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The Letter
Archives
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October 9, 2020
Everything But The Shuttle BusHow have I been doing? Glad you asked. It's been a week filled with watching a radio convention online, comprised of what seemed like an endless procession of Zoom panels featuring moderators behaving like the stars of hostage tapes, reading stiffly from scripts on their ...
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October 2, 2020
A Note From Mr. Know-It-AllYou can't prepare for everything. Or maybe you can. But if you're doing talk radio, you know that plans sometimes go out the window with some regularity. You can and should plan things out, do your research, be prepared. And then something pops up that demands to be ...
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September 25, 2020
The Vision ThingRemember the pivot? Yeah, that was fun. Sometime in the mid-2010s, between "we need to do a podcast" and "let's focus on social media," it seemed like every media company decided that the future was in online video, or at least the future of monetization was in video, ...
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September 11, 2020
Let The Chef Do The CookingYou have a widget for sale. You're in a competitive business, so you have to keep that widget fresh and innovative and adapting to a changing market. Who are you going to use to design that widget? The sales manager? No, of course not; you'll keep the sales manager ...
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September 4, 2020
DisengageHey, want a challenge for the Labor Day weekend? Stop looking at Facebook and Twitter. Okay, we've been told over and over that radio people need to be very active on social media. I've told you that before. It's all about the engagement with listeners, right? Plus, it's ...
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August 28, 2020
Can’t EvenIs it just me, or is talk radio sometimes really hard to listen to these days? It's probably just me. And, in fairness, it's not ALL of commercial talk radio that's a chore for me to consume. There ARE good shows and hosts out there. But I wonder, because it seems like ...
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August 21, 2020
The Best Is (Maybe) Yet To Come (I Hope)Thursday was National Radio Day, or at least one of those hashtag generator companies decided to make it National Radio Day, and it went as it does every year: ignored by the formal industry, embraced by people working in the business, a cavalcade of resumÈs on Facebook, ...
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August 14, 2020
Can’t We Talk About Something Else?It's fitting in 2020 that the most talked-about song of the Summer can't be played on the radio without a "radio edit," not that this is a new thing. Plenty of hit songs have required extensive bowdlerization to be radio-friendly, what with the FCC and all. But it's the ...
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August 7, 2020
No More ExcusesGonna keep it short and to the point this week: Don't be an a-hole. Okay, let me elaborate. You've read about the situation at Ellen DeGeneres' show, right? It's funny: If you know people in the circle of TV writers and comedians, the ones who tend to populate TV talk ...
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July 31, 2020
Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ OnTiming is everything, and so the press release announcing a new morning show for a Los Angeles Top 40 radio station showed up the same morning that we had an earthquake, not the biggest quake but one that most people here felt. The new morning show is not here, it's in ...