WBZ cuts Leveille, Cuddy, Dyett, poss. Desmarais

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Fri, 2 Jan 2009 23:04:34 -0600, "Kevin Vahey" <kvahey@comcast.net> said:

> I think the biggest problem today is the lack of creativity on media.
> When there were only 3-4 TV stations and a handful of AM signals you
> HAD to be good. That is becoming less of a factor today.

I disagree.  I think there's plenty of creativity out there -- just
not on the broadcast platform any more.  The biggest problem today is
that the ownership of traditional media platforms has become so
concentrated, while the audience has become so fragmented, that the
owners are afraid to do anything that might actually cost money.
That's particularly the case at big, debt-saddled group owners who are
just a step away from bankruptcy.

To step into an alternate part of the media world for a
seocnd... nearly all of the creativity in the comic-strip business
these days is happening on the Web.  Newspapers, long the mainstay of
the comics business, are increasingly irrelevant, and the syndicated
comics they still carry are looking increasingly superannuated.  The
level of investment required to start a syndicated strip today is
frankly insurmountable (only very popular current artists need apply),
and the level of creative control demanded by the syndicators is far
beyond what today's young artists consider acceptable.  But for a few
successful webcomic artists, an off-hours hobby Web site has become a
full-time job -- enough to pay the bills -- without giving up anything
to newspaper syndication.  Webcomics are no longer restricted to niche
products for the geek audience like "User Friendly" (drawn by
J.D. Fraser, and thought to be the first successful
advertising-supported self-syndicated webcomic).

There's still an enormous audience out there for terrestrial radio --
an audience which can carry onto new distribution platforms if the
operators don't destroy their brands by diluting product quality -- so
the twofold question is, why haven't commercial broadcasters been more
successful in brining innovative content to the radio, and why are
they not better at selling the value proposition of radio advertising
to merchants?[0]  (Particularly when the PPM is finally going to bring
increased rigor[1] to ratings analysis.)

-GAWollman

[0] See Lew Dickey's comments to Wall Street analysts in the last
Cumulus conference call.  He gets it.  I think Mel got it, when he was
runinng CBS, despite the documented tightfistedness of his tenure
there.

[1] To a point.  The margin of sampling error on many of those
demographic crosstabs is still going to make it impossible to
distinguish between first place and last with reasonable confidence.
But at least advertisers will know for sure whether their message
reached the intended audience.