Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

Hot talk.

Garrison Keillor: Confessions of a Listener, in The Nation. It's killer writing, as usual. A sample:

The deregulation of radio was tough on good-neighbor radio because Clear Channel and other conglomerates were anxious to vacuum up every station in sight for fabulous sums of cash and turn them into robot repeaters. I dropped in to a broadcasting school last fall and saw kids being trained for radio careers as if radio were a branch of computer processing. They had no conception of the possibility of talking into a microphone to an audience that wants to hear what you have to say. I tried to suggest what a cheat this was, but the instructor was standing next to me. Clear Channel's brand of robotics is not the future of broadcasting. With a whole generation turning to iPod and another generation discovering satellite radio and Internet radio, the robotic formatted-music station looks like a very marginal operation indeed. Training kids to do that is like teaching typewriter repair.

After the iPod takes half the radio audience and satellite radio subtracts half of the remainder and Internet radio gets a third of the rest and Clear Channel has to start cutting its losses and selling off frequencies, good-neighbor radio will come back. People do enjoy being spoken to by other people who are alive and who live within a few miles of you.

Like the item below, I found this through The Huffington Post. Like Dave's, this blog isn't on her reaaall looong blogroll. (Which I like, because it helps disprove all that A-list bullshit.)

By the way, I also wonder if commercial blogs can legally quote from THP. See 4. (a) of its terms. IANAL, etc., but it looks to me like the answer is no. [Note: rather than subtract this paragraph from this post, I enlarged the topic with another whole post above.]

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