I’ve been raving about all the stupid things people are doing during the pandemic, but last week I heard some good news—and an object lesson for what should be happening throughout the country. I was talking with my sister-in-law on…
This week a bunch of journalistic organizations announced a flurry of awards for excellence; sadly, very few commercial radio stations were included, and those that were are in what we would call medium markets (Des Moines, Wilmington, Buffalo, etc.) that…
It’s not good news for anybody involved when an entire team is fired, especially during the holiday season—which, unfortunately, coincides with the end of the business year. Usually the terminees in such cases are silent; sometimes they issue half-hearted statements…
As I put the finishing touches on this week’s edition, Tom Taylor announced that he was retiring. As you doubtless know, Tom is a veteran radio journalist who has covered our industry for decades, most recently via his own daily…
Boy, this is a tough one. What most media report as “several radio stations”—we only know of one, actually—banned the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” because of questionable lyric content spotlighted by the #MeToo movement. To some, the lyrics suggest…
I have a friend who refuses to load free apps on his phone because they will be data-mining information from his phone on a constant basis. Yeah, so? If there is anyone left on the planet with an Internet connection…
We have been featuring commentary from Bob Hoffman on the Facebook fiction for months, and in this week’s issue, Fred Jacobs weighs in with his own take, including the fact—which I have also learned from conversations with our readers—that small…
I noted with great interest that Chairman Pai is focusing on unwanted phone calls and messages, according to his Thanksgiving Day blog post. But how much of what the chairman wants to do will actually get done? It doesn’t take…
So iHeartMedia has bought a company that has developed a platform for programmatic ad buying. I was kind of hoping that if we just let the likes of Facebook and Google fiddle around with a technology that fundamentally misunderstands our…
It’s one thing to compete with other legitimate advertising media. We shouldn’t have to deal with media that have no business conveying advertising.