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.   

In the interest of "letting it go" and giving credit where credit is due, let me briefly note the Minnesota Poll(s) produced by the Strib throughout the past two days, particularly Sunday's poll, which waded into the Norm Coleman drama.

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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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I corrected yesterday's post, where I had KTLK's generic conservative talker Chris Baker physically returning to Houston. In classic mega-media fashion, Baker will instead be providing, uh, content, such as his stunningly credulous interview with Michele Bachmann, to both the Twin Cities and Houston markets (with a combined reachable audience of, um, nine million or so).

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We'll see what the arbiters of instant history decide was the "takeaway line" from Barack Obama's inaugural address today. But his quote from Corinthians about it being a "time to put aside childish things" struck me as extraordinarily apt. Put another way, he's saying, "Hey, America, grow up already."

Of all the stark contrasts between what The Previous Regime did to this country and what Obama is promising to undo, the starkest may be that he brings what the former never did--namely, the enormous reassurance of an adult's thought processes and composure. It always stunned me how much George W., Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, their Greek Chorus of Misinformational Foghorns, Limbaugh, Hannity, and the rest sounded and behaved like adolescents, relentlessly, unapologetically ignorant, and/or indifferent to the consequences of their actions.

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There are several disruptions to being, um, "right-sized," one of which is that HR orders a cutoff of all communication functions. E-mail, passwords, etc. Gone before you know it. A concern about spontaneous, impulse embezzlement, I guess. Whatever went down with the logins and passwords to this blog, which will continue here for a bit longer, has taken until tonight, inauguration eve, to undo.

Several interesting stories have burbled up since the plug was pulled last Thursday. In the interest of keeping these things brief and readable enough for the ADHD set, I'll try to play them out throughout the next few days instead of running everything now.

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The brain wizards at AM1500 are zipped up tight on the whys of the abrupt firing of Tommy Mischke last week. "I can't say anything," was program director Steve Konrad's mantra. (If you're in the mood, these legalized "no comment" bits offer the opportunity for sophomoric amusement. For example, Q: "Mr. Konrad, at least tell us it isn't true that you were seen in a ridiculously small French swim suit poisoning small animals on a grade school playground?" . . . A: "I can't say anything." . . . See?)

But knowing a tiny bit about how radio works in these economically perilous times, I think we can review several options fairly quickly.

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Let me recap, just so we're all clear.

On Monday, WCCO radio and its two sister stations show fourteen employees the door.

Monday was also the day anyone who wanted a buyout from KARE, formerly the Twin Cities' money-printing colossus, had to have raised their hand or wait for layoffs.

On Tuesday, the Star Tribune tells its employees they need to "save" their investment wizards $20 million, most likely by working for less and paying more for health insurance.

On Wednesday, the Star Tribune refines its message and announces it'll be laying off another two dozen newsroom employees.

On Thursday, KSTP-TV--the house of "breaking news"--leaks word that it is whacking eighteen out of its news department.

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It has been a long time since I convinced anyone I was a music hipster. OK, it never happened. But I like music enough that I, like so many others I hear complaining, find music formatted radio boring beyond belief. Yes, I associate long-ago misty good times with a couple Bachman Turner Overdrive hits, and at some point I might have thought the Wilson sisters' teased hair was pretty hot. But good lord, if your senses of curiosity and adventure aren't completely numb, you moved on . . . about three decades ago.

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The return to status of the Twin Cities' most successful radio manager of the past generation--Mick Anselmo (soon taking over WCCO-AM, WLTE-FM, and JACK-FM)--spawned several conversations on the subject of what to do with a medium--commercial radio--that people still enjoy but in an age of digital convergence (i.e. iPods, satellites, etc.)? Everyone knows audiences will abandon the second they are given something equally cheap and easy to consume.

There's a theory out there for every avid listener. This is mine.

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