Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

Low-Power Community Radio?

A comment on this post reminded me of something I was thinking a few days ago: remember when the commercial radio stations were fighting with the low-power radio stations? I haven’t been involved in this debate for a while (I used to work for a member of Congress, so I recall something of the issue; I’ve been out of politics for about 7 years, so I don’t know whether it’s still a live issue.)

Some in the community at that time were concerned about consolidation by Clear Channel and other big players, and that radio would lack local community voices…so they wanted to have extremely low-power stations that would preserve that local megaphone (or maybe I should say miniphone.)

Now we seem to have come full-circle. Clear Channel is going private and selling off hundreds of its stations. And with the advent of podcasting less than three years ago, now anybody can get as big an audience as they can attract. No FCC license needed.

In fact, that’s my working definition of New Media: anything that doesn’t require an FCC license.

Admittedly, the FCC licenses are for public airwaves, and there is a stewardship responsibility. I don’t know how exactly what the ownership rules are (and Nabisco, whose name links to the NAB site) obviously has a dog in this fight, as he properly disclosed in his comment.

Who disagrees with him and why? I can see that the broadcast stations are going to have a significant advantage in building an audience because they are using the public airwaves for transmission. But with bandwidth costs essentially approaching zero, now almost anyone has very similar ability to reach an audience through audio. And we can do video, too…which radio stations can’t, except on their web sites.

And as we see on the net, communities aren’t necessarily geographic. FIR, for instance, reaches a community of people interested in PR and technology.

In a world of infinite choice for audio entertainment and information, does it still make sense to limit ownership of local radio stations?

I don’t know…I’m sure open to hearing arguments on the other side. But it seems the days of media monopolies are over.

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Twying Twitter

I’ve been watching all the chirping about Twitter, those who are addicted and those who hate it. One of the questions I had was how I might practically use it. Lifehacker has some good thoughts, and other related posts are here, here and here.

So, I decided to try it. Part of my job as Manager for National Media and New Media at Mayo Clinic is to explore new trends and how they might affect our work of communicating about research, relating with journalists and making reliable health and medical information available to the general public.

I’ll admit that SMS text messaging is something with which I wasn’t too familiar, mainly because it was an extra charge on my cell phone bill. And with six users on our cell phone plan (even with my oldest daughter getting married and moving to a new account) we didn’t need more cell phone expense.

But my daughters are seriously into IM and SMS, as is everyone else in their generation, so I rationalized buying the 300 message plan for myself on grounds of connecting with them and also better understanding the next generation.

I set up a Twitter account here, and would welcome friends to join. You can sign up for my Twitter RSS feed (I can’t guarantee it will be interesting) even without joining Twitter, but if you do join Twitter you can get alerts on your cell phone.

I’m not sure how I can best use Twitter or whether Mayo Clinic should, but I look forward to exploring. My friend Shel Holtz at FIR uses it to tweet people and invite comments when he’s recording his twice weekly podcast with Neville Hobson, which I think is a neat way to create more timely interactivity with their audience.

I could see this possibly being used for emergency communications, disaster drills, to quickly get messages to a core team. Setting up a Twitter account called “Disaster55905” for our zip code, and asking people to sign up for SMS alerts, would be a good way to reach participants quickly.

I could see this having some media relations possiblities too, where maybe journalists could set up an account where they post what stories they’re working on, and what kinds of sources they need. It might be a way to get sources quickly without using email or placing phone calls. And maybe for organizations that have news releases/studies, etc., they (or we) could use it for a heads up to journalists who opt in to receive notification of story ideas…creating a community of news related to a topic like health, or medicine, or for a particular company or industry.

Journalists and their editors have traditionally wanted to keep their story budgets close to the vest for competitive reasons, but maybe not in the future. Wired magazine has an interesting crowdsourcing article that suggests maybe journalists might be opening up a bit.

What do you think? Possibilities?

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Media and Marketing Chaos

In Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario 2.0, from Advertising Age, Garfield summarizes in one place what I’ve been writing for several months about layoffs in traditional media and their plummeting stock prices and market valuations.

In December 2005, Viacom spun off CBS, the so-called Tiffany Network, lest the broadcast business impede growth and depress shareholder value.

Just before Christmas 2005, Time Inc. laid off 100 employees. Just after Christmas, in January 2006, Time Inc. laid off 100 more employees. In April 2006, Time Inc. laid off 250 more employees — the last round of job cuts, the company said. In January, Time Inc. laid off 300 more employees. No wonder. Since 2001, Time Warner’s market capitalization has shrunk to $82 billion from $193 billion.

Last fall, ostensibly to promote their new seasons, five broadcast networks bypassed their local affiliates and gave away new programs online.

In October 2006, NBC announced a $750 million cost cutback, including 700 jobs and a moratorium on scripted programs in the first hour of prime time.

In November 2006, Clear Channel — the boogeyman of media consolidation — sold to private-equity owners and declared that it wants to unload its TV and small-market radio stations. The sale fetched $38 a share. In 2000, the stock sold at $100 a share.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune, acquired by McClatchy in 1998 for $1.2 billion, was sold to private investors in December 2006 for $530 million.

In 2000, Chicago-based Tribune Co. was valued at $12 billion. It then bought Times-Mirror Co. for more than $8 billion. At this writing, with Tribune Co. for sale as a whole or in part, the value of the merged company is $7.34 billion.

YouTube. Two years ago, it — much less Joost and Revver and Brightcove and the online-video industry in general — did not exist.

And of course, the Tribune deal went down just last week, with a creatively financed $8 billion package, or roughly what Tribune paid for the Times-Mirror in 2000.

I highly recommend reading the whole article, including the prequel from 2005.

Shel Holtz is right when he says new media don’t make old media obsolete, but the old media adapt. The question Garfield raises is whether they will adapt quickly enough to remain economically viable in the long term, or whether they will put on a brave face as they steam toward the iceberg, not wanting to alarm the passengers/advertisers.

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Upcoming Presentations

In the next few weeks I’ll be presenting at some conferences, of both the audio and full-body/multimedia varieties:

  • Wednesday, March 28 (tomorrow) I’m one of four presenters in a Healthcare Intelligence Network audio conference entitled Healthcare for the New Generations: Understanding and Engaging Generation “Xers” and “Yers” Through Tailored Products and Channels
  • During the second week of April I’ll be at this conference in Chicago, the Advanced Learning Institute’s Social Media Summit. I presented at a similar conference last October in San Francisco, and found it well-run and highly informative.
  • In late April, a colleague and I will be in Orlando for the Forum for Healthcare Strategists’ Twelfth National Forum on Customer Based Marketing Strategies (PDF).
  • I enjoy presenting at and participating in these seminars and conferences because they’re a lot like the blogosphere, with threads of conversation, various points of view, and people chiming in and contributing to the shared knowledge. I always learn a lot that I can apply in my work.

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Getting Nekkid

On Wired, Clive Thompson has a provocative article The See-Through CEO about the value of radical transparency achieved through CEO blogging…

Pretend for a second that you’re a CEO. Would you reveal your deepest, darkest secrets online? Would you confess that you’re an indecisive weakling, that your colleagues are inept, that you’re not really sure if you can meet payroll? Sounds crazy, right? After all, Coke doesn’t tell Pepsi what’s in the formula. Nobody sane strips down naked in front of their peers. But that’s exactly what Glenn Kelman did. And he thinks it saved his business.

You’ve gotta read that now, right? Go here to see it.

And while you’re at it, this history of Microsoft’s Channel 9 is a good case study of how blogging, and especially video blogging, can help key audiences better understand a company. If you think your company is basically doing things right, transparency like this can help the world see it. And if you’ve got problems, it can help even more…by shining the light on things that need to change, and showing that you’re open to solutions. Let your stakeholders help find them.

Interestingly, Thompson’s article was written “in the buff,” so to speak. He did it out in the open and asked for comments, which made the final product stronger. Not the way to do it if you’re looking for a “scoop,” but a way to take advantage of engaged readers to bring different facts and points of view into focus.

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