By all appearances, our guy Jesse Ventura only has to clear his throat to be invited on damn near every talk show in the country. I mean, good lord, he's out there again flogging the paperback release of last year's book! But, like Ann Coulter (only better looking), Ventura is such guaranteed good copy, a font of such reliable, juice-injected sound bites that The View and Fox & Friends, and, even his nitwitness, Sean Hannity, would book him if they heard he was signing a credit card tab at the last Blarney Stone in Manhattan.

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So Clear Channel, once reviled as The Evil Empire by people like me—before and after I worked for it (while there, my term of endearment was, "big ugly company")—has fired Dan "The Geezer" Donovan and 589 others around the country in its latest spasm of carp-flop death throes. News for KTLK, the so-called "News Talk" station, will now come entirely from KOA in Denver, just as so much of the, uh, music pumped out to Clear Channel's provincial stations comes from tiny little one-man studios in places such as Minneapolis.

KOOL 108 will go totally robot—no quipping between blasts of nostalgia—and along with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, Twin Cities listeners will almost certainly be hearing more of "high-quality national acts," such as Ryan Seacrest via the flopping empire's Premium Choice syndication package.

Do you like shamelessly lame corporate jargon? How about this Clear Channel home office description of what comes next as its stock price slides below a buck a pop—technically already a "penny stock"—" ... a multi-point plan to raise the bar for radio programming across all dayparts and platforms, including online and mobile.”

"To raise the bar . . . ." From what? Something a blind mole could get over? 

The similarities to what has the Star Tribune and other big papers in bankruptcy are stark, to say the least. The big boys bet—preferably with someone else's money—that the valuation ratios would keep climbing . . . ten-times billing, fifteen-times billing, twenty-times billing. Now, having ignored the impact of digital technology (iPod) and the broadening appeal of taste fragmentation (news/info and music via the Internet), the tent has collapsed.

As the Bushies used to like to say, "Who could have anticipated . . . ?"

OK, it hasn't completely collapsed, like, say, The Hindenberg. Jason Lewis—a local act—rose to number one in the 25 to 54 afternoon Arbitron ratings just released, a clear indication that there is still at least one salary to be covered by tea bagging and Obama-bashing. But Clear Channel's bet—like newspapers—was that the public revered constancy, that is to say the same product looking and sounding pretty much as it always has, no matter how many million MP3 players and websites were being bought and created.

The enormous debt loads required—to deliver huge profits to the major players moving from private to public (and in Clear Channel's case) back to private—meant every traditional element of every traditional format had to stay precisely as it was, with the only variable being the number of people required to produce it.

If any Clear Channel executive wants to explain the cost/benefit logic of canning Dan Donovan, I'm all ears. My eyes glaze at the thought of listening to Golden Oldies. But if you do have an audience that laps up nostalgia, give it to me straight, are you seeing research somewhere that says that same nostalgia-loving audience is not as interested in the era-appropriate humor of a jock they remember from way back when . . . as they are in the musty old tunes? Or, put another way, how much is a mega-conglomerate really saving by whacking Donovan or any of these people?

I must also say a kind word about Dan Barreiro's producer/sidekick, Joe Anderson, AKA "Mr. Phun." Barreiro is a quality act. But he and everyone who thinks two seconds about radio knows how much Anderson meant to the sound of that show.

Anyway . . . it really is kind of hopeless. Mass media is an endangered species. (What? You want  tele-type sound effects for news flashes like that?) But the irony is the inability of these mastodon-size debt beasts to serve any number of potentially valuable niche audiences, people looking for broadcast formats beyond . . . classic rock; pop country; golden oldies; tea bag talk; and half-assed, mailed-in news.

I only mention restoring The Fairness Doctrine these days to annoy my paranoid right-wing friends—you know, the ones hoarding guns and bottled water for when Obama sends them to FEMA camps and turns us into Sweden with baseball. But with Clear Channel, Citadel (KQRS's parent), and CBS Radio at low ebb, now might be a good time to put the squeeze on the industry—or at least the next generation of owners, as the barons who oversaw the collapse slink away with their winnings—for legitimate, verifiable "localism."

Empires such as Clear Channel and the bazillion "Christian" broadcasters are terrified of true "localism" because it impedes their one-stop profit-taking with syndicated acts such as Limbaugh, Hannity, and the vast chorus of wing-nut preachers.

I frankly don't get the appeal or need for music radio at all anymore. Seriously, who needs it? If it all vanished tomorrow, it'd take even the dimmest Luddite ten minutes to adapt.

But that's just me.

There is still life though in broadcast news/talk, assuming the sellers clean up and modernize their products, which means adjusting with the era and the culture and testing formats they haven't been able to play with under the weight of the casino debt that has now crushed them.   

I was surprised and saddened to hear that Steve Cannon died last night. I had heard he was ill but not that he was at death's door. I got to know Steve as his radio career was winding down. We talked on the phone a couple times a week for a few years. I played a round of golf with him and visited him down in Naples (which included a memorable dinner with Steve and Howard Viken).

 

 

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Our girl Michelle is obviously making the familiar calculation that there really is no such thing as too much, too far, or excess when it comes to rallying the Republican Party's activist base. Her line about getting "armed and dangerous" in opposition to President Obama's carbon tax—a little straight-from-the-hip shootin' delivered on John "Powerline" Hinderaker's The Patriot 1280 radio show this weekend—was another example of where conservative leadership is in the country today, post two lost duels at the ballot box.

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By dawn Thursday Jon Stewart's take down of CNBC for its bootlicking, fanzine style of "reporting" (i.e. cheerleading) of international finance in the run up to the meltdown was already the stuff legend, well on its way to pop culture immortality. And deservedly so.

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David Brauer has a post up over at MinnPost about the departure of Nick Coleman from the Strib, something neither Coleman nor Strib management has yet said . . . officially. Hell, the Strib hasn't even told its readers that Coleman won't be writing his column anymore. As though no one would notice or care.

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As a subscriber to the Star Tribune, as in someone who pays to have it delivered and then reads (most) of it, I've been waiting a day over two weeks now to sink my teeth into a new column by my favorite sulfurous, commie, pro-tax, anti-stadium, Pawlenty-baiter: Nick Coleman.

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Let me see. I'm doing a little math here. Today, Team Norm Coleman wanted to do a re-look at sixteen ballots the canvassing board ruled on last week and, um, also claimed that thirty-four ballots for which challenges were withdrawn somehow ended up in Al Franken's totals. That's uh . . . carry the one . . . 50 votes! And whoa golly . . . by sheer coincidence, Franken currently leads by 46 or 47. Isn't that odd?

To this point, most Minnesotans, and avid recount watchers around the country, have been entirely patient with the process. Mainly because it has been so thoroughly anti-Floridian, which is to say transparent and free of any discernible political big-footing. Both sides have spun their spins, challenged the unchallengeable, and countered the other's silly legal gambits. But as long as that has been peripheral noise to a process that counted every vote, the public has put up with it. Good for us.

But we are now fast approaching the moment when all the votes--challenged, absentee, what have you--will have been counted as best and as transparently as humanly possible. Once that point is reached and the canvassing board can certify a winner, I know my patience will have expired, and I don't think I'm alone.

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It can't be fun being Norm Coleman these days. If the endless recount weren't enough, with an increasing likelihood that he'll lose twice in ten years to a "gimmick candidate" (first Jesse Ventura and now Al Franken), this business(es) with good buddy Nasser Kazeminy is getting murkier and more expensive by the minute, and that's not good for guy described as "the fourth-poorest U.S. Senator."

Last week, Tom Lyden of Fox 9 put together a cost overrun of roughly $80,000 on a very handsome renovation of Coleman's St. Paul house with the timing of the $75,000 Coleman's wife, Laurie, got via an associate of Kazeminy and her insurance business. Lyden conceded he had no smoking gun. But the timing and the similarity of the numbers is curious. It was one of those, "I'm not sayin'. I'm just sayin'" moments.

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[ADDITIONAL MATERIAL]

I called Tom Bartel to gossip about the re-branding of his web-site, the death of MARQ, the Strib's improbable "luxury" appendage and see what his crystal ball was telling him in these increasingly bleak times.

Before coming over here to Mpls./St.Paul, I had a deal with Bartel for almost a year and found him to be much less fearsome than I had been warned. The guy's got an "instant on" switch for pugnacity, but it is rooted less in genetic jerk-dom than a honed survival instinct. He also happens to be smart about what can and cannot be done. He and his wife, Kris Henning, (a.k.a. "the nice one") built City Pages into something both financially successful and journalistically credible, (with no small amount of help from editor Steve Perry, now over at Minnesota Independent). Bartel and Henning cashed out pretty well on City Pages and reappeared with a six-year run with The Rake, which stopped dead-tree publishing last March, and then this past week dumped The Rake name entirely, in favor of secretsofthecity.com, which also houses the popular local chat forum, MnSpeak.com, although that name too has disappeared. (The new "MnSpeak" is nicely filtered so you can easily navigate away from political trolls if some restrauteur scandal is more your thing.)

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