Clinging To Fossils: FM Radio, Blogs

This might be about time. And change. Or those things and impermanence. It might also be about technology. It's just that things are always dying. And sometimes I don't realize it. And then there are times when death is foretold.

WAMC is again conducting a fund drive. It started on Monday, and the goal is $1 Million. That’s right $1 Million Dollars. When I say that, I sound like Dr. Evil. Regardless, this $1 Million Dollar Fund Drive happens three (or is it now four?) times in every year. And it goes on and on and on. Yes, WAMC is a large enterprise. Yes, it has lots of listeners across the Northeast. Yes, it has 20 transmitters. Yes. But I’m wondering whether it’s a fossil. Whether FM (now HD radio) is DOA. Whether all of this fund raising is for something that might gracefully be saluted, and appreciated, and let go. An old love that’s now gone. A sweetheart who’s leaving. A companion who has lived a full life and can’t continue. An old, but beloved car. This fills me with sadness. And probably denial. I don’t want to see it go, but the obit’s in the draft file.

Of course, I haven’t been able to listen to WAMC’s regular programming because they are on the Fund Drive. So what. I can hear NPR news on my iPhone. I can hear streaming features from NPR and its many affiliates across the country on my iPhone. In fact, I can hear almost anything I want on my iPhone (Thanks and all praise be to Spotify and Pandora and ESPN). So I don’t really need WAMC now. I don’t really need it at all. Even in the car. Nor do you. As far as I’m concerned they can fund raise perpetually and then get stuck in a loop of replaying Prairie Home Companion. I don’t care. And if Verizon has enough bandwidth, and I have enough money to pay for it, I can listen to whatever I want from NPR (read: Government Radio) or anywhere else (Al Jazeera, e.g.), streaming on 3G or 4G or where there is Internet access for free on demand. I’m not tied to a schedule. And I never have to turn on the FM radio ever again. So, does all of this mean that WAMC a fossil? Yes, a once beloved one, but a fossil nonetheless?

A nephew who shall remain nameless is in the radio biz. I asked him, “Is FM going to be transformed into something new and useful or is it going to die?” Said he in essence, “Get your suit dry cleaned for the funerals.”

Which, sadly, brings me to WGXC in Hudson at 90.7. A community FM station. A new one. One that has had some wonderful moments. And some equally dreadful ones. A station that has explored both the zeniths and the nadirs, and often in the same hour. I tried to be an underwriter for WGXC. I don’t know whether my ad ever ran. I don’t know when the ad expired. Nobody ever showed me the information about when it ran, if it did, and then, oddly, nobody ever called me to ask me to re-up, to pay for more ads, to solicit my money. No, I called them instead. Crickets. This may be yet another reason to dry clean the black suit. It’s hard to have a community FM station survive when nobody’s collecting money from easy donors like me. Or am I unreasonable to want to know that what I paid for was actually carried out?

And then there’s blogging. Blogger friends tell me that blogging is dead, that social media is what is now important. To some extent I agree and I understand what they are saying, but I keep writing this blog, The Dream Antilles. And I keep praying that Google, which owns blogger which owns the blogspot.com domain, won’t have an infarction and lose everything I’ve written for the past 6 years. So, yes, I guess it's obvious, this blog, too, may be a fossil. And maybe I won’t be able to let it go, even when it’s completely obvious to everyone but me that it’s outlived its useful life. And that it has no readership. The latter probably doesn’t matter to me. At least not today. I suppose I’ll just keep going. I’ll keep writing this blog. And I’ll quietly compare myself to WAMC. And I’ll wonder what exactly it might be that keeps any of these fossils slogging perpetually along. Beyond their useful lives.

Stalking The Specter Of The Eternal Fund Drive

WAMC began its winter fund drive early this past Monday morning, February 6. Today is Sunday, February 12, and the fund drive continues on day 7. The goal is $1 million; today almost $600,000 has been raised. That means that the drive will in all likelihood stretch out into the middle of the coming week. And that, in turn, means that the main on-air activity is the fund drive (the “Fun Drive” if you insist) and that regular programming is extremely limited. Fine. I’ve contributed. I’m a member. But today as I check in and hear that the drive is continuing, I’m worried. I’m worried by the specter that at some time in the future —it will not happen on this drive— the station will find itself locked into an eternal, fruitless fund drive. The fund drive will be all there is, and it will never end. And the station will eventually run out of funds and go off the air.

How can that happen? I am concerned that WAMC may be yet another dinosaur on its way to the boneyard. I’m worried that community supported, over-the-air public radio is an idea of the past, and that the Internet and personal devices are slowly going to render it irrelevant. And replace it. I expect that as soon as personal devices interface with sound systems in a majority of cars on the road, FM radio slowly will be abandoned by its listeners. This abandonment will mirror what happened decades ago to AM radio; maybe somebody will find another use for FM.

How, I wonder, can FM not end? Isn’t the end of over-the-air media where we’re inevitably headed? I’m not saying that the present fund drive will never end. No.It may seem like that in the dark times, but it’s not the case. That will not happen this fund drive. It won’t. But how many more of these fund drives can there possibly be before the number of listeners to over-the-air radio shrinks to a level where continued support at this multi-million dollar level is no longer possible, and the fund drive, once started, continues eternally, becoming the sole programming, gobbling up everything else?

Northeast Public Radio is now no small operation. It covers a huge geographical area. It has a large engineering infrastructure and many transmitters and repeaters (23 stations heard in 7 states). It has grown enormously and in predictable response to listener demands. And desires. And changing tastes. It began as the dying radio station of the Albany Medical College some three decades ago. That station was saved by the group that would evolve into the present WAMC staff and Board. And over time the station has grown in quality and in scope. And its staff has grown. It transformed from a tiny, local Albany, New York station to a large, regional one. It has followed the FM radio trend from music to talk. It has moved from local news to regional news. It has expanded its listener base. It has preserved the Saturday Opera. It continues to report on New York State Government. And it’s the source of NPR news for this area. In other words, this is a very, very good Public Radio Station. It may be the best of Public Radio in the US. Somehow, though, that doesn’t matter.

It’s nobody’s fault that it takes several $1 million fund drives per year to keep the station on the air. The fund drive is something to endure because right now it’s worth it to have WAMC and to keep the station running.

But at the same time, mobile media are now growing rapidly. And that growth may signal the end of WAMC as it presently exists. WAMC’s function is primarily over-the-air radio. Yes, it’s streaming online as well. But when all those personal Internet devices replace the FM radios in cars, all of the infrastructure for over-the-air transmission will no longer be required. It won’t be necessary to broadcast signals with transmitters from towers. There won’t be a need or a desire for FM radio any more. The Internet will render FM radio extinct, and WAMC, as we currently know it, with it. WAMC may endure in some other form, but it won’t be what it is now, an FM (or HD) public radio station.

I do hope listeners will carry WAMC through its present fund drive. I’m sad it’s taking so long to end it. As it goes on and on and on, I fear that this drive foreshadows the end, the loss of a good and constant companion. To be completely honest, when I listen to the fund drive, with all the usual shtick and the rewards and the thank yous and the repeated stories and the begging and pleading and the traditional yodeling and banjo music, I think I hear the beginning of a death rattle. I didn’t hear it last fund drive. But this time, I hear it. I wish it were otherwise. Really I do. But it's just not true that this drive has the same vitality as the previous ones.

Storm Central?

There's one thing I haven't heard lately. "Well, when I was a kid, the winter was much worse than this." It's not that nobody's saying that. No. It's that it's impossible to get out, and there's nobody here who would dare to say that aloud. Especially with the Internet. You could look it up and find out that it wasn't really any different. Or you could not look it up and instead spend a few hours testily arguing about it. Arguing is more in line with the onset of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), cabin fever, grumpiness, and that exquisite soreness that comes from shoveling snow. Arguing is an inevitable indoor Winter activity.

Hopefully the storms that have turned Columbia County, New York into a pale model of the Northwest Territories will end tonight.

Meanwhile, there is an element of the surreal to be noted in passing. WAMC, the public radio station, started a fund raiser on Monday. Because it has zillions of transmitters all over this part of the world, and because there's virtually no public money for public radio, they're trying to raise $1 Million. One Million Dollars. Reminds me of Mini Me. This is a lot of money. And they have their tactics for raising it. The result is that the listener doesn't know when they will play the news or the weather. You tune in, thinking you'll hear about what you want to know about, the storm or about Egypt. Instead, you're treated to a feast of passive aggressive obnoxiousness designed to make you pay up or turn the radio off: yodeling yesterday, today the gong from Law and Order is rung after each and every donation is announced. Pardon me. I gave money to the station yesterday. But I cannot listen to this any more.

Ironically, to keep the station on the air so that it could report events for which radio is helpful, like terrible weather, like rapidly unfolding world events in Egypt and the like, I have to listen to incessant yodeling and the gong. It is not avoidable. Nobody is telling what the schedule is, nobody reveals when there will be a program instead of the fund raiser, so I find myself hoping beyond hope that there will be a break from the fund raising sturm and drang to bring that most precious commodity, information. Alas. I cannot listen and wait. Last night, I listened to this nonsense for more than forty minutes, only to have the break be financial news. Not Egypt. Not the storm. Do not ask me why I let it go on for that long. It's winter. I made bad decisions. Shoot me, please.

Back on November 6, 2010, I complained about this. I wasn't charitable:

We do have a public radio station to keep us company. But it seems to have only two programs. Prairie Home Companion, which it seems to play on a loop throughout the weekend, and Fundraising, which plays during the week. The station tries to raise $800,000 per fund drive. That is a huge amount of money. And there’s also commentary. Unfortunately, it seems there is only one commentator. And he’s on all the time, expressing his opinion or raising money or both. My opinion? Let me try to remember the last time any sane person asked for that. It seems the radio station has decided to have millions of transmitters and only 3 programs. This is a recipe for seasonal insanity, if not depression.

All right. I want to amend my remarks. At the time I wrote them, I admit they seemed unnecessarily grumpy. As fate would have it, they weren't. Not at all. The station is now locked in what I think is will turn into a perpetual fund raiser. And it is impossible to listen to the station. This will continue until the Equinox. Or longer. Or forever.

My radio is off. It may stay off. I'm getting information about Egypt from Al Jazeera's live stream and the weather from the weather sites. This could be habit forming, because it is so incredibly easy. I suspect that WAMC, which has been an asset to this community for so long, because of the timing and amount of this particular fund drive, may have consigned itself to history. Like those big snow storms nobody around here is talking about.

Its only hope is that eventually we'll be able to drive again. WAMC, if it's saved at all, will be rescued by car radios.

Please Put A Blogger On Your Radio Show

June 29, 2008

The Media Project
WAMC, Northeast Public Radio
318 Central Avenue
Albany, New York 12206

Dear Alan, Ira, Elisa and Rex:
This evening, again, the subject of Blogs came up during your show, the Media Project. And, to nobody's particular surprise, the usual, superficial analysis was quickly dispensed: bloggers are not journalists, blogs have no quality control, blogs are too quick, blogs have no restraints, blogs by anonymous writers are irresponsible, blogs don't gather news, some blogs print "horrible" things. I've come to expect this.

The fact is that there are millions of blogs. For political and cultural analysis these come in two main types: group blogs (e.g., daily Kos in left Blogistan) and individual blogs. Individual blogs, like newspapers, radio, and TV, have enormous variations in intelligence and quality. Some are absolutely brilliant; others, unreadable. But both kinds of blogs are extremely democratic: anybody with access to a computer can be a writer and express an opinion or an analysis or spread a story. Anybody with a comment about a story is free to post it. Yoanni Sanchez, a prizewinning Cuban blogger, uses the computer at the local library. One doesn't need money to be a blogger. Only time and desire. Bloggers who are no good remain unread and eventually give up. Bloggers who have something to say are ultimately recognized and build a readership.

I say all of this because I don't think your show sufficiently acknowledges the importance of blogs, and it's important that you begin to. Newspapers are cutting back and dying, radio and television are consolidating and moving news to entertainment and propaganda. Blogs continue to grow in influence and importance. Simply put, blogs are the important, new medium. In fact, some newspapers and radio stations attempt to put up blogs, to compete, but in general these are just not the same thing as blogs that are supported only by the writers' time, energy, desire and persistence.

Why am I writing all of this? Because "Teh Blogs" deserve a seat on the Media Project. They provide an important viewpoint you ought to be providing your listeners. And nobody can explain blogging and its role in media as well as someone actually involved in it. In fact, only someone who is actively involved in blogging, which seems to involve reading lots of other blogs in addition to writing, can provide insight into what actually happened in the blogosphere in the past week. You'd be surprised to note that events in the blogosphere frequently don't dwell on the same stories as the traditional media.

You don't have to invite me to sit in. There are lots of other people who could do a wonderful job at this. You can pick the blogger of your choice.

Are the blogs powerful enough, important enough to deserve this kind of consideration? A simple demonstration. I won't mail this letter to you. I'll just post it on two small blogs, my own, The Dream Antilles, and my favorite group blog, Docudharma. I'm relatively sure you'll find out about my opinion and the comments of many others through the magic of the blogs.

Sincerely,

David Seth Michaels

P.S. I use the name "davidseth" when I blog. Anybody who cares can easily find my full name and where I am. I do this because I stand behind every single word I write.