Disaster Radio

Three years ago, Hurricane Katrina made landfall at 7am and all hell broke loose on the Gulf Coast. It was a time when my radio and my laptop were the only real lifelines I had to my rapidly submerging home. Both then and upon my return to the Crescent City six weeks later, I found broadcast to be my lifeline.

Television reporting on the situation was extensive, but composed of short pieces in continuous rotation. It was radio I went to for in depth coverage and commentary.

This past May, the people of Myanmar suffered their own storm, one vastly worse than Katrina. It killed nearly 140,000 people as its Category 4 winds whipped across the land. Cyclone Nagris.

Despite concerns that the government controlled radio station, Naypyidaw Myanmar Radio, did not warn the people adequately of the oncoming cyclone, the population still relies on radio for a day to day lifeline. Listening to the weather report has become a daily ritual.

This is something that we on the Gulf Coast have in common with Myanmar: the reliance on an inexpensive device that pulls content from thin air. No subscription fees. No need for Internet infrastructure. Just a handheld device sharing info that could mean the difference between life and death for one’s family.

Via IRIN News:

Tint Naing, a driver from Daedayal Township, told IRIN radio was cheap and convenient, and required no more than a few batteries. [...]

Some also sees radio as a more objective source of information: “I like to listen to both state-owned and foreign [Burmese programme] radios like BBC and VOA (Voice of America),” said Lwin Maung, a 32-year old fisherman in Kunchangone who often tunes into the latter’s regular Burmese broadcasts.

“I want to compare,” said another resident, who regularly listens to the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) , which is broadcast from Norway and is largely critical of Myanmar’s military-led government.

This simultaneously illustrates both the reach of radio and the importance of reliable and accurate reporting on the airwaves. In a place like Myanmar where poverty ad illiteracy are rampant, where a simple newspaper (If available) can cost up to 1/30 of a family’s monthly income, access to radio is of vital importance.

As I continue to watch the paths of Hurricane Gustav and Tropical Storm Hanna, this aspect of the medium is very much on my mind. Three years ago I had to rely on radio for info from the ground while my home was under five feet of water from the levee failure. As I continue prepare for the possibility of evacuation, the thing I find most important is my pair of radios, a battery powered AM/FM box and a hand crank powered weather radio.

Whether I stay to ride it out or flee with my family, I can guarantee that I will be monitoring broadcast more than any other medium.

Photo courtesy of Dina Midden, used under its Creative Commons license

Grabbing My Radio, and Buying Batteries

For those of you who are new to the site, allow me to explain something. I am from New Orleans, Louisiana. Not only from there, but currently residing there, as I have for 42 years now. At the moment, our city is disturbing, a level of deja vu (and the worst kind at that) has everyone in its grip as Hurricane Gustav rolls through the Gulf of Mexico. Downgraded on Wednesday to a tropical storm, it is nonetheless projected to return to full hurricane status, with some meteorologists predicting the dreaded phrase “Category 5.”

I remember Katrina and the levee failure that followed. My wife and I left the day before landfall. It was the first hurricane I have ever run from. I remember being trapped in traffic that was more parking lot than escape route as the first storm bands rocked the car, hoping we would move before the winds worsened and we would be blown off the overpass and into the bayou.

At this point, cell phones were almost useless; the towers overloaded as the entire population attempted to phone loved ones and friends to either make sure they got out or to offer the two golden words, “I’m okay.” The radio was our only connection to any sort of news for the next 18 hours that it took for us to make the five hour drive to Memphis.

Now I write about a lot of aspects of radio on this site: advances in technology, the convergent evolution of broadcast and Internet, industry-related legislation and more. Not today. Today its all about the batteries for my radio.

If we decide to leave, we will need radio for news about Contra Flow (the evacuation plan set by the government), about traffic and where we can get through, about storm updates and tracking. Basically, everything.

If we stay, we will need radio for when the cell towers become overloaded and the Internet drops out. As it was when we returned after Katrina, it will be the go-to medium for survival information. Three years ago, the only way we knew what water was safe and what was polluted into poison by chemical spills was the radio.

So today I am buying batteries by the pound and grabbing a backup portable storm radio with crank power since I gave mine to an elderly neighbor.

There are lots of things that I could write about right now, but at the moment it’s all about the radio….

Image courtesy of dyobmit, used under its Creative Commons license

Radio, The Global View: Profitable and Innovative

UTV is based in Belfast, Ireland, and has endeavors which include Radio Ireland and GB Radio. They have seen their profits for the radio division grow by leaps and bounds as their revenue stream from TV and other media dropped.

Via The Times Online:

Operating profit in the whole radio division rose 31 per cent year on year in the first six months of the year to £9 million, with total revenue up 15 per cent to £36.4 million.

GB Radio increased revenues by 5 per cent year on year to £25 million in the first half of 2008, fuelled by an 18 per cent boost in TalkSport’s revenue to £12.1 million.

As a counterpoint, TV advertising revenue dropped by 4% in the first quarter and TV operating profit fell a whopping 15%! It seems that as we look at the global picture radio is thriving, I keep pulling up reports from all over about radio thriving and innovating not only in Ireland, but also across eastern Europe, India and many many other places.

As I examine these stories, I tend to look at a lot of radio websites — a lot of radio station websites in particular. As I do, one thing keep coming to mind: innovation. Television was supposed to kill FM in the same way FM was supposed to invalidate AM when it arrived. We all know how that worked out. Now I see that radio is developing a face as well as a voice.

Look at how many radio station websites out there are actually leveraging video in addition to their other Internet-based content. It is astounding. The advent of the Internet and broadband in particular is allowing radio the opportunity to step out ahead of the other, younger media.

The big picture is a global one, and seeing the stories about radio that I see in the news, I have to say that the gestalt of profitability (when properly leveraged) and adaptation to the digital ecosystem of the World Wide Web help paint a rosy picture of the coming years.

Slainte!

Image courtesy of Mishel Churkin, used under its Creative Commons license

Canadian Radio is Thriving

I’m from the subtropics, a land where snow is something you see on television and if winter gets down to 20 degrees it almost stops the city. Canada, as you may imagine, is alien terrain for me. Even the summers are often what I would find to be utterly freezing. I know this for a fact because I’ve been there in June.

One thing that is not freezing in Canada is radio profits. According to an article in The Canadian Press:

Statistics Canada says advertising revenue among private radio broadcasters advanced six per cent to $1.5 billion in 2007.

That’s the third time in five years radio advertising growth has outpaced advertising market growth as a whole.

Of course stations in larger, predominantly metropolitan markets are raking in much greater shares of the profit than others. That is the advantage of a concentrated audience. What I found to be particularly interesting about the figures presented was the size that margin of difference achieved:

[...] radio stations operating in the five largest census metropolitan areas last year generated almost twice as much profit before interest and taxes per dollar of revenue as stations operating in smaller markets.

The article attributes the rise in profits to a combination of factors including the transition of numerous AM stations to the FM band, a portion of the spectrum acknowledged to be both more popular with the listening public and also more popular — probably as a result of the first factor. Another factor cited is the greater concentration of ownership that followed regulatory changes in 1998, something which has allowed more stability in the face of competition from new media.

Photo courtesy of Ian Mutoo, used under ts Creative Commons license

Radio Ruminations

It is a really interesting time to be alive. The warp speed rush of technological advance makes itself felt daily at all levels, be it the Facebook-based efforts of the Obama campaign, the integration of radio into cell phones or the tiny iPods that carry weeks worth of music in a package smaller than a cassette tape. We have the privilege of watching history unfold, a period of advancements rivaled by nothing in human history. It is, quite simply, astounding.

Yesterday afternoon, I did a pre-recorded interview for a local New Orleans radio station about technology and the ramifications of social media. It was a lot of fun, and it also made me realize a few things. I make my living here on the ‘net. I have to stay as on top of “what’s new” as I possibly can be, from microblogging tools like Twitter to analyzing how people use FriendFeed to enhance work collaboration. To my wife’s chagrin, I am always glued to my laptop.

Yet despite virtually breathing the ones and zeros of digital life, getting on the air is always a thrill.

In the mid-1980s I was a college DJ at KLSU FM in Baton Rouge. My studies and career path took me in another direction, but I still have incredibly fond memories of it. I miss the joy of sending your voice out there to an unknown number of people, sharing my own musical tastes with them, and everything else that goes with the late night show. Weird phone-ins are especially missed. Those were always good for a bit of Gary Larson style entertainment.

I realized while speaking into the producer’s mic that there is a connection of feeling in radio that I have not found anywhere else. On the Internet you can reach an amazing array of people, you can interact in the comments of blogs (Go ahead, try it. Leave me a comment.) or in a wide variety of other ways. You just do not get the feeling of connection that comes with broadcast. There is something about it that is unquantifiable, the feeling that people are being drawn in which is distinctly different in so many ways. To return to the words of audio artist Tetsuo Kogawa, “radio is centripetal, not centrifugal, since it brings people together to the center.” I know I used that quote in my last post but it bears repeating.

I think he is dead right. Most Internet-based efforts are spinning content out in ever broadening arcs as they attempt to find/create their audience and community. This is not a bad thing. Radio on the other hand draws you in. Just like in the early days of broadcast when families would sit huddled near the radio listening raptly to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The Shadow, radio still draws you in.

Construction workers on a job site listening to music after the all important argument about which station to listen to is resolved. Taxi drivers and their passengers taking in the usually local content rushing through the airwaves. Indian businessmen halfway around the world listening to FM on their cell phones. These are the descendants of the big wooden box that told my grandfather when Babe Ruth scored a home run. Even though it lacks the pictorial aspect of TV or YouTube, there is nothing like radio for feeling like you are part of things.

As Bruce Lee said in Enter The Dragon, “What we need is emotional content.”

Photo courtesy of gutter, used under its Creative Commons license

Radio with Seoul: Audio Art and Radio Relevance

Art is not something that comes up often in discussions about radio unless one is speaking of music. At least that used to be the case. A movement among certain performance artists towards creating audio art — many times in the form of mashups created on the fly — has been steadily rising.

Right now, for instance, there is quite an intriguing installation in Seoul, Korea, that is broadcasting through a temporary FM station built just for that purpose. I realize that performance art is something that eludes many people. They just do not quite get it. Heck, sometimes I do not get it. In this case, even if you have no interest in the artistic angle, you really should pay attention to the valuable insights about radio as a medium that are coming out of the effort.

Via The Korea Times:

According to the organizers of Sound Effects Seoul Radio 2008 (SFX Seoul), radio is definitely still alive and relevant.

“Radio is a presence in our lives. It’s kind of like a soundtrack to our lives. Something that you don’t know quite what to expect from, something always in the background and usually it is something that you don’t pay attention to directly. …That’s something similar to the way sound art is. Sound art is not an artwork that you can focus on. It is always affected by other sounds. There are a lot of parallels to that with radio. Radio is a medium for presenting sound art,” Baruch Gottlieb, director and co-founder of SFX Seoul, told The Korea Times.

What I love about this is that it support assertions I find myself making frequently: things are changing, radio is still relevant, and that there is still an important and vibrant difference between radio and the web despite the convergent evolution of the two.

SFX Seoul includes a temporary radio station, which is intended to be an extension of Japanese artist Tetsuo Kogawa’s Mini-FM concept, wherein hundreds of people set up their own mini-radio stations in Tokyo.

The event also explores whether radio is still relevant in the age of the Internet. “Why is it so important to broadcast? There are a few sides that are relevant. (Academic) Jonathan Stern says that one of the aspects of radio that makes it different from the Internet is that it is autonomous. While the Internet is tied up with servers and computers, Kogawa showed that with just $20 and a 9-volt battery you can broadcast to anybody within a kilometer. It has a very different presence from the Internet. Kogawa said radio is centripetal, not centrifugal, since it brings people together to the center,” Gottlieb said.

You see? While the 21st Century trend towards audio art may not be your cup of tea, it can still offer insight and perspective on our own medium. This is the cutting edge of art, and they love radio. Keep in mind the “centripetal, not centrifugal” aspect Mr. Gottlieb mentioned. It is quite an insight and one that we will be returning to here on Radio2020.

Until later, Stay Tuned!

Photo courtesy of laszlo-photo used uder its Creative Commons license

The iTunes Download: Now On The Radio!

Here we go! A little technological cross pollination to help start your day off on an interesting foot! As new media continues its ongoing and rapid evolution and digital music players become as ubiquitous as Walkmans back in the ’80s, we find that radio is not only advancing with them but also is finally becoming integrated into the new picture of audio entertainment for the 21st Century!

Check out this bit from Lost Remote, a site whose tag line is “Local Media and the Battle for the Web”:

While some in the radio business cringe when they think of the popularity of iTunes and in-car iPods, mega radio syndicator Premiere Radio Networks has created a new show called The iTunes Download that counts down the 30 most downloaded iTunes songs. And it’s hosted by iTunes Director of Music Programming Alex Luke. “Radio is where more music buyers first hear what they want to buy and iTunes is the place they go to do it — now we’re connecting the two,” said Luke. I don’t know about you, but I don’t listen to the radio to hear the same songs over and over again (like many stations still do), but I listen to discover new music that I might add to my iPod playlists. Understanding that shift — from pure entertainment to discovery engine — is important for music radio stations to navigate the years ahead.

This seems to be a solid integration of classic broadcast and new technology, something that we should be seeing more and more of as developers continue to explore the ever widening range of tech available. It has the added advantage of taking a more “new media” stance as far as the role of each element: broadcast for discovery, iTunes and Internet-based delivery systems for purchase.

Evolution. I use this word constantly and with good reason. As everyone from the huge conglomerates to the independently owned public stations has realized, the game is changing. At the moment, it’s like playing poker with half the cards wild. With forethought and mental agility, it can be a chaotic but profitable game.

I’ll take two cards, please.

Photo courtesy of tanais, used under its Creative Commons license

Radio Cadena Es Buena!

Martín Llorens is well known as an expert in fashion and beauty. Now he is an expert with the power of broadcast, reaching America’s fastest growing demographic: Hispanics.

On August 15, Univision Radio announced that Mr. Llorens has been signed as the new host for “Hola Martin,” a spanish language program focused on lifestyle and entertainment. Not only that, but the show will have a national presence since it is being broadcast on fifteen Radio Cadena stations across the United States. Radio Cadena is Univision Radio’s national network of AM stations.

Via Della de Lafuente of MediaWeek:

Kmart is the chief sponsor for the weekday call-in program, which features practical advice from Llorens on lifestyle topics, including beauty, fashion, health and wellness and even homework. Guests include celebrities, musical acts and other entertainers. Llorens’ program went on the air June 30, per a Univision representative.

“Hola Martín” airs in major Hispanic markets including, Los Angeles (KTNQ); New York (WADO); Miami (WQBA); Chicago (WRTO); Houston (KLAT); San Antonio (KCOR); San Francisco (KLOK); Dallas-Ft.Worth (KFLC); McAllen (KGBT); San Diego (XERCN) and others.

Geared for a youthful demographic in a market acknowledged to be expanding, the program seems to have high potential. Gary Stone, President and COO of Univision Radio, has been quoted as saying that it will tackle topics and entertainment “not addressed on other Spanish-language talk radio programs.” Between that and the program’s partnership with advertiser Kmart, this could go far.

“‘Hola Martín’ offers marketers a powerful outlet for reaching Hispanics on air, on site and online,” said David Lawenda, president, advertising sales and marketing, Univision Communications Inc, in a statement.

In the midst of all of the technological advancements we see everyday, it is interesting to run across stories like this. AM radio is not what one thinks of when industry advances or innovation enter the conversation, however stories like this illustrate its continued relevance. Not bad for a format that “was on its last legs” with the advent of FM, eh?

Food for thought. (Huevos Rancheros in this case, mmmmm…..)

Photo courtesy of DF Shapinsky for PINGNews.com/Shapinsky MultiMedia, used under its Creative Commons license

Leroy Sievers Passes

At the age of 53, award-winning journalist Leroy Sievers has lost his battle with cancer. While most of you probably know him from his amazing work on Nightline with Ted Koppel, it is the work he did starting in 2006 for NPR that I would like to look at.

Via Valerie J. Nelson at the Los Angeles Times:

He began his public conversation about the disease by saying, “Death and I are hardly strangers” in a that aired on NPR’s “Morning Edition” in early 2006. It was a reference to his quarter-century as a journalist during which he covered more than a dozen wars for CBS and ABC news. His radio commentaries evolved into a regular series about his life that he called “cancer world.” The project grew to include a daily blog and a weekly podcast.

“Leroy gave voice to a topic that we are very uncomfortable with — death and dying,” Ellen McDonnell, NPR’s morning programming director said in a statement.

As he shared with the world an inside view of fighting terminal illness, he also pointed the way to the future in the way he chose to do so. By combining traditional broadcast with blogging and podcasting, he was able to reach out across the nation not only to fellow cancer patients, but to the populace at large.

Having direct experience in Iraq, Kososvo, Central America, and Somalia among other blood-drenched trouble spots, death was indeed “no stranger,” although a much more lingering house guest than he may have expected. It was this greatest battle that he chose to share with us via the medium of radio — NPR’s Morning Edition to be precise.

Via Shomial Ahmad at NPR:

As he began chemotherapy treatments, Sievers detailed his experiences on NPR’s Morning Edition, in a commentary that aired Feb. 16, 2006.

Ellen McDonnell, NPR’s morning-programming director, recalls listening to that first commentary, and she remembers how the rawness and transparency of Sievers’ words struck a chord with listeners — those battling cancer, and others as well.

Several months after the first commentary came a second, and then a regular series chronicling Sievers’ life in what he called “Cancer World.”

Eventually, under the title “My Cancer,” the project would become a multimedia conversation that included a daily blog, a weekly podcast and — most important to Sievers — a community.

From frank sharing of the simple things — the uncomfortable silences in conversation that come with cancer, a desire to live long enough to read the final Harry Potter book, and more — Sievers gave the world a window into what it is like to not only fight for your life against illness, but also into all of the ways that such an illness affects all aspects of day to day existence. By grounding it in the normally mundane details of existence, he opened up room for actual conversation.

Terminal illness often makes one feel outside of normal life, separated by rebellious bodily functions and deterioration from the lighter hearted day to day life of those around you. Sievers provided a forum on which people could talk about their feelings, fears, hopes, and the daily tribulations that chronic illness brings.

[...] many reporters asked Sievers variations on one basic question: “What do you get out of writing the blog?”

He concluded one My Cancer post with an answer: “A daily reminder that none of us walks this road alone. What could be better than that?”

Indeed. What could be better? All trials are easier with some company. Leroy, we will miss your company and your insight. Broadcast media as a whole will be lessened by your departure.

NPR – Leroy Sievers: A Farewell In His Own Words

Photo courtesy of NC in DC, used under its Creative Commons license

Ladies and Gentlemen, President Bush and Senator McCain

Since our last post looked at the Democratic Party using radio as a vehicle for their message, this time we’ll be looking at the Republican Party’s use of the airwaves. While the Democratic address we looked at last time was concerned with domestic affairs, President Bush’s had a focus halfway around the world.

President Bush and Senator McCain used the address to call upon Russia to restore its relationship with the international community while also warning against future altercations with Georgia. He noted that the Russian invasion of Georgia coming rapidly in the wake of Georgia applying for NATO membership was an event with larger implications within the global political arena, particularly in the west.

Here is a quote via Jackie Kucinich at The Hill:

“In recent years, Russia has sought to integrate into the diplomatic, political, economic, and security structures of the West…The United States has supported those efforts,” Bush said. “Now Russia has put its aspirations at risk by taking actions in Georgia that are inconsistent with the principles of those institutions.”

Senator McCain then followed up by using the recent upheavals in Georgia to argue in favor of domestic energy production, citing skyrocketing gas and oil prices as the results of dependence upon foreign sources.

Photo courtesy of Image Editor, used under its Creative Commons license