Interview Regarding San Diego’s Mid-Century Art Scene

A fascinating interview (audio and transcript) with Dave Hampton of ObjectsUSA.com, who discusses the art scene in mid-twentieth-century San Diego. Check it out HERE.

CSM on the death of local radio

CSM
Your local DJ – a few time zones away
Radio stations are axing staff and subbing in syndicated hosts to cut costs.
By Randy Dotinga | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

from the January 23, 2009 edition

You could call it the culling of the heard.

In Boston, a popular AM station has stopped broadcasting live overnight for the first time since 1952. In San Diego, the nation's ninth-largest city, just two major local talk-show hosts remain on the air after cutbacks. And across the country, stations are banishing local disc jockeys to the unemployment line in favor of nationally syndicated hosts like Ryan Seacrest and John Tesh.

There's a common theme here: With all of its costs, live and local radio programming is in decline. In essence, many in the radio industry are concluding that it doesn't matter if the voice introducing the next "seven-song rock bloc" is in the same time zone.

But observers fear radio is dooming itself to irrelevance in a world full of rivals like satellite radio and iPods.

Local programming is the only thing that sets radio stations apart, says radio consultant Donna Halper, an assistant professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. "I want something I can't get anywhere else," she says.

The radio industry, just like newspapers and books and other forms of media, is facing an unprecedented financial crunch. Radio advertising revenue dropped by9 percent in the third quarter of 2008 compared with the same period in the previous year, and many radio companies are saddled with huge amounts of debt.

Just this week, the giant Clear Channel Communications company, which owns more than 1,200 US radio stations, laid off 1,850 workers, many of them radio personalities and executives. The cuts account for 9 percent of the company's employees.

Then there's the matter of precedent: Radio stations have been moving away from live and local programming for more than a decade without falling apart. Owners have centralized operations, leaving many smaller stations with few – or any – local radio personalities. Live request shows and call-in contests have become rarer than ever; in some cases, disc jockeys try to fool listeners into thinking they're local even though they prerecord their between-song patter in faraway cities.

Still, many stations tried to remain local, at least during daytime and evening hours on weekdays. But then the economy slumped in 2008, and more cuts came.

"These are tough decisions people are making in a real scary time," says Charlie Quinn, a CBS Radio executive who works at KyXy, a soft-rock station in San Diego.

The station is one of only two in the city of 1.3 million that airs live and local programming 24 hours a day. But Mr. Quinn acknowledges that his station may soon begin airing a syndicated show in the evening.

Quinn has plenty of company. More stations are turning to syndicated programming. Radio stations typically can broadcast syndicated shows at no cost; they just have to allow a distributor to sell some of the commercials on the show. In some cases, it's cheaper for a station to air syndicated programming than to hire a local disc jockey or talk show host.

As a result of cutbacks, national radio personalities such as Mr. Seacrest – who hosts a weekday music show in addition to his duties as host of "American Idol" – are now heard in cities like Atlanta and San Diego, where local disc jockeys lost their jobs to make room for him.

Talk show hosts are suffering, too, finding themselves replaced by national hosts who only talk about national issues. Boston's WBZ, for instance, dumped a local overnight host earlier this month in favor of a syndicated show.

Some listeners were unhappy. One online commenter said the show was an oasis amid shows that have "no connection to life in Boston, or New England, for that matter. Not local; not relevant; annoying; boring; repetitive; disconnected. That's the bottom line."

But some argue that radio doesn't need to be local to be compelling. "I have a very simple philosophy ... put the very best product you can on the air, regardless of origin," says Gabe Hobbs, a senior vice president for programming at Clear Channel.

That may be a wise strategy, but a heavy focus on national shows creates another problem: The next generations of Rush Limbaughs and Ryan Seacrests won't have the opportunity to learn their craft at small radio stations if there are no on-air shifts for them to take.

For now, the radio industry seems likely to continue what a San Diego radio executive calls a "terrific experiment" in moving away from a local focus.

"There are a couple of us left who will continue doing it the way it's always been done," says Darrel Goodin, general manager of three San Diego music stations that retain a local focus.

"It's what I'll call the right way."

Review-Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio

New York Times
April 13, 2008
Radio Days
By JACQUES STEINBERG
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RIGHT OF THE DIAL

The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio.

By Alec Foege.

294 pp. Faber & Faber. $25.

To those listeners who long for the days when their favorite radio station was independent, eclectic in its programming and as responsive as a tripwire to breaking local news, Clear Channel is nothing less than the Evil Empire. In Internet chat rooms where the media giant’s acquisitions and cost slashing have been tallied as if on a scoreboard — it grew from 43 stations to more than 1,200 from 1995 to 2001 alone — its name is regularly followed by the same expletive typically directed at the Yankees during a game at Fenway Park.

But when Alec Foege, a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Spin and Playboy, set out to write the definitive history of a company that possesses more radio stations than any other, he decided to give it the benefit of the doubt.

“I was not out to do a hatchet job,” he writes in the preface to “Right of the Dial,” “but rather to get to the bottom of a company that I suspected had gotten a raw deal as its bad publicity had snowballed.”

The reader need wait only three paragraphs before Foege renders his final verdict: “Having spent a lot of time talking to some of the company’s most prominent critics, as well as some of its most devout supporters, I have concluded that Clear Channel is indeed to blame for much of what it has been accused of.”

While unable to refute the conventional rap against Clear Channel — he finds it responsible for a “McDonald’s approach to radio programming” that makes one city’s offerings largely indistinguishable from another’s — Foege nonetheless succeeds in telling the story of how all this came to pass. The reader is guided from the company’s dusty beginnings in Texas in 1972 to its subsequent acquisition of the company that employed Rush Limbaugh (it still syndicates him on about 600 stations), and from its binge buying, as federal media ownership rules were relaxed in the late 1990s, to the high-tech battering it began receiving from the iPod in the new century.

Even before television and movies surpassed it in the nation’s cultural pecking order, radio was a medium that attracted a disproportionate share of colorful, often shady characters. Foege brings many of them to life, not least the pioneering radio programmer who hitchhiked for days at a time to divine what drivers were listening to (he later helped program XM, the satellite radio channel) or another who presided over a programming meeting where strippers were paraded through (his company was later bought by Clear Channel, and he was installed as a top executive).

Foege is an unabashed radio wonk, but he is particularly adept at translating the medium’s culture and technology for a lay audience. This includes those listeners unaware that their local Clear Channel station may well be operating on autopilot via remote control. He writes: “Clear Channel arguably innovated the practice of importing voice-tracked disc jockeys cross-country, whereby a D.J. in San Jose, Calif., would appear on the air in Boise, Idaho, making occasional references to local haunts, news events and the weather, giving every impression that he was in Boise. In truth, he had recorded his broadcast in San Jose weeks before, aided by a cheat sheet of local reference information.”

And Foege can obviously navigate a balance sheet, to say nothing of a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, taking the reader inside Clear Channel meeting rooms as the stock price of the overstuffed company plummets to $27.17 a share by August 2006 from more than $90 in early 2000. The reader is hardly surprised when Clear Channel begins reducing some of its holdings (including the spinoff of its concert division) before ultimately agreeing to be bought out by a private equity partnership in late 2006.

If there is a gaping hole in Foege’s narrative, it is one largely outside his control: the voices of his main characters are absent — like someone who chooses not to attend a roast being staged in his honor.

The Mays family, which founded and still runs Clear Channel, has long been reluctant to talk to journalists, and Foege has fared no better than previous suitors. “When I received the go-ahead for this book,” he writes, “I wrote multiple letters to Lowry Mays, Mark Mays and Randall Mays, informing them of my plans and encouraging their participation. In return, I received complete and utter silence — not even a ‘no thank you.’” Later, he adds, a Clear Channel publicist “fired off a letter to my publisher, threatening a lawsuit if I got any of my facts wrong.”

In their absence, Foege is forced to rely on scattered interviews with former Clear Channel associates and some competitors, as well as the groundbreaking work of other journalists, particularly that of Eric Boehlert of Salon.

The book also suffers from Foege’s uneven writing style. His prose can be as clear as a 50,000-watt station in the dead of night, only to become muffled a few pages later by crackling static. For starters, there are too many clichés. “It didn’t take a rocket scientist to guess the partnership would create heat,” he writes at one point. At another: “Clear Channel’s executives learned there was more than one way to skin a cat.” In his telling, too many entities are variously “spit out,” “coughed up,” “slurped up” or “hoovered up.”

Still, to those who care deeply about what has been lost, culturally, as Clear Channel has taken command of the public airwaves these last four decades, Foege’s effort is a noble one. And the story he tells is as important as it is unnerving.

Jacques Steinberg is a media reporter for The Times and the author of “The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College.”