Radio, rock, giornali e un guru molto discusso

La società editoriale Tribune, proprietario del Chicago Tribune e del LA Times, fa discutere per aver assunto, con l'incarico di rilanciare i quotidiani del gruppo nell'era di Internet, l'ex direttore artistico di XM Satellite Radio, Lee Abrams, reputato (da alcuni) un guru dei new media. Abrams è una personalità importante nel mondo della radio americana, ma il suo ruolo all'interno di una azienda radicata nella vecchia tradizione dei giornali cartacei non è ben vista da tutti. Anzi. Sui siti Internet cominciano a circolare i memo che Abrams invia ai "suoi" giornalisti con la mail interna. Sono pieni di banalità spaventose e denunciano una scarsa dimestichezza con un medium che starà anche morendo, ma non ha mica l'Alzheimer.
Approfondendo la questione salta fuori che Lee Abrams gode di incerta reputazione anche nel mondo della radio. Secondo un critico molto autorevole, Joe Carducci, l'ex responsabile della programmazione di XM porterebbe la grave responsabilità della "uccisione" di alcuni format radiofonici importanti, a incominciare dal rock puro (mal comune, mezzo gaudio verrebbe da dire confrontando le parole di Carducci - "dopo aver ammazzato la radio adesso Abrams è stato incaricato di ammazzare i giornali; li rimpiangerò come oggi rimpiango la radio" - con la storia italiana di RockFM). Perché dico che Carducci è un esperto? Intanto perché lo scrive Business Week. Poi perché su Wikipedia ho letto con molto interesse del libro scritto da Carducci sull'estetica del rock, uno dei primi studi di questo tipo. Pubblicato nel 1991 Rock and the pop narcotic è un tomo di oltre cinquento pagine e ora non mi resta che attendere con ansia che Christian me ne faccia un ponderato riassunto.
Questa storia di generi che muoiono mi è sembrata suggestiva e ho voluto condividerla con voi. Qui di seguito ecco i testi di InformationWeek e il velenoso post anti-abramsiano firmato dallo stesso Carducci. Non so Abrams riuscirà a rilanciare il Chicago Tribune o lo farà affondare come ha fatto con il format rock (sostituito dallo scialbo "adult contemporary"), so solo che Carducci fa notare alcune incongruità dei "microformat" della radio satellitare che mi hanno fatto riflettere.

Old Media Looks To A Radio Guru

Richard Martin, May 19, 2008 06:44 PM

Right now, among the beleaguered employees of the Tribune Co., the prevalent question (besides "Will I still have a job tomorrow?") is, "Who the hell does Lee Abrams think he is?"
Officially, Abrams is the newly hired "chief innovation officer" at Tribune, which owns the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, and a bunch of other newspapers plus 23 TV stations, including the WGN "Superstation." Abrams came over from XM Radio several months ago to try and revive Tribune's daily newspaper business, which is plummeting faster than an Indian rocket. Unfortunately, what he's done so far is mostly written a bunch of inane e-memos, which have inevitably made their way to the blogosphere.
As it happens, I spent a few days with Abrams a few years ago, trailing him for a feature on XM for Wired magazine. He's a roly-poly fellow with a Groucho Marx moustache, and he's a pioneer in "alternative" radio -- some would say he killed off alternative radio with the programmatic "adult-oriented rock" format, which he helped create. He's a very sharp guy, with a penchant for telling war tales about his hazy days with superbands like Yes, in the glory days of the 1970s. Unfortunately, judging from his Tribune memos, he also has a penchant for new-media clichés, often presented in ALL CAPS with lots of EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!

(continua)

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On Lee Abrams: Radio Down, Newspapers To Go

Posted Wed Mar 26 2:22pm PDT by Joe Carducci in The ARTHUR Blog

Lee Abrams introduced himself last week to the Tribune Company's employees as their new "innovation chief" with an all-caps headline:

NEWS & INFORMATION IS THE NEW ROCK N ROLL.
His formulation predictably echoes one by Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone in 1974, wherein, juiced by the excitement of McGovern's recent 49-state loss to Richard Nixon, he declared,

POLITICS WILL BE THE ROCK AND ROLL OF THE SEVENTIES.

Wenner was in essence admitting publicly his loss of interest in music (the mag soured on everything new but singer-songwriters by 1970), but he had already driven off the real politicos on the staff who'd wanted Rolling Stone to get behind the revolution of the Panthers, the Weathermen, et. al. That had been expressed as a defense of music (!?!). But Hunter S. Thompson's ability to revolutionize campaign reportage in 1972 led Rolling Stone from the west coast and rock and roll to New York in 1978, where Wenner rapidly devolved into just another clueless publisher trying to bell the cat--that beast out beyond the Hudson that kept electing Republicans and buying Rush albums.
Such bombast usually disguises its opposite. "It was the star trip all over again," Wenner's staff concluded according to Robert Sam Anson in his book, Gone Crazy And Back Again (Doubleday). Wenner's purpose had been to meet the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and now his mind was wandering.
Lee Abrams' memo (posted at poynter.org) follows his abusive invocation of Rock with three bullet points headed: Soul, Art, and The economics.
He poses as coming from vital, innovative ROCK N ROLL!, when actually he was one of the handful of people who made their fortune destroying rock and roll radio and all but extinguishing vitality and innovation.
Beginning in January 1973 Burkhart-Abrams Inc. formatted, programmed, researched, and syndicated the music for nearly a thousand stations--Burkhart did the AM, Abrams did FM. In my first book I quoted Abrams from an interview he unwisely gave to Rolling Stone in 1977:

"We have about thirty-nine college students who worked 365 days of the year doing legwork distributing questionnaires about general music taste... They're distributed all over the country, mainly in shopping center type locations. We found that if we use music locations like concerts, we get a tremendous bias."

Yeah, a bias in favor of music: live rock and roll. This all dovetailed with the anxiety that punk rock was causing the now corporatized '60s ex-underground. Burkhart-Abrams simply deprived punk rock of oxygen and thereby all but killed rock and roll in the defense of established "Superstars"--their FM format's name. Today one hears the Ramones at major league sports events, but the Weirdos and hundreds more deserved airplay in that 17-year radio desert that ended briefly with Nirvana's breakthrough. With rock and roll safely underground once again, Abrams ditched music for Howard Stern, Steve Dahl and the morning zoo legions of guffawing drive-time buffoons.
(continua)

USA: lo stato della notizia

Grazie a Jonathan Marks, che lo ha puntualmente recensito su Critical Distance, sono in grado di suggerirvi la lettura del capitolo sulla radio (anche tutti gli altri sono molto belli) del rapporto annuale The State of News Media, un lavoro del Project for Excellence in Journalism che analizza in dettaglio lo stato dei mezzi di informazione negli Stati Uniti. Il PEJ è un progetto per nove anni affiliato con la Columbia University e oggi ospitato dal Pew Research Center di Washington, l'ufficio studi finanziato dal Pew Charitable Trusts.

Sul sito ufficiale di State of News Media 2008 trovate (oltre all'archivio delle precedenti edizioni a partire dal 2004) tutti i capitoli del volume, con un utile motore di ricerca. La sezione dedicata alla radio è fitta di testo e di grafici che sarebbe impossibile riassumere o riportare qui. Mi limito a inserire qui l'introduzione del capitolo:

Intro

By the Project for Excellence in Journalism

News remains an important part of what was once simply called radio. In many ways, indeed, the tradition of listening to the news — aural transmission is the original way people got news — is among the most enduring.

But the radio business is undergoing no less of a revolution than any other part of media. The audience is fragmenting across new listening platforms. The revenue models are unclear, and which technology will emerge is uncertain.

What we once knew as radio is now something more complex and in many ways more interesting. In addition to the AM and FM dials, now there is satellite, HD, Internet, MP3s, podcasting, and increasingly, cell phones.

In 2007, the audience for traditional radio continued to slip some. But AM/FM listening still reached 93% of the population over 12 years old, down less than two percentage points overall since 2000.

At the same time, the audiences for new audio continue to grow. The numbers are still small. And it may be that a technology that has not yet become a major factor — cell phones — could in the end be a dominant one. Much more change, in other words, is to come.

Financially, the industry faces large challenges, leading to experimentation and change. Radio is finally putting more resources into the Web, into social networking, on-demand news features and portable Internet radio equipment. Online revenue is growing, but not dramatically.

Some companies, partly in reaction, continued to move toward privatization. Clear Channel, the largest radio concern, started the trend in 2006, and had nearly completed the move by selling off some of its stations by the end of 2007. Cumulus Media signaled its intent to move toward private ownership in 2007 as well.

With fragmentation, moreover, comes variety. Even the content of traditional broadcast radio is now remarkably varied, depending on the source. Public radio thrives. News headlines, our content analysis suggests, provide an important and diverse source of information — and are far more than anchors reading wire copy. Talk radio, meanwhile, is something quite distinct from traditional news, and narrows, not broadens, the agenda.

What seems safest is the idea that listening to news and information is likely to endure, even thrive. But the shape of that is both changing rapidly and in other ways changing very little.

La radio del Washington Post chiude i battenti

Nel suo piccolo la conclusione dell'avventura raiofonica del gruppo RCS con la cessione di Play Radio a Finelco, ci aveva suggerito che il mondo della notizia cartacea non può essere trapiantato sic et simpliciter nella realtà del giornalismo o dell'intrattenimento radiofonico. Una verità che il Washington Post ha imparato a spese di WTWP, emittente all news andata in onda un anno e mezzo fa e destinata a chiudere il mese prossimo. WTWP aveva preso il posto sui 1500 kHz di un marchio storico della Washington all news, WTOP (spostatasi sugli 820 kHz). WTOP rimane di proprietà del gruppo Bonneville, partner radiofonico del Post nella nuova, sfortunata, iniziativa. Insieme alla notizia apparsa oggi sul quotidiano della capitale americana leggetevi il commento di Marc Fisher, blogger e columnist per il Post. Quella che doveva essere una "NPR alla caffeina" (una stazione di alto profilo culturale ed equilibrata ma dal giornalismo di approfondimento e aggressivo) era diventata una accozzaglia di interventi disparati, dove anche le migliori firme della carta stampata (il dead tree medium, come si dice oggi) apparivano fuori luogo.
Non ho ben capito che cosa intenda fare Bonneville della frequenza di 1500, uno dei canali nord americani più regolari per i DXer delle onde medie in Italia. Le onde medie sono sicuramente più seguite negli USA, ma non al punto da giustificare l'occupazione di una frequenza a fronte di uno share striminzito.

With Low Ratings, Post Radio Venture To End Next Month

By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 28, 2007; C01

Washington Post Radio, which brought the newspaper's journalists to the local airwaves, will go off the air next month after failing to attract enough listeners and losing money during its 17-month existence.

Post Radio, which is broadcast regionwide on 107.7 FM and 1500 AM, , was not able to draw even 1 percent of listeners during its first year. Although ratings have improved somewhat in recent months -- partly because of Nationals baseball broadcasts and Tony Kornheiser's morning program -- the gains weren't enough to convince WTWP's owner, Bonneville International Corp., that the station could be profitable any time soon, executives said. Bonneville and The Post had a three-year agreement.
The two companies will announce Friday that WTWP -- whose call letters abbreviate the newspaper's name -- will go off the air by the end of September. The stations will continue to carry news and talk programming without an association with The Post.
Billed as a new kind of radio programming when it began in March of last year, Post Radio, or WTWP AM-FM, featured in-depth discussions with Post reporters and editors about the day's news. The station's backers said it would be like "NPR on caffeine" for news-hungry listeners.
Some local programs, such as David Burd's morning show, will continue on the new, still-unnamed replacement station, but the bulk of the broadcasting day will be filled with syndicated talk shows. Executives declined to identify a new lineup yesterday, but they previously have said they were considering conservative-libertarian talkers Glenn Beck and Neal Boortz, among others.
Bonneville paid an annual fee to The Post for access to its journalists and for the use of The Post's name. The Post, which had no direct financial investment in the stations, will make a small profit from the fee payments, an executive familiar with the agreement said yesterday.
In addition to WTWP, the Salt Lake City-based Bonneville owns all-news WTOP (820 AM and 103.5 FM) in Washington and WFED (1050 AM), which broadcasts news about the federal government.
"It has been a good experiment during which we learned about radio as one of the platforms on which we can put Washington Post journalists and journalism," said Leonard Downie, The Post's executive editor. Downie declined to comment directly on WTWP's demise.
People close to the station said the end of the venture would result in very few layoffs because employees of WTWP will be able to move to Bonneville's other stations, including WTOP. It was unclear how the end of WTWP would affect a small cadre of producers who work on radio and TV projects within The Post.
During the recent spring ratings period, WTWP finished tied for 18th place among local stations, with an average of 1.2 percent of the audience, according to Arbitron. It was the station's best three-month performance since its inception.
The addition of syndicated programs to WTWP's lineup had been a source of tension between Bonneville and The Post when executives began meeting in June to consider changes. Bonneville, eager to cut losses that have run to about $2 million annually, favored syndicated programming because it costs a station virtually nothing to carry it. But The Post was concerned about being associated with the kind of one-sided and inflammatory rhetoric that often distinguishes successful syndicated talk hosts.
One unresolved issue is the status of Kornheiser, who hosted WTWP's most popular programs on weekday mornings. Executives expected Kornheiser, a veteran Post sports columnist, to return to the station next January after finishing his second season as an analyst on ESPN's "Monday Night Football," but the dissolution of The Post's involvement could affect his role.


Why Washington Post Radio Died

From its sudden and fascinating inception to its slow and awkward demise, Washington Post Radio was a work in progress. It never came close to fulfilling its original promise--"NPR on caffeine," in the spicy phrase of the newspaper's radio-TV guru, Tina Gulland--but it was a radio station bubbling with possibilities.
Not that many listeners cared to explore those possibilities. The radio station--which will die next month by mutual consent of its clumsily-paired parents, The Washington Post and Bonneville broadcasting--never showed much of a pulse in the ratings, even though its programming ran on one of the most powerful and storied spots on Washington's radio dial, the former home of all-news WTOP.
In an era of rapid change in the news and media businesses, when both print newspapers and broadcast radio stations are seeing huge chunks of their audience migrate to online news and entertainment sources, Washington Post Radio was an experiment in stretching the idea that it doesn't really matter through what platform you get your news--what's important, rather, is who the storytellers are.
From the start in March of last year, Post Radio was intended to serve several purposes: 1) Promote the Post's print and online journalism by reaching a new audience on the radio. 2) Create another outlet for Post reporting and thereby add one more justification for keeping a big, sprawling newsroom at a paper that, like almost all U.S. papers, is otherwise shrinking its staff. 3) Give Bonneville, the owner of all-news WTOP and several other D.C. radio stations, a way to capture some of the Washington region's enormous audience for public radio's more in-depth and upscale news and information programming. 4) Build on the powerful profits that WTOP draws as the dominant local station in morning drive time.
The radio industry by and large found the experiment intriguing but foolhardy--a difficult marriage of two very different news cultures. The station, owned by Bonneville in a contract with the Post, was managed primarily by executives at WTOP's headquarters on Idaho Avenue NW in McLean Gardens, while most of the people who appeared on the station sat in a studio built in the Post's downtown newsroom. Both companies provided producers who worked in their respective newsrooms organizing each day's programming.
Not long after Post Radio launched, National Public Radio helped local public stations WAMU (88.5 FM) and WETA (90.9 FM) finance a series of focus groups with listeners "to help us see what Washington Post Radio would mean to us," said Caryn Mathes, general manager of WAMU, the third-most listened to public station in the nation, after outlets in New York and San Francisco.
The four focus groups were united in their perceptions of Post Radio: Listeners said that after they tuned in to the Post station, which launched with the slogan "There's always more to the story," "there wasn't more to the story," Mathes said. "People felt the station didn't deliver on deeper, more insider kind of stuff from the reporters who were on the air."
For the Post's hundreds of reporters and editors, going on the radio was something new. From the start, some people were good at it, some were just awful and a lot perhaps had potential, but didn't have much idea of what we were doing. This was learning by doing--in a very public way.
At first, the idea was to create a throwback to radio's golden era, with a station designed like a magazine, with different departments each hour--an hour on travel from the folks in the paper's Travel section, an hour with the editors from Book World, an hour of politics, and so on. But with the station making not a blip in the ratings and with its producers increasingly convinced that too many of the Post's writers had perhaps chosen a career in print for a good reason, the executives at Bonneville quickly moved to scrap the original format and go to something they knew more intimately--a tightly-organized hourly clock with different stories and personalities appearing every five minutes or so.
Listeners had every reason to wonder what had happened to the increased depth they had been promised. Print editors accustomed to a more serious news menu clashed with radio producers who argued that their medium required a more populist and lowbrow selection of stories. In each newsroom, too many people rolled their eyes over the cluelessness of their cross-town partners.
When the radio-side producers one morning invited on the air and lightly questioned some nutball hawking a conspiracy theory about how the U.S. government had arranged for the 9/11 attacks, editors in the Post newsroom went ballistic. Although many attempts would follow to find a happy medium between the two news sensibilities, the basic reservoir of mutual respect had dropped suddenly and permanently to a dangerous low.
At its best, Washington Post Radio was a comfortable, personable and conversational way to learn what was in that day's newspaper and sometimes even to get the story behind the story. The station's anchors were top-shelf professionals, from NBC veteran Bob Kur and former local TV weather forecaster Hillary Howard to CBS and NPR newsman Sam Litzinger and longtime local radio host David Burd. And some of the Post's voices worked splendidly on radio, winning praise within the industry and from listeners as well--Lisa deMoraes on television, Stephen Hunter on movies, Emilio Garcia-Ruiz on sports, and columnist Gene Robinson on just about anything.
Sometimes, the theory behind the station became reality, and a foreign correspondent could phone in from the scene of an earth-moving event with the kind of firsthand account that radio was invented to deliver. More often, however, the reporters who came on the air did little more than repeat what they'd said in that morning's paper.
In the end, there were too many oh-my-God, Martha, this person is freezing up live on the radio moments. A Book World segment crashed and burned when a writer insisted on reading his pearls of wisdom verbatim from his newspaper work. And on more occasions than either side cared to admit, reporters were told to come on the air to talk about one story, only to go live and hear an anchorman ask them about something wholly different, about which the reporter knew not a thing.
In the end, though, Post Radio's competitors say it was the basic concept that was flawed: "It sounded like a bad college seminar where neither the professors nor the students knew how to keep anyone listening," said the program director of an FM music station who asked not to be named because he might work with people at Bonneville in the future.
And from the other end of radio's spectrum, this from the chief of the region's most powerful public radio outlet: "This assumption that people don't have an attention span is kind of offensive," WAMU's Mathes said. "People who want a deep contextual approach to news do have an attention span."
For those of us who tried our hand at radio, Washington Post Radio was enormous fun, a chance to dive into a form that might seem similar, but really requires very different skills. The idea that Post executives fell in love with remains an important one: If the American newspaper is to survive as the basic foundation of newsgathering in this country, the companies that produce daily papers will have to find ways to sell their wares in various other media. But what the demise of Post Radio teaches is that that expansion into other crafts will mean that news organizations must hire and train people with a different set of talents and passions, and that inevitably entails a different concept of what the news is. It's a new world out there. Read all about it.
By Marc Fisher | August 28, 2007; 6:08 AM ET