Hi. I'm in the back of a hotel ballroom again, at another convention. This one -- the Conclave -- was, as these things go, actually quite good, with some interesting, informative panels and sessions, and it was nice to see lots of young, aspiring radio professionals here ...

You know the rules. Talk stations have to be consistent. You have to have hosts who are politically aligned. The shows have to be a certain length, and in the same slot every single weekday. The clock is the clock, immutable. The hosts have to sound a certain way, ...

"Should I do a podcast?" "I've been thinking about trying a streaming show, but I'm not sure." I hear those a lot. I heard them last week at that convention in New York, and I get that in emails and phone calls and casual conversation. I hear that from radio ...

Okay, I gotta say something. I'm presently sitting in a room in New York, covering the Talkers conference, and about 2/3 of the way through a panel on ratings, after several mentions of the Voltair processing device that some feel can affect talk radio's ratings under ...

How confident are you in radio? I mean, broadcast radio. Do you think it's nothing better content will fix? Do you think AM can be revitalized? Is there opportunity in things like HD Radio? Okay, then. Would you buy a station right now? With your own money? I'm ...

"You're in radio, huh? Yeah, that must be fun. You know, I can talk. You should give ME a show. I'd be great." I got that a lot when I was a program director. I got that from friends, acquaintances, all of them. I don't miss hearing that, because it always came ...

Does anyone want to work on the day before a long holiday weekend? Neither do I. I admit that I spent more time trying to come up with a good reason to blow off this column than actually preparing for it. In fact, this morning, I really didn't have anything, and then, ...

At the moment that I'm writing this, it's raining. This being Southern California, the arrival of rain is traditionally greeted with the kind of news coverage other regions more accustomed to water falling from the sky would reserve for a major blizzard. That, drought ...

Radio is, if nothing else, one of the industries most enthralled with its past. Surely, every part of the media loves its history, from old movies and YouTube clips of vintage TV to the Internet Wayback Machine revealing that, eighteen years ago, the Internet was ...