Program scripts from week of January 28, 2013
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Radio and Social Media
I need to offer a tip of the hat to my friend and former co-worker Julia Ciesla-Hanley for tipping me to this story. She linked to the blog post by Social Media Strategist Lori Lewis on her Facebook page. It made fascinating reading for someone with a background in radio who is now exploring the world of Internet communications.
Fascinating in a sort of traffic accident/train wreck kind of way.
Along with print radio has taken the greatest beating from our new digital age. Streaming music services like Pandora, Spotify, Slacker Radio and last.fm have taken the core of the music radio industry (the music) and stripped away all those things that so many listeners find annoying (commercials, repetitive playlists and yes, bad disc jockeys). What’s left is a station that theoretically plays only songs you like (well maybe) and nothing else. And that’s pretty attractive.
What’s really astounding is how resistant to fighting back radio can be. Here’s where the blog post from Lori Lewis comes in. She notes the big news in the industry over the last couple weeks has been the return of a big time Country station to the New York City market. When she checked out their website she saw the listed both a Facebook page and Twitter feed. Since she’s a social media specialist she checked them out. And discovered that neither one of them existed. In fact the Twitter handle they publicized turned not to have been claimed yet. So Lewis grabbed it. This a major move from one of the biggest broadcast companies in the nation, Cumulus. And no one bothered to actually create the social media presence that they were promoting.
How many different kinds of stupid do you have to be to pull that off? For my brothers and sisters still toiling in the radio industry salt mines here’s the fundamentals. At bare minimum you MUST have a web page where you stream your station, a Facebook page and a Twitter feed. It is vital if you’re going to survive the next decade.
Otherwise an entire industry is going to end up asking if you want fries with that.
Corman at Sundance
This is one of those stories that you end up scratching your head wondering how it could possibly be true. For the first time ever independent film making icon Roger Corman appeared at the Sundance Film Festival which ended this past weekend.
Sundance is one of the largest independent film festivals in the United States. It’s probably done more for raising the profile of indie film makers than any other event. And somehow Roger Corman, one of the most prolific and beloved indie filmmakers of the last half century has never made an appearance. Mind boggling.
If you’re not a film fan the name Roger Corman may not mean anything to you. When you find out that he has almost 400 movies to his name you may wonder why you’ve never heard of him. That’s easy. Corman has made a career out of making films on tiny budgets. With all the sacrifices that might be inevitable along the way. It’s easy to dismiss him as low budget schlock till you remember that he has mentored directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron and Jonathan Demme among others. He helped launch the careers of Jack Nicholson, William Shatner, Peter Fonda, Talia Shire, Robert De Niro and more.
If you really want to see where he made his reputation take a look at the adaptations of a variety of Edgar Allen Poe stories in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. 8 films, 7 of them starring Vincent Price. Also appearing in some of the titles were Ray Milland, Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone. All of them are low budget classics.
In 1970 Corman funded his own independent movie studio New World Pictures and brought such cult classics to the screen as “Death Race 2000”, “Rock and Roll High School”, “Children of the Corn” and “Piranha”. Roger Corman is what every indie film maker wants to be even if they’ve never heard of him.
At 86 now Corman is still working and creating low budget movies. The film that premiered at Sundance “Virtually Heroes” was made for less than a half a million dollars.
It was about time that the premiere indie film festival and the premiere indie filmmaker finally were introduced.
Rant on Phones
A bit of a rant today, so you have been warned.
The first great modern mass communication media was the telephone. The phone is the single most commonly used appliance in the developed world. It’s been around since 1876 and is, in one form or another, an indispensable part of most of our lives.
But think about this. The phone is actually a service more than a device. You can have the device in your house and it doesn’t do a thing till you pay to get it hooked up. Then you pay a monthly charge to have that service in your home. Let’s go over this one more time. It is an option YOU choose to have and YOU pay to have it. I would assume that virtually everyone would say that we do so for OUR purposes. So that we can make calls and receive calls from the people of our choice.
Which is why tele-marketers really tick me off. Where do they get off running their business through my service? Yes, I know that the incoming call doesn’t cost me a penny. That’s beside the point. I didn’t pay for the installation and monthly service charge so that someone else can make money by annoying me. Tele-marketers are the epitome of marketing. They are trying to convince you that you need something that you have no desire for intrinsically.
No doubt someone is now wagging thier finger at the radio to remind me that this is a public utility. So is the electrical service. How would you feel about a business coming in and saying “Oh we’re going to tap into your electric to run our business. Thanks so much”. If they are on my phone then they keep me from using it. What gives them the right?
In the world of the Internet we have a word for folks who do this sort of thing. They’re called spammers. Spammers rank down there with trolls in the hierarchy of web society. Yet somehow the person who spams my phone is supposedly different.
I shouldn’t have to put up with people denying me the ability to use a service I pay for. I shouldn’t have to come up with elaborate ways to get them off the phone.
It’s my phone, dang it.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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