Posted on 10/25/2009 9:15:32 AM PDT by abb
FYI, in yesterday’s mail came the latest Gourmet, wrapped in plastic, with an envelope attached, in BIG letters, telling me that it was my LAST CHANCE TO RENEW MY SUBSCRIPTION..
What other foodie magazines are out there to compete with Gourmet? Or are you perusing articles and recipes online?
Bon Appetite survives...I expect that they will transfer remaining subscriptions from Gourmet to there..
How so? The local Democrat Party apparatchik will still be happy to send you their/your daily talking points.
David Carr (b. 1956), US Journalist. CNN "Reliable Sources", Sunday, August 10, 2008.
There is no reason a talking head, teleprompter reader should be making several million.
At one time the Marketplace said they were worth it - back when broadcast television was an audio/video monopoly. Progress created a more efficient audio/video distribution system - the interweb thingy.
Now the Marketplace is saying they are not worth it.
Y'know, abb?
I get it, I do.
But in the example used here couldn't the dislocation also have been due to an aging old goat who overstayed his welcome by 30 years, too?
I mean the demographic in LA has to be largely Hispanic, *enlightened* albeit guilty left-wing whites, and let us not forget the Royce Da 5'9"-ish crowd, all probably under 25.
I use 25 & under deliberately because really, WTH could watch the tabloid crap "news" has morphed into anymore, except the near brain-dead and the official brain-dead?
No wonder he wound-up back in Buffalo.
Sweet Jesus WTH wants to go there? While it's career purgatory, a stop before virtual hell?
It's also probably an aging demo, possibly majority Caucasian blah blah who'll *connect* with a Hollyweird libtard.
I really have to wonder about the conclusions being attributed to the shift. Hailing a symptom without regard to the disease means they're really dead since there's simply no hope of 'em fixing that which is killing 'em.
It that respect it is *indeed* similar to the Rag industry. LOL
"If you think local TV news is irrelevant and has long sacrificed real news coverage for flash and trash, just wait until stations have no money to even pretend they're covering the important stuff."
BWWWWWWHAAAAAAA!!
Hey, is the weasel threatening us? LOL!
*How*, pray tell could one possibly make news casts any worse than they already are? It ain't possible. Not unless they prop up cheaply painted mannequins to read or running Ginsu infomercials during normal news cast hours.
Methinks the slide began some time ago. As they incrementally slid so went the product & the audience followed.
Sound like it'll hit rock bottom soon enough, how couldn't it?
"In some cases, local TV stations are facing the same problems as local newspapers: fewer advertisers (as department stores vanish and auto dealerships struggle) and dollars shifting to other platforms, like the Internet."
While *no* part of the tank's due to banal synthesized & extruded *personalities* reading pap, ad naseum to people who really don't like them????
They're delusional, truly adrift. LOL
"The Washington Post reported that Fox-owned WTTG may have its anchors operate their own TelePrompTers, via their hands and feet."
Oh, the horror.
Could the TOTUS be far behind? Then he could literally tap dance his way through speeches.
How Green is that? :o)
Tell you one thing about that "may have" scenario.
There'll be new mandatory 3 credit courses in "Digit Care & Welfare" in the JSchools required of wannabes to compliment the obligatory broadcaster prerequisite.
Good grief. LOL
I could've parsed every paragraph, but, cocktails have been mixed & poured and waiting. Besides, *I* have had enough laughs for a day thanks to Variety.
Don't want to hog 'em all, y'know. ;^) LOL
As usual, thanks for posting this stuff abb.
Did you get a chance to watch the Chandler thing on PBS? I haven’t watched it yet, but I have it on my DVR. I just finished the Otis Chandler bio a week or so ago.
http://books.google.com/books?id=FCvoJFg5jjYC&dq=fortunate+son+otis+chandler&source=gbs_navlinks_s
The Chandler family was as involved as anyone in building Greater LA in the early 20th century.
Now this is an intriguing subject I have on my “to study” list. There is a movie about to come out on the subject that is being promoted on TV.
http://www.filminfocus.com/article/ahoy__pirate_radio
Ahoy, Pirate Radio
By Simon Frith
These days, forty-five years on, the idea of pirate radio is irresistible. Those toothy, louche young men, defying seasickness and the law, clambering up the sides of converted forts and ferries, playing young people’s music to young people otherwise ignored or patronised by British broadcasters, have taken their place in the mythology of the Swinging Sixties. Those pirate stations, anchored just outside British waters, provided, it seems, the soundtrack to a social revolution.
The reality was a little different. 60s pirate radio was a European (not just British) phenomenon and it was driven by the familiar logic (and established capital) of US radio. And while it had a significant effect on the subsequent sound of British broadcasting, it had little influence on the history of British music. It’s a great story, but one that needs to be understood in a much wider framework than the pirates’ brief life between 1964-7.
The real story starts when radio starts, in the 1920s, when Europe and the USA chose different models of radio finance and regulation. In the US radio was a commercial enterprise, its history was shaped by private companies competing for a profitable return on their investment. Their income came not from radio listeners themselves, but from the value of these listeners to sponsors and advertisers. Music radio, American style, evolved as a way of getting and keeping an audience for advertisers. Listeners came to take it for granted that music was always there at the touch of a dial. Their attention therefore had to be grabbed, by deejays and offers and jingles; they had to be cosseted or they would switch their attention to someone else.
In Europe, by contrast, radio was financed directly by the public (in Britain’s case via a license fee paid to entitle one to use a wireless receiver) and radio programmes were provided by state owned monopolies. “Public service broadcasting” meant a way of radio listening that for US visitors must have seemed bizarre. When I grew up there was one broadcasting company, the BBC, with three nationwide stations: the Home Service (talk), the Light Programme (entertainment) and the Third Programme (high culture). The BBC had no British competition for radio listeners. To meet the perceived needs of all license fee payers it therefore provided different music programmes at different times of day for different listeners. Listening to the radio meant turning it on at the right times. “Youth music” was confined to youth programmes, such as Saturday Club, when, for an hour or two, we were addressed by avuncular presenters faintly amused buy the latest teen fads.
There is no doubt that by the 1960s British teenagers were deprived of what US teenagers already took for granted: radio’s attention. But what was less obvious to us then was British radio’s peculiar relationship with the record industry. Under British law, broadcasters had to obtain the rights to broadcast records and record companies (in alliance with the Musicians Union) had historically succeeded in restricting the amount of programming using records (as against live performances or radio studio recordings). The “needletime agreement” meant that the BBC’s broadcasts of teenage music in the mid 1960s were more likely to mean studio bands’ cover versions of the latest hits than plays of those hits themselves.
Even in the 1960s, though, the people most frustrated by British radio regulation weren’t listeners (who didn’t really know what music radio could be) but advertising agencies, which couldn’t exploit what was potentially a hugely profitable medium. Would-be commercial broadcasters had long sought ways around European wireless regulations––plans for an radio station broadcasting from outside British waters were first floated in the 1920s)—and they were quick to seize the opportunities offered in the one or two European countries in which advertising on radio was legal. Radio Normandie and then Radio Luxembourg transmitted English language programmes from the 1930s. Radio Luxembourg became particularly significant in the late 1950s as a source of rock’n’roll and other US sounds.
The first of a new kind of unauthorised of offshore radio station also appeared at this time. Radio Mercur, broadcasting into Denmark, was soon followed by Radio Veronica, targeting Holland, and Radio Nord, beamed at Sweden. Radio Veronica started an English language service in 1961, and this inspired Rohan O’Rahilly, a London based music agent, to raise the finance to purchase and refit a ship off the British coast. Radio Caroline was launched on March 29 1964 to be followed by Radio Atlanta (the two services soon merged to become Radio Caroline North and South), Radio Sutch (which became Radio City) and Radio Invicta (which became King Radio), which were sited on old wartime offshore forts, Radio London, Radio 390, Radio Essex and, finally, Radio Scotland.
Rohan O’Rahilly, blonde, personable, with an ex- actor’s charm and an Irish way with words was a persuasive front for pirate radio PR but his insouciance distracted attention from what the pirates were really about: the Americanisation of European radio. As historian Erik Barnouw has described, by the 1960s: “The music-and-news station, backed everywhere by American advertisers, was a world-wide phenomenon; disc-jockeys calling themselves the Good Guys erupted even on ‘pirate’ stations operating from ships around the British Isles—almost all financed by American capital. Along Madison Avenue in New York girls in pirate costume drummed up business for this novel form of international freebooting; which for a time earned small fortunes.”
And what pirate radio offered to fascinated British listeners was something we’d never really heard before, even on Radio Luxembourg, the full on noise of Top 40 radio. What defined this was not the records played but the surrounding sounds, the jingles, the station idents, the deejays’ slangy matiness, the sound of people selling things! Add to this the continuous musical flow, the novel possibility of switching from station to station and public ubiquity of these stations along Carnaby Street and the Kings Road it becomes obvious why pirate radio is remembered as the sound of swinging London.
What should also be remembered though is that pirate radio was illegal. Its glitzy street front concealed not just American capital but also a very British seediness, a cast of station managers and airtime sellers familiar from post-war Ealing comedies: ex-military men, spivs and chancers. The 1966 trial of Major Oliver Smedley (founder of Radio Atlanta) for the manslaughter of Reg Calvert (owner of Radio City) provided the public with a seamier account of what piracy really meant. And even as broadcasters the pirate stations often came across as only semi-competent versions of Top 40 radio. This was in part because of the gap between the freewheeling glamorous life style claimed by the pirate deejays and the actual squalor of their workplace, and in part because none of the ships were run with the discipline of a US station. In his memoirs of working for Radio Caroline, Emperor Rosko, for example, recalls his resistance to the station’s opportunistic play-for-pay deals with record pluggers. Rosko would intercept the record boxes when they arrived on deck and toss them overboard.
Pirate radio on this model came to an end following the passing of the Marine, Etc., Broadcasting (Offences) Bill in August 1967. Their legacy was immediate. The BBC accelerated its plans to reorganise its radio broadcasting, and launched a dedicated pop music channel, Radio 1, which employed many of the same deejays the boats had and, more surprisingly, commissioned programme and deejay jingles from the pirates’ US suppliers. Radio 1 didn’t carry ads, though, and the needle time agreement, limiting the free flow of record based programmes, continued for years to come. Commercial local radio stations were soon licensed too, though it was another 30 years before anything like competitive American top 40 radio became a national listening norm.
In retrospect the pirates had little impact on the mid-60s emergence of British rock. The Beatles’ success predated the pirates (and was in many ways shaped by BBC rather than commercial broadcasting norms), and the pirates always represented mainstream rather than adventurous pop taste—John Peel would later remark that he was much more restricted in what he could play by the pirates’ than the BBC’s playlist policies.
If, in the end it was the pirate stations’ disc jockeys, rather than owners or backers, who had any sort of long term radio impact, but John Peel was one of the few who had much interest in music. More typical was the first deejay to be heard on Radio Caroline, Simon Dee (who died earlier this month). Dee (real name Cyril Henty-Dodd) was a public school boy who’d got his first radio experience serving in the RAF and used his pirate exposure as the basis of a meteoric if short lived career as first an easy listening BBC radio deejay and then a TV chat show host. A surprising number of the pirate deejays were like Dee, ex-public school with a slightly cloying charm and not much pzazz. As Radio 1 deejays, from 1967, they became the sort of radio voice that all true rock fans despised.
Simon Frith marries his experience as a rock critic and sociologist to explore the culture of popular music. Currently holding the Tovey Chair of Music at Edinburgh University, Frith is the author of such books as The Sociology of Rock, Sound Effects, Art into Pop and Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music.Frith recently edited a four volume set entitled Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media & Cultural Studies, and also has chaired the judges of the Mercury Music Prize since its inception in 1992. His writing can be found in a number of popular journals from the Village Voice to The Sunday Times.
from David Sarnoff by Eugene Lyons, 1966.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone would watch local (or national) TV news. You essentially get but a few paragraphs of what is normally a complicated story best presented in a written form, in its entirety.
But then again, I have never been a Joe Schmoe who sits on the sofa and watches this bland stuff.
Missed it, my friend.
Darnnit!
How was it *billed*? A "Frontline"? "American Experience"? ...and when did it supposedly air?
"I haven’t watched it yet, but I have it on my DVR."
Could it be the program ran on your local PBS, not nationally? Just asking because I actually read program lineups every day. Not saying I couldn't have missed it, just saying it'd have caught my eye, so, somewhat unlikely.
"I just finished the Otis Chandler bio a week or so ago...The Chandler family was as involved as anyone in building Greater LA in the early 20th century."
Oh I remember your interest in the Chandler family, knew you'd been pursuing their bio visa vi a book.
Chandler's ran an empire, that much I know.
Not unlike Hearst, Col. McCormick and Sultzburger families to name a few. "King Makers" all, in the day.
Please, I'd really enjoy hearing your take, overall impression(s) on this film after you've viewed it OK?
I'm specifically looking for your gut level; insofar, as where the producers may have wandered afield of fact(s), spin etc as well as what they graced us by getting it right.
That kind of information tells the biggest story for me. Reveals the real direction, if any, they'd like to lead the audience. TIA, my friend. ;^)
Now, only thing left before acting on this?
Your recommendation; or, is it worth it?
Not financing my own ignorance, anymore.
If the Hollyweirdites want to eat cake, hell's bells that's fine by me; but, I'll be damned if I bake it if I can help it, too. ;^)
Got it, will-do.
Thanks, my friend!
Wow. The quote from Mr. Sarnoff 45 years ago perfectly describes the modern public Internet. Except he underestimated the speed of the Internet backbone—backbones now run hundreds of gigabits per second at times.
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