Michael Robertson is the creator of dar.fm, which store copies of radio streams “in the cloud” for later playback.
When I’m not testing stations or playing candy crush, I’m probably posting comments on newspaper web sites.
My experience varies wildly. YahooNews is the most wide open. Washington Post is very active and somewhat balanced politically and relatively civil. ABCNews is draconian, probably deleting a third of all comments for relatively trivial things.
Many people have pointed out that Walt Disney’s instincts tended toward fascism (the real kind). (ABC is owned by Disney) Disney demanded that to build Disney World, Florida would have to allow Disney to make his theme park a city with its own police force. He also demanded the right to build a nuclear power plant (Atoms for Peace).
There would be no distinction between corporation and government. EPCOT (the original concept) took it one step further. Walt Disney believed he had the innate vision to design a perfect city of tomorrow, all centrally planned and micromanaged to the smallest detail
Local newspapers and TV stations are generally completely dead, or maybe moderating comments and just ignoring them all. New York Times heavily manicures their comments. In general, most of my comments go through, but the editors “pick” comments that just reinforce the groupthink of their readers.
So how much should I charge to let you post comments here?
Why don’t we do it the liberal progressive way? If you post something our group disagrees YER OUT! No one is allowed to disagree. It works for them. Try to post a comment on WaPo or Huffing-and-Puffing.
It is not just the comment sections. Twitter programmatically suspends accounts that are blocked by a lot of users. Get into a few hot political discussions and people will block you and then you are gone. I believe facebook operates the same way. They try to create “safe spaces” like a Disney theme park. By the way, the ABC news is the worst for a post that does anything other than reinforce their corporate propaganda.
Local stations are just running down the road in that inevitable rut called “ratings”. Odd that they are “dead” in the area of sales – it seems that only the rare syndicated show will draw local sales increases. I don’t understand the structure anymore – the stations demand political correctness, but only the non-PC hosts draw the revenue. Will iHeart radio glom on all transmitters in the US?
Cryptic – when I read it again. I was lamenting the imminent death of radio. Newspapers are already dead and Local TV is all news for every minute that there is no programming.
I think iHeart is the Google or Apple of radio. They may end up with all the marbles.
iHeart is being strangled by over a billion a year in debt service costs. While the radio business throws off healthy cash flows, the bidding wars from 1996-2000 left them with this huge anchor.
The performance royalty issue is firing up again. As musicians suddenly are getting big checks is from Sound exchange for music played on Pandora, Spotify, SiriusXM, radio streaming, etc… Critical mass may be reached where Congress might stop protecting radio’s free ride.
It is always interesting when companies use big government to squash competition and the rules they encourage come back to get them. Big radio liked to see Pandora, Spotify and SiriusXM saddled with new costs.
Reminds me of Google’s Eric Schmidt- he lobbied for the government to make Microsoft noncompetitive by convincing them that Microsoft had a monopoly on Windows computers. Once that that government organization had staffed up, it noticed that Google has a monopoly on googling. lmao
If I looked up “microsofting”, I wonder what the definition would be…
Apparently, I misunderstood. Hillary’s SuperPAC is the one paying to have nonsense posted on newspaper comment sections.
I tried to post to Richmond times Dispatch, they never approved anything I typed in response to stories. I gave up. ( yeah I know I leave a word out sometimes)
I am trying to proofread more.
All the crazy local TV stations now want you to have either a twitter account or face-(dork) account to post comments. Screw that, I have neither and I do not plan to obtain such accounts.
Cumu-lost ruined local radio everywhere across the country. They are ‘locust’ . They eat up station and crap them out when they run off all the listeners and fire the staff. All they do is put canned PSA’s and no local news anymore. NASH country music is absolutely horrendous.
Back in the 80’s you could travel around and different states and cities the radio stations did have a local flavor. Not anymore.
I never listen to iheart radio app, I miss listening to wrva sometimes.
My cat passed away so we have been in mourning. It sucks. I even quit talking on the silly band radio (CB).
I listened to spaceman last evening, Illuminati blah blah, I do like listening to Canadian radio somewhat. Except they are scared to offend, geesh
Best regards
parrott
http://erskineovernight.com/
A name from the past shows up on Erskine’s show this week- Lowell Ponte. Lowell had a show on GCN about 10 years ago, but I think my memories of him may go back further than that