- points out that Blockbuster was successful for a reason. It had more variety than many video stores: Blockbuster stores were required to have a minimum of 7,000 movies and averaged 10,000, more than many of its competitors, he said.  By doing so, it opened up more of America to more movies (and, later, TV show collections). Even though Blockbuster itself primarily stuck to cities and suburbs, it became a model for other chains that opened stores in small towns.

If people compared Blockbuster to McDonald's, that wasn't necessarily a knock, said Herbert. "They self-consciously modeled themselves on McDonald's, and at various points hired members of McDonald's upper management," he said.  But over the last decade, business took one hit after another. In a September article, The Billfold's Christopher Tucker described how independent video stores were put out of business. The same trends affected Blockbuster.  First there were DVDs, which were relatively inexpensive and intended for purchase, especially compared to the VHS titles that cost stores up to $100 a pop. With the advent of broadband, people started downloading movies and shows -- not always legally. Netflix and Redbox used the slim size of DVDs to their advantage. And finally, "Hulu was launched, and your average Joe and Josephine were introduced to Cloud Media," Tucker said.

Even Blockbuster's late fees came back to bite the chain in an unlikely way. In 1997, a man named Reed Hastings returned a late copy of "Apollo 13" to his local Blockbuster. He was assessed a $40 fee. Two years later, he founded Netflix.  Blockbuster was caught flat-footed by many of these changes. It could have purchased Netflix for $50 million in 2000, but passed. As Netflix rose, Blockbuster's attempts to compete on Netflix's terms -- especially through the mail -- foundered. It also tried to compete with Redbox using standalone kiosks. That didn't work, either.  By the time Blockbuster was sold to DISH in 2011, it was down to 1,700 stores, more than 7,000 fewer than its peak just seven years earlier. People had long since started devoting their Friday nights to streaming and downloading at home -- and if they were heading out, it wasn't to a Blockbuster.

The Onion, of course, nailed it. In a 2008 video headlined "Historic 'Blockbuster' Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past," the satiric site showcased a Michigan venue that "aims to transport visitors to a time before the Internet."  Like a version of Colonial Williamsburg, it had actors playing clerks and customers who described how the rental process worked. Onlookers watched the performance, stunned.  "It's really amazing that people had to go through so much just to get a movie," says a visitor in the skit.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/06/tech/gaming-gadgets/blockbuster-video-stores-impact/

Alexandria’s Old Town Theater Closing This Weekend

(By Tom Jackman, Washington Post, 05 January 2012)

The Old Town Theater, on King Street in Alexandria, has been showing “moving pictures” for almost 100 years, along with vaudeville, community theater, puppet shows, and anything else you could put on a stage or screen. But no more.   David Sachs reports in Thursday’s Alexandria Times that the Old Town is closing for good this weekend, the stuff inside auctioned off next weekend, and the great old marquee torn down shortly after that to make way for more retail space in the heart of Old Town.  Roger Fons, the managing partner, told Sachs he was tired of slow business, employee theft and a string of crummy movies. “You’ve got to have a product that is worth something,” Fons said of Hollywood’s recent output. He said the King Street Trolley bypassing the theater and increased parking fees may have contributed to declining income.

Sachs reports that the building has been sold to PMA Properties, which has applied to the city to “restore the original facade,” meaning remove the marquee. The building was built in 1914 for the purpose of “moving pictures, bowling alleys and billiards,” Old Town’s Web site says, and it’s been through various iterations in the ensuing 98 years. After it closed in 1999, Fons bought it in 2003 for $1.1 million, set it up as a non-profit, saw it closed in 2006 after he added a second screen without the city’s permission, and tried to keep it going as a “multi-entertainment center featuring all forms of the performing arts including film, theater, music and children shows.” But the losses were too great.  And so, its final movie? “Mission Impossible (4).”  I’ve left messages for Fons, but in the meantime here is Sachs’s fine story from the Alexandria Times.

Library Of Congress’s Collection Preserves History Of American Culture
(By Monica Hesse, Washington Post, April 22, 2012)

The librarians of the nation kick off Preservation Week today, the Holy Week for collection specialists, a time of dusty tomes and deacidification spray and the other niche materials used to preserve the great documents of our country: our presidential papers and Lincoln Bibles and notes handwritten by Emily Dickinson.  But for now, let us talk about Rise of the Dragon.  Rise of the Dragon was a video game released in 1990. It is about a private detective who sets off to find the drug kingpin responsible for the death of the mayor’s daughter. It came on a stack of six-inch floppy disks, which meant that it was played on a belligerent, boxy computer, a pile of tan plastic with a bubble screen and keys that got gummy and grimy and needed a Q-Tip.  Rise of the Dragon was designed to be played on precisely the machine that you finally sold at that garage sale nine years ago. No right-thinking person would still own this game.  The Library of Congress owns it.
 

"As you can see, we have the first 25 and the last 25 pages of [the game’s] source code, too,” says Greg Lukow, the chief of the library’s motion picture and sound division. He is proud of the library’s collection, which includes not only Rise of the Dragon, but also “Dexter,” “American Reunion” (the new “American Pie”; don’t pretend you don’t know), the home movies of nobody citizens, cached and abandoned Web pages, and defunct technologies.  Let us honor the preservation of the mix tape. Let us explore not who we were a long time ago, but who we were just yesterday, through the Library of Congress — the archaeologists of our recent history, of our impending obsolescence.  Books have worked the same way, more or less, for centuries. They are a remarkably intuitive technology. Open, read, close. “Or if you have a photo album, you know exactly what that is,” says Bill LeFurgy, who works for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the library. “It’s self-evident. It’s self-describing.” 

Now consider the disc, compact or floppy. The disc is not intuitive. The disc may contain photographs, but the disc will not show them to you unless you know how to open it — which, as everyone relocates to the Cloud, will become an increasingly antique skill. In 75 years, the disc will be modern civilization’s hieroglyph; the Rosetta Stone will be the yellowed user manual of an Apple IIe.  While books have endured unchanged, other forms of technology have bred with the speed of invertebrate insects, multiple generations each decade: 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, flash drives, Google docs, Pinterest boards — old things abandoned for new things in increasingly short life cycles.  “I worry about this,” LeFurgy says. “I worry about things being thrown away.” He worries about the specks of dust that could get in crevices and render unusable the temperamental floppy. He worries about the documents saved on WordStar, the pre-Microsoft Word word processing system.
 

All of this worry coincides (appropriately, ironically) with the rise of self-curation — our Instagrammed era in which every meal, photo, event and thought is hashtagged and filed away with a virtual Sharpie. But for all of the organizational skills that Pinterest has bestowed upon us, we are remarkably unconcerned with how accessible our virtual collections will be to our progeny.  “Corporations,” LeFurgy notes dryly, “are not in the forever business.”  Technology companies and Web sites are guided by profitability, not historic duty. They move with the times and shut down when they must. It might be easier to access Granny’s 80-year-old diaries than it is to access your now-defunct Friendster profile; it may be more possible to recover sound from a wax cylinder than from a digital audio tape circa 1987.  It turns out that we modern humans are not actually good at curation. What we are good at is short-term hoarding. We tag and tag with disappearing ink. For the generations hence, and the advanced, beam-me-up technology they are sure to have, we would be completely inscrutable, Generation Disposable.
 

Take Route 66, for miles and miles, then turn off on 29 South, past the dairy stands and fruit stands and churches advertising “11: a.m. Cowboy Services.” Eventually you’ll come to a giant structure built into the side of a hill that looks like it was originally a Cold War bunker, because that’s what it was. This is the library’s Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation. It’s where the country stores priceless artifacts, like Thomas Edison’s 19th-century films. It is also where the country stores “General Hospital” on VHS, “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never” on digital cinema package, and hundreds of thousands of other historical files, like the personal collection of J. Fred MacDonald, a Chicago man who built an extraordinary repertoire of industrial and educational films.  “What we have here,” Lukow says, “is a mint collection of American creativity.”
 

Lukow is broad and very tall. He looks and sounds the slightest bit like John Lithgow. He’s in charge of the collections out here, of the petabytes of information lurking underground, in vaults climate-controlled to 50 degrees.  On a recent afternoon, he led a private tour through the vaults, and up and down the go-for-miles hallways populating the building. He leads through the visual department, with giant bins full of media that pour in every week either from private collectors or through the Copyright Deposit System. He leads through soundproofed studios, where the library stocks dozens of needles of varying thicknesses to better play old records.  In a dim, jammed room that everyone calls “the museum,” the library stores shelf after shelf of recently obsolete technology: stacks of CD players, cassette players, Sony VCRs.  “These are about the most valuable things in here,” Lukow says as he points to a row of hard cases tucked just above eye level. They contain two-inch video heads, used for playing back media. Nobody makes them anymore, and there are only two well-known facilities in the country left that repair them.
 

Across the hall from the museum, two technicians monitor troops of robot-machines as they digitize hours, yards, miles of content. Tiny screens display the activity. Here are the Boston Red Sox circa 1999, next to a late-era Johnny Carson. Here is Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin on a 2008 episode of Saturday Night Live.  “Oh, we’re on ‘Silver Spoons’ now!” A technician peers at the screen closest to him. This is excellent news. “We’ve been on ‘All My Children’ for weeks.”  Maybe preservation is overrated, really, if what we’re preserving is the rise and fall of Susan Lucci’s hair, the never-ending “American Pie” franchise, the extemporaneous Twitter feed (yes, the library saves those, too). 
 

Those of us who live in this time are cognizant enough to be frequently embarrassed about this time. No one looks forward to the day when she may curl up with her granddaughter and a remote control, and say, “Let’s watch the hero of my youth, Snooki.”  One of the benefits of a disposable culture is that we can dispose of it, brush it all up with a Swiffer, lose it with our latest upgrade. The term papers that went missing with your ancient Dell weren’t good anyway — the only thing they would reveal to later generations was that students have never understood the difference between “affect” and “effect.” Let it rot, leave it be, allow us to forget cultural behaviors that haunt us.
 

But then, our recent past it not any trashier than the pop culture of more distant pasts; the difference is that much of that trash ended up in the garbage. There is meaning in the gleaming blond of Ricky Schroder’s hair; we’re just not far enough away to understand it yet, and by the time we are, the tape will have disintegrated.  Maybe the archeologists of the near future will be able to sift through our floppies, our flash drives. Maybe they will sit down for hours and master all of the levels of Rise of the Dragon, and hidden in the source code will be all of the secrets of humanity, and we will completely understand who we once were.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/2012/04/22/gIQABtcoaT_story.html?wpisrc=nl_lunchln

 

 

-------- Original Message --------

Date:  Sat, 6 Nov 2010 04:57:06 -0700 (PDT)

Subject: Changes Are Coming

LOTS OF TRUTH IN THESE PREDICTIONS. . . . .  There is nothing political about this email. It simply points out very probable changes that are in our future.  CHANGES ARE COMING ---- Whether these changes are good or bad depends in part on how we adapt to them. But, ready or not, here they come

1. The Post Office.  Get ready to imagine a world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills.

2. The Check.  Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with checks by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to process checks. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the check. This plays right into the death of the post office. If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by mail, the post office would absolutely go out of business.

3. The Newspaper.  The younger generation simply doesn't read the newspaper. They certainly don't subscribe to a daily delivered print edition. That may go the way of the milkman and the laundry man. As for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an alliance. They have met with Apple, Amazon, and the major cell phone companies to develop a model for paid subscription services.

4. The Book. You say you will never give up the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages. I said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes. I wanted my hard copy CD. But I quickly changed my mind when I discovered that I could get albums for half the price without ever leaving home to get the latest music. The same thing will happen with books. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview chapter before you buy. And the price is less than half that of a real book. And think of the convenience! Once you start flicking your fingers on the screen instead of the book, you find that you are lost in the story, can't wait to see what happens next, and you forget that you're holding a gadget instead of a book.

5. The Land Line Telephone.  Unless you have a large family and make a lot of local calls, you don't need it anymore. Most people keep it simply because they've always had it. But you are paying double charges for that extra service. All the cell phone companies will let you call customers using the same cell provider for no charge against your minutes

6. Music.  This is one of the saddest parts of the change story. The music industry is dying a slow death. Not just because of illegal downloading. It's the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to get to the people who would like to hear it. Greed and corruption is the problem. The record labels and the radio conglomerates are simply self-destructing. Over 40% of the music purchased today is "catalog items," meaning traditional music that the public is familiar with.  Older established artists. This is also true on the live concert circuit. To explore this fascinating and disturbing topic further, check out the book, "Appetite for Self-Destruction" by Steve Knopper, and the video documentary, "Before the Music Dies."

7. Television.  Revenues to the networks are down dramatically. Not just because of the economy. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their computers. And they're playing games and doing lots of other things that take up the time that used to be spent watching TV. Prime time shows have degenerated down to lower than the lowest common denominator. Cable rates are skyrocketing and commercials run about every 4 minutes and 30 seconds. I say good riddance to most of it. It's time for the cable companies to be put out of our misery. Let the people choose what they want to watch online and through Netflix.

8. The "Things" That You Own.  Many of the very possessions that we used to own are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them in the future. They may simply reside in "the cloud." Today your computer has a hard drive and you store your pictures, music, movies, and documents. Your software is on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install it if need be. But all of that is changing. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their latest "cloud services." That means that when you turn on a computer, the Internet will be built into the operating system. So, Windows, Google, and the Mac OS will be tied straight into the Internet. If you click an icon, it will open something in the Internet cloud. If you save something, it will be saved to the cloud. And you may pay a monthly subscription fee to the cloud provider. In this virtual world, you can access your music or your books, or your whatever from any laptop or handheld device. That's the good news. But, will you actually own any of this "stuff" or will it all be able to disappear at any moment in a big "Poof?" Will most of the things in our lives be disposable and whimsical? It makes you want to run to the closet and pull out that photo album, grab a book from the shelf, or open up a CD case and pull out the insert.

9. Privacy.  If there ever was a concept that we can look back on nostalgically, it would be privacy. That's gone. It's been gone for a long time anyway. There are cameras on the street, in most of the buildings, and even built into your computer and cell phone. But you can be sure that 24/7, "They" know who you are and where you are, right down to the GPS coordinates, and the Google Street View. If you buy something, your habit is put into a zillion profiles, and your ads will change to reflect those habits. And "They" will try to get you to buy something else. Again and again.

 All we will have that can't be changed are Memories.

Making Best Buy Better

(By Farhad Manjoo, Washington Post, 17 April 2012)

Best Buy made its fortune by offering lots of choices. Now, on the way to its grave, it's still promoting an endless selection.  Buying a television should be easy. In theory, all you’ve got to do is pick a screen size, set a budget, and choose the best model that fits your criteria. What does best mean? The TV industry would like you to believe that every TV is unique—that there are major differences in picture quality and features across different brands, and that you should spend a lot of time researching before you buy. The truth, though, is that manufacturers add unnecessary features and bombard us with confusing specs to disguise the fact that most TVs are pretty much the same.  It’s not just televisions. We live in an age of commodity electronics, where most gadgets are more or less interchangeable. You aren’t likely to notice any major differences between a product made by Samsung versus one made by Toshiba—they’ll both likely be made out of the same parts, in the same way, and perhaps in the same factories. Given these similarities, if you spend more than 10 minutes comparing different models of any type of gadget, you’re doing it wrong.

But you’d never realize this if you were to visit your local Best Buy. America’s largest electronics retailer made its fortune by offering lots of choices. Now, on the way to its grave, it is still waving the banner of endless selection. My local Best Buy carries nearly a dozen nearly identical 32-inch TVs, a similar number of 42-inch sets, and no fewer than 20 different 55-inch TVs. You’ll find the same bounty in other product categories. If you’re looking for a point-and-shoot camera, Best Buy wants you to choose between 15 different models. Need a two-terabyte external hard drive? My store has six. In the market for a 23-or-so-inch computer monitor? Pick one of nine.

Best Buy is in a lot of trouble. Once the undisputed leader in technology retail—it vanquished Circuit City, CompUSA, and every mom-and-pop electronics store in the country—the company is now being killed by Amazon online and Apple offline. In March, Best Buy reported a $1.7 billion quarterly loss and announced that it would close 50 stores. Then, last week, the firm’s CEO Brian Dunn suddenly resigned. The company declined to fully explain what prompted Dunn’s departure, but the Wall Street Journal has reported that Best Buy has been investigating an alleged relationship between Dunn and a younger subordinate.  Whatever the reason behind it, Best Buy should use Dunn’s departure as an opportunity to rethink how it sells gadgets. In particular, it’s time to abandon the idea of endless selection. If Best Buy wants to survive, it’s got to replace its hulking, teeming stores with smaller, less crowded, more intimate spaces. When you walk in to buy a 32-inch TV, the guy in the blue shirt shouldn’t make you choose between a dozen nearly identical models. Instead, he should show you a single set, a TV that Best Buy’s experts have determined offers the best features at the best price. The firm could do the same across its inventory, culling the tech universe down to a few essential, can’t-beat products. In this way, Best Buy would transform itself from a supermarket into a boutique—a place with fewer things for sale and lots of friendly, sophisticated, helpful experts who’ll save you the hassle of researching your next TV or PC purchase. They’ll do all the work for you.

Why would going small work for Best Buy? Because big has become the domain of the Web. There once was a time when massive selection was a key differentiator in physical stores—the more stuff you stocked, the more likely you were to appeal a wider range of customers. But now, no matter how many TVs Best Buy keeps in stock, its selection will never match that of Web retailers. If you’re the type of customer who studies every 32-inch set before choosing one, you’re not likely to bother with a store.  Maintaining a big selection costs big money and offers a perverse advantage to Best Buy’s online rivals. By keeping so many TVs on its sale floor, Best Buy is offering itself up as a showroom for Amazon: Potential customers can walk into a store, check out the stock, and go home and buy the product they like best online. Then there’s the “paradox of choice”—the idea that giving consumers lots of retail choices tends to paralyze and confuse them, and sometimes pushes them to leave your store empty-handed. Though this theory is controversial, the runaway success of Apple’s retail stores proves that a small, curated product line doesn’t necessarily hurt sales. Why wade through 30 laptops when you only want to buy one?

In his last few months at Best Buy, Dunn made a few smart moves to turn the firm around. Last year, the company announced a plan to shrink some of its stores and sublease the extra space to new tenants. The firm is also planning to replace some of its shuttered stores with new, tiny locations that will be called Best Buy Mobile. These outlets will be situated in shopping malls, and each location will take up only take up about 1,200 square feet. (By comparison, the average big-box Best Buy is 45,000 square feet, while a typical Apple Store is about 6,000 square feet.) But turning Best Buy around is not just a matter of downsizing. The company also needs to change its approach to customer service. When I walk into a Best Buy, I find it difficult to find what I’m looking for. It’s usually a hassle to get help—there are never enough employees on the floor—and when I do get a hold of someone, there’s a good chance the person can’t help me. Last year my wife and I went to Best Buy to look for a new refrigerator. We found something we liked, but we had a simple question: Would this model fit in our kitchen? We asked an associate if the width listed on the fridge’s tag was its dimension with the door open or closed (that turned out to be a key factor in our kitchen). He didn’t know. He called over another blue shirt, but that guy didn’t know either. Eventually the salesman offered to go to the back to get a tape measure; it took him about 10 minutes to find one. We didn’t end up buying the fridge.

Shrinking its selection would improve this situation—the fewer products it sells, the easier it would be for Best Buy’s employees to become experts about all of the goods on offer. It would also make it easier for customers to find stuff. Still, the transformation I’m calling for is radical—it would involve massive physical restructuring, as well as a program to re-educate the company’s staff. It won’t be easy. It’s not guaranteed to work. On the other hand, if Best Buy sticks to its current course, it’s certain to die. Given the alternative, the company has no choice but to make a fundamental change.

 

No Pennies For Your Thoughts

(By Matthew Yglesias, Slate.com, April 3, 2012)

One United States dollar is currently worth almost exactly 99 Canadian cents. It won’t be long, though, before it will be impossible to put 99 cents in your pocket north of the border. That’s because Canada is poised to implement a longtime dream of American budget wonks (and Aaron Sorkin) and withdraw the penny from circulation.  The basic problem with pennies is that they cost a lot of money for the government to make. Normally, minting coins and printing bills is a profitable undertaking for a government running a fiat currency. Citizens use money to conduct transactions with one another, and ultimately to pay taxes. But as long as that money is sitting around in pockets and sock drawers, it’s as if the government has received an interest-free loan. After all, the resources needed to produce a coin or a piece of paper with Alexander Hamilton’s picture on it are pretty trivial. But in the case of the penny, the problem for the government is that the actual value of the thing is trivial as well.

Since 1900, the price level in the United States has increased 25-fold—in other words, a penny in 1900 had about the same real purchasing power as a quarter does today. Even today there’s not much you can buy for 25 cents, but put a few quarters together and you’ve got yourself some time in a parking space, a load of laundry, or a soda from a vending machine. A penny, by contrast, has almost no purchasing power. That means that the real resources involved in producing one, though hardly enormous, are big enough to make it unprofitable. Ten years ago, a penny cost slightly less than one cent to produce, but rising commodity prices mean there are now more than 2.4 cents’ worth of metal and labor in each one-cent coin. In 2011, the net cost to the taxpayer of minting pennies was a bit over $60 million. In the scheme of things, that’s not all that much money, but it’s money that’s worth saving.

Budget-induced alterations in coinage are hardly a new idea. People often think that pennies are made of copper, but that hasn’t been the case for some time. From 1864 to 1942, the penny was bronze—i.e., an alloy of 95 percent copper with 5 percent tin and zinc. But in 1943, the powers that be wisely decided that beating Hitler was a higher priority than minting low-value coins. Copper shortages had been ameliorated by 1944, but rather than returning to bronze we moved to a tin-free copper/zinc brass alloy. By 1946, wartime austerity was on its way out and tin got back into the coins, only to be removed again in 1962.

The so-called “Great Inflation” that proceeded over the next two decades created the original version of today’s anti-seigniorage problem. Suddenly the country was putting more than one cent’s worth of bronze into each penny. The solution was a shift to today’s penny, which consists of a 99.2 percent zinc core sheathed in a plating of full copper. It was a clever idea, but the price level has more than doubled since 1982, when the switch was last made. In its Fiscal Year 2013 budget proposal the Obama administration asked for “increased flexibility for the U.S. Mint in coinage” to allow for yet another switch and help us evade the high price of zinc.  Since the zinc lobby itself is the main impediment to penny abolition, as long as we’re taking them on we might as well go all the way and just kill the coin off. This is especially true because the budget cost of the penny is in some ways the least of its problems. The U.S. government didn’t make steel pennies in 1943 because it needed more money, but rather because it wanted more copper available for war production.

The same basic issue applies today. Some forms of government spending can stimulate economic activity, but taking two cents’ worth of zinc and stamping it with a one-cent mark just deprives the rest of the economy of potentially useful metal. Consuming commodities to create quarters performs a valuable service by giving us a useful medium of exchange, but pennies are at least as much a nuisance as a convenience.  The main case against scrapping the penny—mounted by Eric Wen at the New Republic, citing research from Penn State’s Raymond Lombra—is that firms would round up when setting prices, and this would disproportionately hurt the poor, who are more likely to use cash. That’s likely true, but on the upside, prices should also get “stickier” in the face of inflation. In other words, 99 cents might be rounded up to a dollar this year, but they’d then stick at a dollar even in the face of 2 percent inflation before rising by five cents a few years down the road. Any positive or negative impact on pricing, then, is only going to be temporary.

Meanwhile, complaints that money-saving measures may hurt the poor should be put in perspective. Right now, Congress is cutting spending on programs aimed to save poor children from brain damage induced by lead poisoning, compared with which, going penny-free looks like a delightful form of austerity.  As a bonus to help tide people over, Congress could declare that, as soon as new pennies stop being minted, old one-cent pieces would instantly be worth five cents each. Given the currently depressed state of the economy, that would work as a mild form of instant stimulus. People would be inspired to scrounge around their couch cushions and change jars in search of newly valuable pennies, and the pace of overall spending would get a little boost.

 

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/04/abolish_the_penny_the_united_states_should_follow_canada_s_lead_and_ditch_one_cent_coins_.html?wpisrc=nl_lunchln

Discovering Music Now That Radio Is Irrelevant

Alternative Rock Radio: The Sad, Unwarranted Decline Of FM Rock Stations.

(By Christine Pawlak, Slate.com, November 15, 2011)

I was 24 when I first lost my job as a radio DJ. I was 30 when it happened again. In both cases, my employers changed the stations’ formats, abandoning “alternative rock” for gospel (at Philadelphia’s Y100) and news (at Q101 in Chicago). Just this year, another Philadelphia station, WYSP, as well as New York’s WRXP and WVRX in Washington, D.C., have shifted from rock music to talk radio formats. This is just the most recent round of deaths—over the last few years, major rock stations like New York’s K-Rock, Indie 103.1 in Los Angeles, and WBCN in Boston have gone silent. These stations haven’t been disappearing because the format’s a money loser. It’s because a handful of executives have decided that rock radio doesn’t belong on the FM dial.

In February of 2004, I moved to Philadelphia to host the night show at Y100. I was incredibly excited about being on the air in such a big city. During each five-hour show, I wrote “Weekend Update”-esque zingers about music and entertainment news and counted down the day’s most-requested songs. I had just fallen in love with the band Muse, and watching them at a private show for our listeners was one of my favorite Y100 moments. But about a year after I arrived, I walked into our weekly DJ meeting and found the station in chaos. We were told that Y100 was going off the air immediately, and our services would no longer be needed. I thought I’d never get such a cool opportunity again.

Thankfully, I was wrong. Emmis Communications owned Chicago’s Q101 when I started my new gig as a midday host in 2005. At the time, the station had responded to the iPod’s popularity by using the phrase “on shuffle”—you never knew which random musical gem might pop up after Nirvana, Pearl Jam, or Foo Fighters. We supported local bands and those with local roots, like Rise Against, Fall Out Boy, Chevelle, and Smashing Pumpkins. And to the chagrin of many “alternative” fans, we played Metallica.

I’m actually not a fan of the alternative label. It’s limiting because it’s subjective: One listener’s alternative is another’s mainstream. I just knew that Q101 played music that I loved when I was growing up, and that made it fun to go to work. I’d walk into the studio excited to play a request or crack a joke that made someone’s workday a little better. My enthusiasm caught the eye of Chicago Magazine, which named me Best Radio DJ in 2008, praising my “playful riffs on topics breathtaking for their sheer randomness.” I loved my job, and my listeners—eventually—grew to love me.

Behind the scenes, though, the station’s parent company was facing financial struggles. Emmis, a publicly traded company boasting more than 30 media properties, limped through the recession and a failed attempt to take the company private. With more than $300 million in long-term debt and its stock valued at around $1 per share, CEO Jeff Smulyan decided to sell off three of Emmis’ radio stations: WRXP in New York, and The Loop and Q101 in Chicago. A few hours after the sale went through, we learned that both Q101 and WRXP would be shifting to all-news formats.

The man who decided that alternative rock radio was over in Chicago was Randy Michaels. Michaels, who resigned from his executive position at the Chicago Tribune after revelations of inappropriate and loutish behavior in 2010, made his triumphant return to media moguldom by buying my station. “My favorite format has always been spoken radio,” Michaels said in the July 31 press release announcing the launch of Chicago’s FM News 101.1. “I’ve long had a nostalgic love affair with the big AM stations known for the format, and today—as music moves to the iPod—it’s time for spoken word to move to FM.”

This isn’t the first time that one man’s actions have dealt a blow to rock radio. Howard Stern’s hugely popular morning show debuted on New York’s K-Rock in 1985 and was ultimately syndicated on dozens of rock stations. When Stern took his talents to satellite radio in 2006, K-Rock changed to an all-talk format called Free FM, with disastrous results. Most critics blamed the plunging ratings on Stern’s departure, but I’m convinced that the sudden, drastic format change sealed the station’s demise. I wonder what might have happened if K-Rock’s programmers, or those at WBCN and Indie 103.1, had been patient and given rock music a chance. (Consider that multimedia giant Clear Channel, which owns 850 American radio stations, launched a successful alternative rock station in Philadelphia two years after the death of Y100.)

Though the rise of satellite radio was supposed to prophesy the death of AM and FM, that’s not anywhere close to happening. Even so, Sirius/XM is unquestionably prying ears away from terrestrial radio. So are iPods; music-sharing services like Pandora and Spotify, which appeal to fans with instant access to millions of songs; social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter that provide constant streams of personalized content; and all the other entertainment options in this era of 1,000 cable channels and 24/7 connectivity.  An FM radio station, by comparison, lacks customization and can’t be heard “on demand.” But I don’t think music is ready to vacate the airwaves, or that someone who acknowledges a bias toward another format should be the arbiter of that decision.

FM radio doesn’t have the buzz of more recently minted technology, but that doesn’t mean it lacks listeners. The Chicagoland area is the country’s third-largest media market and has an audience of more than 7 million people. According to Arbitron, the research firm responsible for radio ratings, Q101 had roughly 1.2 million different listeners during its final weeks on the air. They weren’t all listening at once, and they wouldn’t all say that Q101 was their favorite radio station. They did, however, all make a choice to tune in. It’s too early to know if FM News 101.1 will match the size of that audience: Michaels’ Merlin Media LLC is conjuring new stations from scratch, unlike other radio conglomerates that have decided to simulcast established AM stations on crisper FM frequencies. Currently, Arbitron is reporting that 1 million fewer people are tuning their dials to 101.1 than when I was on the air. When I look at those numbers, I wonder how many of those missing million listeners remember their old friend Q101 when they turn on their iPods.

Curiosity can make a listener tune in to a radio station. Loyalty will make him stay, and loyalty must be earned. Making that kind of connection isn’t easy, and it takes patience. It helped that I worked for a company that trusted me to host a request hour and didn’t require me to pre-record shows for the weekend or for stations in other cities. Recording a show to sound live or local when it’s neither makes a DJ sound like the great and powerful Oz—a disembodied voice behind a curtain, not to be trusted. That practice, known as voice-tracking, is a way to cut costs by consolidating stations into regional clusters with a minimal number of employees. The industry started moving in that direction in the late 1990s at the behest of Clear Channel, specifically the head of Clear Channel’s radio division ... Randy Michaels.

It would be easy for me to resent Michaels, but radio is a business. He wanted to maximize his company’s profits in a volatile, vulnerable industry, and he met that goal. Consolidation made financial sense, even if it sacrificed the medium’s humanity.  Michaels’ faith in FM news is more subjective. CD sales have fallen sharply with the rise of digital downloads, and there are few alternative rock artists topping the iTunes charts. It’s tempting to conclude that tech-savvy consumers don’t care about hearing new rock music on the radio. If so, the absence of oldies, classic rock, and Latin music on those iTunes charts would imply that those formats aren’t financially successful on FM radio either ... but they are.  What I know from my years as a DJ is that listeners know what they like when they hear it. Q101 fans reached out en masse during our last days, sharing their memories of the station’s almost 20-year run. Chicago natives who’d moved away for jobs, school, or military service listened via Q101.com and sent us heartfelt emails and texts. Even now, I get choked up reading the hundreds of comments on my old Facebook page: “I feel like I've lost my best friend.” “You have no idea how much we'll all miss you guys.” “A big piece of my generation's life just died.” Then, there’s this: “Sure, the iPod can play music, but nothing can replace the personality that you brought to the station.”

Once we knew that the end was near, Q101's programming department let the DJs pick their own music. I "dusted off" songs I hadn't played in years, like "Little Black Backpack" by Stroke 9, The Cure's "Lullaby," and "Song for the Dumped" by Ben Folds Five. I played newer artists I've grown to love: Mumford and Sons, Foster the People, and naturally, Muse. I allowed myself to be nostalgic, emotional, and honest.  Those last shows were the best of my career. Passion isn’t quantifiable like ratings or revenue, but I’m proud that Q101 inspired it in our listeners, no matter how many we had. Technology will change; the need to connect with each other through stories and songs won't. When it comes to rock radio, I don’t think the preferences of a few should affect the interests of so many.

 

Discovering Music in 2009: The New Tools

(via Gizmodo by Adrian Covert on 4/15/09)

MTV doesn't play music videos. Magazines are dying. Radio is all about the $$$. It's no secret the old modes of music discovery have been thrown out the window. Thankfully, new music-finders are here:  I think anyone reading this understands that the internet is the new trading post for artists, listeners, critics and salesmen. It's impossible to avoid some of the marketing campaigns carried out on MySpace and YouTube, but mostly music's move to the internet gives listeners more power to develop their own tastes, for better or for worse. You can turn to MP3 stores, recommendation services, internet radio and podcasts, MySpace—and even personal music blogs and forums that'll help you "sample" pirated music. Here's my take on each method of discovery and the relevance it has to listeners:

Recommendation Services

The Pandoras, Rhapsodys and Last.fms of the world are nice, because they do most of the discovery work for you, without pushing some corporate agenda on you behind the scenes (...ahem...Clear Channel). Even better, these services cater their first song selections around your initially revealed tastes, and as you give the software feedback as to what you like and don't like, they continue to refine and improve their artist recommendations. Zune's Mixview also provides a similar service, visually recommending similar artists and songs to those already in your library.  But my problem with a service like this is that you don't necessarily get music that's really new or groundbreaking. Sure, it might be new or exciting to the casual music fan, or just someone who spends all their time listening to these services, but for the true junkie—okay, maybe "music snob"—it's hard to really be wowed by any of these services. We've seen and heard most of it before.

MP3 Stores

Sometimes looking for new music to actually buy is a great way to discover new stuff. Whenever I stop through the legendary Amoeba Records in SF to buy actual, real CDs and vinyl, half my stack is full of stuff I'm completely unfamiliar with. The same holds true with MP3 stores.  Whether it's the monoliths like the iTunes and Amazon mp3 stores, or smaller music peddlers like Boomkat, Bleep, Beatport or Juno, most these stores not only let you click through and listen to all the 30-second clips you can handle, but they have tons of recommendations in the sidebars, allowing you to explore similar artists and sounds. The only problem with this? If you don't want to buy all these tracks, hunting them down again is a drag. And in the case of some of the more obscure stores, you might not find the songs anywhere else.

Internet Radio and Podcasts

The beautiful thing about radio in its prime was that, top hits and genres-aside, you never knew what you were going to hear at any specific moment. That unpredictability has an addictive quality to it, and internet radio preserves that spirit to a degree. Though not as popular in the era of the iPod, I still tune in to internet radio stations when I'm feeling bored with my music collection.  Two of my personal favorites are KCRW out of LA, which sticks to indie and the non-top-40 pop hits, and Rinse FM out of London, which has a current rotation of DJs spinning Grime, Dubstep, House and whatever other electronic genres are currently bubbling over there. My favorite thing about these two stations are that they put the content above all else—playing music they like, and not necessarily music that will sell. (On perhaps the complete other end of the music spectrum, Wilson recommends similarly free-minded stations WFUV in New York, and KEXP in Seattle.)  The risk you run in your path of discovery, however, is that if your ears are at the mercy of the DJ you're listening to on internet radio, and if you don't like their taste, hard luck.

MySpace and Twitter

This is what I sort of view as the great democratic project in music. The complaint while the internet was in its infancy was that big media and big corporations had too much influence over what music made it, and what didn't. Obviously that's all changed, in large part to MySpace.  As a social media service at large, MySpace is an eyesore and an abomination. But as a place to discover new music, believe it or not, it's an invaluable goldmine. Big artists, small artists, fat artists, skinny artists—hell, your mom—all have the same basic framework at their dispersal to reach the masses when they're using MySpace. Here you can find your favorite established artists sneaking new tracks up on their page, you can find work from newer artists who have no official releases out, or you can stumble upon that completely random, brilliant band of 17-year-olds from Pawnee, Oklahoma throwing out avant-garde acid pop.  But the best part, is that you can click around their grid of friends, who most of the time are other musicians, and you can get lost in musical worlds you didn't know existed. I spent eight hours doing this one night last winter, and found enough new artists and styles that kept me interested for the rest of the year.  On the Twitter side, it's mostly just good for gathering names and news, but the fact that more musicians, writers and other people of interest are using the service to jot down thoughts means you get to see what they're into at any given moment. People ranging from The Root's ?uestlove, to The New Yorker's music writer Sasha Frere-Jones, to Diplo all twitter frequently about the new music they're digging at the time.

The Online Music Media

The big music magazines, like Rolling Stone and The Source, went from influential and respected in their prime for their great taste and writing, to walking punchlines later on for their willingness to make a buck at the cost of content. What this did was open the door for music blogs to jump in and give readers a new place to figure out what's new and good in the world of tunes.  Most of the bigger/more general music blogs (Pitchfork, Stereogum, Gorilla vs Bear) will never be the first ones to break a new artist, but they will be quick to tell you when known artists have new works available or coming out soon. Smaller, niche blogs (The Fader, Xlr8r, Valerie), however, will cultivate their sites like boutiques of taste, and always look for what's next in music, as opposed to what's now.  Filtering through sites like this takes a decent amount of work, however, and is for the dedicated music fan. Lesser enthusiasts need not apply.

"Sampling"

The Somali method is for the most hardcore of the hardcore. People who don't want to wait for the media to tell them what's what, and would rather just "sample" it for themselves, hit the internet hard and heavy for albums that leak weeks, sometimes months, ahead of their release.  "Sampling" these albums is not for the faint of heart. It takes a general sense of music knowledge, music news, ability to follow the right websites and some technical know how. Bittorrent (and once upon a time, Oink...RIP) is a hotbed for many music leaks as they hit, but since it's tough to mask your IP address if you're not in a private community, it's easier to "sample" the same album using RapidShare, MegaUpload or Mediafire. (In case you're wondering, avoid RapidShare at all costs, use Mediafire whenever possible...you'll save like 5 years of your life).  Generally the best place to "sample" these links to new album leaks are in the threads music-related forums. This could be a forum for an artist, a record label, a genre, or just music in general, but people always start an upload thread full of links for you to troll.  There are also blogs and sites that keep track of the latest leaks. Bolachas Gratis is probably the most famous of the bunch, famously hopping from blog service to blog service, finding a new home to post links to albums for you to "sample." Nodata.tv aims to do something similar, while there's another site, Did It Leak, that just lists albums it's seen floating around the internet. They even have a Twitter feed. 

These days, once you have an album title, its as simple as visiting Google Blog Search, MAYBE typing an album name in the search bar in quotes, and MAYBE adding a 2009 and "+rar" or "+zip" to the search string (NO IDEA what those mean!). Search around for a few bit blogs that may have a link, and bam—new music to "sample".  This is undoubtedly the best method for pure discovery, because it lets you chase down the latest and greatest in music without being tainted by anyone else's opinion or tastes. But it also requires an obsessive, nerdish approach to music fandom that may have ramifications on your social life. Not to mention a total disregard for the economics of the music business, and for the needs of artists to be remunerated for their work. So, you know, proceed with caution.