Broadcasting
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If you like public broadcasting, be customers, not just consumers
Public broadcasting has three markets: Listeners and viewers. Philanthropies (wealthy individuals and foundations). Government agencies (primarily the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB). I saw the writing on the wall for #3 in 2010. (Actually much earlier, but that’s the oldest link I could find.) It has been clear for decades that Republicans have no… Continue reading
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Wednesday, 16 July 2025
Want a weather show? Look at this: Bet it’s about liability and arbitration. T-Mobile just texted me this: T-Mobile: We’ve updated our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Notices. Get the details and learn about your options in the Privacy Dashboard at secure.t-mobile.com/terms I can’t log on, and doing the password reset thing is a PITA, so I… Continue reading
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Tuesday, 15 July 2025
When companies take delivery, the results will be huge. The Cluetrain Will Run from Customers to Companies is about making The Cluetrain Manifesto come true 26 years after it was posted. Redraw your own conclusions. Just one air travel adventure. Cable is toast. And free TV from an antenna is crumbs. Nearly half of all TV watching… Continue reading
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Tuesday, 8 July, 2025
Book burning in our time. Two places to look for what's happened to science and other do-gooding programs since government research programs that smelled woke got defunded: Columbia Law School's Silencing Science Tracker, and this piece by RealKM. Some clues. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, The Cluetrain Manifesto says. (In its 7th of 85 theses.) A corollary might… Continue reading
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Tuesday, 1 July, 2025
I was overheard to have said… Doc Searls on Reloading the Intention Economy: Your Data, Your AI, Your Terms, by Nico Fara, of The Immergence podcast. Just some perspective. I just removed this from a post I’ve been writing: Walt Whitman put the profundity of human life in a kind of perspective when he said, “and I… Continue reading
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Thursday, 26 June 2025
A history lesson. A neighbor who works in tech asked me what my new outdoor TV antenna was for. I told him it was for watching TV stations, mostly from Indianapolis, where the transmitters are about 60 miles away. “Don’t you have cable?” he asked. I said no, we only have Internet service, which for… Continue reading
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How to Make Customers Hate You
Exhibit A: Welcome to negative option billing at work. Other labels include “sludge,” “dark patterns,” “gotcha pricing,” “subscription trapping,” and “bait-and-default.” Works like this: offer a service at a discount that jumps up to a high “regular” price after the discount runs out, and count on the customer forgetting when the jump happens. It’s a… Continue reading
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TGI-Fi
Whole Lotta Badshit Going On. The latest 404 has a weekend worth of it. Surprised this one didn't come sooner. Want the feds to stop funding public broadcasting? Fine. There's an argument for that. (I made one, way back in 2008.) But bias, which is everywhere (because the voice from nowhere is insincere and boring),… Continue reading
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Differences
Peacocks in Pasadena. Well, that’s the alliterative way of putting it. More accurately speaking, they were strutting southbound across Lombardy Road just east of Santa Anita Avenue in San Marino. All errands today here in Pasadena, which is one of my favorite places in SoCal. Or hell, the world. Check out City Hall. Looks like… Continue reading
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Tools
And just one for New Jersey! iLoveFood says the best pizza in Indiana is Mother Bear’s here in Bloomington. Problem: it isn’t. Osteria Rago’s is better. Not that MB’s is bad. It’s good. Just not better than Osteria’s. I’m also betting there must be a better pizza than both somewhere in Indianapolis. iLoveFood also names top… Continue reading
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It’s Over
The Voice of America is silent. To Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Kari Lake (who now runs its corpse), the VOA was corrupt, biased, unnecessary, and needed to go. To nearly everyone else who cares, it was America’s voice on radio, and mattered enormously to an audience in the hundreds of millions, listening in forty-eight… Continue reading
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Gag of America
Here is what a Google News search for Voice of America looks like right now: ‘Bloody Saturday’ at Voice of America and other U.S.-funded networks, by David Folkenflik at NPR, begins with this: Journalists showed up at the Voice of America today to broadcast their programs only to be told they had been locked out:… Continue reading
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Items
Death sells. So far today, this blog post has had 13 visits. Meanwhile, Radio’s Death Knells has had 356. Since I need to go out, I’ll call it a day and put a picture on top. See what happens. What was Indiana thinking? These days sunrise in Bloomington is about four hours before noon, and sunset… Continue reading
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It’s about time. And space.
This informative video by @lainaminute (L.A. in a Minute) on Instagram expands on something I anticipated when I shot this photo album of the KSPN/710 transmitter site at 12775 Burbank Boulevard almost four years ago: that the land under the transmitter—19 acres of fenced-in grass surrounded by suburbs—would be put up for sale by Disney,… Continue reading
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First Drafting
Writing with Wordland is like Tweeting, but on my personal press (this blog) instead of Elon's. Or any other giant's. As a difference in kind, it's absolute. Continue reading
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Radio’s Death Knells
The radio station known since 1935 as KSFO, “The Sound of the City,” was a landmark at 560 on the Bay Area radio dial for most of the last century. Other AM landmarks were KGO/810, KCBS/740, KFRC/610, and KNBR/680. KFRC went away in 2005, as religious programming moved to 610 AM from 106.9 FM, and… Continue reading
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And Now the #HughesFire
Twenty-fourth in the News Commons series Eigth on the #LAfires 7:35 am January 23, 2024—It’s morning now. The Hughes Fire is 17% contained but no longer interesting. The Sepulveda Fire broke out last night along the 405 freeway. It stopped at forty acres, and doesn’t matter much now. Here’s the path of one fire helicopter… Continue reading
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Los Angeles Fires and Aftermath
Nineteenth in the News Commons series Third on the #LAfires 6:50am Friday, January 10, 2025—I will now shift my blogging about the #LAFires from the kind of continuous coverage I’ve done for the last three days to what we might call coverage of coverage. Or something beyond that: shifting to a new kind of news… Continue reading
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On Los Angeles Wildfires
Eighteenth in the News Commons series Second on the #LAfires 8:02pm It appears that water dropped on the Sunset Fire has mostly contained it within a perimeter absent of houses. Good that the winds were not too high to allow that work. I also no longer see the Chinook operating on FlightRadar24, which may mean… Continue reading