A Pilgrimage to the Land of Myth

My wife and I flew out to Oakland to visit my sister inlaw for Christmas this year. Like any good geek who visits the Bay Area, I made a quick pilgrimage to M5 Industries, Inc...home to the Discovery channel show "Mythbusters". It was 12/26 and a Friday, so unsurprisingly the place was closed. But as the sign on the front door shows, they're not set up for tours anyway.

Originally I was thinking that the outside doesn't quite look like what I remembered from the show...only after I got home did I learn that there's a separate building, M7, a few blocks away. And without knowing its precise address, I'd never find it...the area is very industrial and very nondescript. I drove right past M5's turnoff twice before I spotted it.

Still, here's the proof! :-) Check out these pics:

NPR is Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience

(originally published in July 2007)

After this Thursday's taping of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me at Millennium Park, I got word from a reliable source that the unofficial estimate for attendance came close to filling the 11,000 person capacity of Pritzker Pavilion (4000 seats, 7000 lawn). Based on what I saw, I'd agree...the seats were completely filled, and the lawn was pretty full...at least 5000 people out there, maybe 6000.

Think about that for a moment...at least 10000 fans showing up for a public radio show that wasn't even being broadcast live at that time. Granted it was a free event, but still. And this is just Wait Wait's fans who live in Chicago; I doubt there were more than a handful of folks like me who came in from out of town to see it.

Normally Wait Wait records at the Chase Auditorium in Chicago. It has an official capacity of 3563. They charge $20 a head for attendance. It sells out almost every single week. Assuming a few weeks of "Best Of" shows for vacation, that's a staggering $3.5 million dollar source of gross revenue every year for Chicago Public Radio. Granted, not all of that is profit; renting a hall like Chase is not cheap. But still! They could charge double that and they'd still probably sell out every week; Chicagoans love the show.

Ed.Update Dec.2008: I learned today that WWDTM's auditorium is only about 500 people, although it does usually sell out every week. They also do about 10 road shows a year, and I assume about four shows are repeats for holidays, so figure 38 home shows a year, at $20/head, and that's $380,000/yr gross. Just for home shows.

If they do the usual 60-40% split of proceeds with local stations regarding road shows (where the local affiliate pays to rent the hall) then they're probably making at least $1500 to $3000 for a road show if the hall is in the 1500-2000 seat range. Bigger halls in bigger markets cost more but you can charge more per ticket, too...so figure $2000-$6000 per road show for those. Those numbers might be on the optimistic side, and they're also raw speculation. But they probably add up to another $30-$40,000/yr gross, so let's round that off to about $400,000/yr gross, total.

Knowing what I know of concert production costs...which isn't all THAT much...I would be surprised if they're netting more than 70% of that. Hard to say - when you do a regular gig, a lot of the incident costs like lighting, tech, etc, start getting very cheap. And you don't need much security at a pubradio gig. Depends a lot on what they're paying for hall rental at Chase.

Still, the end result is that - assuming my numbers are correct, and that's a big assumption - WWDTM is not profitable off its ticket sales alone. Not with 11 people on staff.

This strikes me as a powerful argument for having a live audience when doing a public radio talk show. Can imagine leveraging the cult of personality that Christopher Lydon has engendered? Fans of the old The Connection and the newer (but unfortunately on hiatus) Radio Open Source would no doubt pay handsomely for the chance to watch Chris interview some local guest in the flesh. And let's sweeten the pot - let the audience submit questions via Blackberry or text message for screening, and then have a producer with a wireless mic go to the audience member whose question they like, and let 'em ask it live on the air.

I picked Lydon just because his "Lydonistas" are somewhat legendary, but really any good public radio personality in any city has lots of dedicated fans. Start small in 250 - 500 seat theaters and within a year or two you'll sell out the 6000-seat Agganis Arena every week. Best part is, you're engaging your local audience in a very powerful way...and it's a fiscally self-sustaining operation since fans will gladly buy tickets to see the show.

The funniest part is that this isn't a new idea; anyone old enough to remember TV in the 1980's remembers how "Cheers was filmed before a live studio audience" (to name one example) because the interaction between performers and audience made for a better show. Public radio is no exception.

Stop pretending that public radio is better when it's sequestered away from the unwashed masses in the glitzy Russ-Berger studios; get out there and interact with your listeners! :-)

Ed.Update Dec.2008: I still think that it makes a lot of sense to do shows like this in front of a live, paying audience. After this revision I'm not sure if the money quite works out, or at least not as blatantly as it did in my initial analysis. But all you need to do is find one venue that is decently-sized and willing to cut you a deal to bring in warm bodies on an off-night like Thursday, and you could almost certainly make it work.

Talk about a Tin Ear

Ed.Update Dec.2008: Quinnipiac has backed down.


How the heck did I miss this?

Apparently the administration at Quinnipiac University either has a real thing for smacking down student media, or they're not the swiftest taco in the value pack when managing them. Either way, it appears that it took national embarrassment heaped on them by the New York Times to get them to back down on a censorship crusade against the student newspaper journalists.

This is only a few years after Q-Pac waited until summer, when none of the students were around, to tear down the campus radio station's broadcast tower without any provisions or plan to replace it, or to allow the station to transmit from somewhere else. It took quite a lot of pressure and outrage to get the college to rebuild it...apparently they never bothered to learn that moving an FM radio station to a different location is always very expensive and often not legally possible thanks to a crowded radio dial.

Isn't Quinnipiac supposed to be known for having a good communications program? Yeesh, not anymore I guess.

I mean, granted, often you hear a story about an administration seemingly putting the smackdown on the poor little student newspaper/radio station/etc for "no reason". And then you dig a little deeper and you find a long and sordid history of the administration trying to work with a recalcitrant student group that refuses to be reasonable in the slightest. Or, at the very least, the story conveniently overlooks that the administration is actually not reducing total student involvement, they're just restructuring things to meet legal/practical realities that the students had neglected for years. I can name no fewer than three examples right off the top of my head of situations like those.

And there are cases where a college really had the best of intentions, but badly managed the execution and the subsequent negative press. The whole WUML debacle comes right to the forefront here...there were dozens of wasted opportunities in that fiasco - from BOTH sides - and while it was most definitely a war...ultimately nobody won it.

But even after factoring that in, this whole Quinnipiac deal smells really awful. When you have everyone (students, alumni, professional organizations, local news outlets) telling you that you're wrong and you need to back down, and you STILL don't do it until months later when - as I said - the New York Times fires the nuclear option (a scathing editorial) on you and it embarrasses your entire college on the national stage?

Ouch. That can't be good come the next fundraiser.

Welcome back from CBI in Kansas City!

I hope y'all had as much fun as I did out there this weekend!

If you're looking for my slides for these sessions:

• HD Radio: Practical Operational Concerns
• HD Radio: Engineering Issues
• Change is Coming: FEMA plus EAS & CAP
• How NPR+ISDN=Free Money for Your Station
• Radio Automation / Playback Control
• Play Ball! Sports Remote Gear Options for Radio Stations.

Check out this site: www.friedbagels.com/cbi/2008

You may also find these blog posts and articles, that I've written, interesting as well:

• Music Library Management: Part One and Part Two.
• How NPR+ISDN=Free Money for Your Station (expanded article)
• All of my articles for Radio World magazine (including several HD Radio reviews)
• How to Engineer a Show for Public Radio (note: in the process of being re-written)
  
• How to Produce a Show for Public Radio (note: in the process of being re-written)
• Staying On-Air When No One's There: Part One, Part Two, Prequel
  

Baseball Players are Goddamn Wimps

You see this bullcrap with Game 5 of the World Series last night? Not the horrendous calls the umps were making, not the lousy plays many players were making. No - I'm talking about this bullcrap about suspending the game until the weather gets better.

"I don't want to speculate now," Selig said when asked when the game would be restarted. "We'll see what happens. But we're not going to resume until we have decent weather conditions.

Newsflash folks: it's late October in Philadelphia. If you wait for better weather, you'll be waiting at least six months!

Goddamn morons.

And goddamn wimps, too. Look at this crap from Wimp-In-Chief Carlos Pena:

"[The conditions] were horrible," said Peña. "It was windy, it was rainy, it was cold." (SNIP) "The conditions were difficult. I remember looking at home plate the last at-bat and all I saw was water. I couldn't even see home plate; it was covered in water. The rain was coming down pretty hard." Asked how he could see the ball to hit it, he said, "That's a good question. I don't even know."

Whassamattah Pena? Playing in the Trop made you soft and weak? Apparently the Rays can't handle playing in anything but climate-controlled indoor stadiums.

Now granted. I'm the first to say that any team that's located north of the Carolinas who builds an outdoor stadium with no roof should have the entire team, from the owner on down, dragged out into the street and shot. Yes, it's that dumb. But until MLB wises up and institutes that policy, these are the stadiums you got and yes, the weather gets lousy come late October in most northern cities.

Look folks, you know what? I don't care. I really. Don't. Care. Play the goddamned game. You're not paid millions of dollars to wuss out just because it's raining. Good God, the frickin' Indians went out there in the '97 World Series and played in the snow! And these wimps are whining about the rain?!? It's the goddamned WORLD SERIES!!!! Nut the f**k up and get out there and play!

Or, more appropriately, get out there and play so the Rays can lose.

Go Sox!

Sadly, I Don't Think Anyone is Really Surprised By This...

Well, the long-embattled Massachusetts state senator Dianne Wilkerson was arrested as part of an FBI sting operation that caught her taking over $23,000 in bribes.

Admittedly, this news isn't as big as deal as it nearly was, since Wilkerson lost the primary to Sonya Chang-Diaz in early October...so Wilkerson's only hope to continue her decade-long stint as Roxbury's senator was a long-shot write-in campaign. A campaign that had about a snowball's chance in hell of working, given how disgusted most of the state was with her seeming inability to remember to pay income taxes.

Frankly, given Wilkerson's reputation as a hack's hack, and her repeated attitude of being "above the rules" that only the little people must follow....the only real tragedy I see in this is that Wilkerson was the lone African-American elected official in the Massachusetts State Senate. I'm not going to begin to claim that race should be a deciding factor in whether or not a candidate deserves to be in public office. But being a minority gives a person a valuable perspective on life that cannot be had by a member of another race. Given Roxbury's high African-American population, I would be inclined to view that perspective as all the more relevant.

Getting back on point, a scandal like this breaking a week before election day would ordinarily be huge news. Even for just a state senator, it could've gotten national play. But it won't. And in two days I doubt anyone will even care. Because Wilkerson's relevance had been fading for years and ended abruptly a month ago in the primaries. And that's a sad thing for her, for her district, and for the Massachusetts State Senate as a whole.

CBI Conference in Kansas City

Next Wednesday night, myself and two HWS students will be heading west to Kansas City, where the annual College Broadcaster's Inc conference will be held in conjunction with the College Media Advisor's conference.

Yours truly will be presenting in six - count 'em, six! - sessions. What da hell was I thinking!?!? :-)

Details on the CBI website: www.askcbi.org

ISDN + Empty Studio + NPR = Profit!

(below is an expanded version of my September 24, 2008 Radio World article: ISDN Can Help Generate Studio Rentals)

If you’re a commercial radio station, or a college campus, and you’ve never thought about ISDN, I have two words for you: public radio.

The generic term for content creators National Public Radio, American Public Media and Public Radio International (among many others), and their affiliate broadcast stations, “public radio” is an award-winning source of news for over 20 million listeners every week.

You might be wondering: “So what? Both NPR and ISDN have been around for decades, why are you talking about them now?” ISDN hasn’t changed, but public radio has: there are a lot more listeners, a lot more prestige and a lot more producers. These producers need studios to book their guests in, and you can help fill that need.

If you’re a commercial radio station with a lightly used extra studio, public radio has the cash to rent that studio to interview a local guest in. And if you’re a college or university, or a college radio station, you can make your professors available to be interviewed by public radio, thus bringing you national prestige and publicity…and the respect of your college.

Earning extra cash, bringing extra prestige, what’s not to love?

What exactly, is ‘the deal’ here?
Public radio, in general, places a premium on audio quality; ISDN helps achieve that.
In this case, ISDN refers to dedicated hardware that uses special telephone lines and high-speed algorithms to deliver CD-quality sound with almost no delay. In short, even though a guest might be in a studio 1,000 miles away, with ISDN they sound like they’re sitting in the same room as the host.

When an average public radio producer wants to interview a guest, that producer is looking — often frantically — for a readily available studio, convenient for the guest, that has the following:

• A quiet/soundproof studio or room with a studio-quality microphone.
• A location convenient for guests.
• A means of doing a backup recording.
• An ISDN codec compatible with the MPEG Layer 2 algorithm at 128 kbps (a.k.a. “L2 mono/128”).

What makes a good “broadcast studio”? Dense, solid walls, internal acoustic treatment, soundproof doors, baffled HVAC vents, and a method for allowing a trained technician to handle the techie stuff, so the guest doesn’t have to.

Don't have all that?You can still create a “studio” of sufficient quality with much less effort and cost. A regular room that’s naturally quiet — with thick concrete walls, no windows, a solid-core door, and egg-crate foam (make sure it's the fire-retardant kind) on the walls — can do the trick. Or a “pre-fab” solution such as a WhisperRoom booth can work well, too.

One note about WhisperRooms - they don't have built-in cooling, just vent fans that do nothing to cool the air. Once the door is closed, the temperature inside the WhisperRoom quickly climbs to 5 to 15 degrees higher than outside. If you're going to use a WhisperRoom, or a similar "vocal booth", make sure the room it's in has really good cooling (able to be down to 60-62 degrees F) so the vent fans are sucking in chilled air, lest your guest be sitting in a puddle of his or her own sweat.

Harping on the fire issue a bit more, The Station Nightclub disaster really rammed home how dangerous the fire risk really is. However, while a water-based sprinkler system is a great idea for saving people's lives...you may also want to consider that a water sprinkler may - in the process - also destroy your setup as thoroughly as a fire would. Check with your campus IT and campus safety office about finding a "electrical equipment / computer-safe" means of extinguishing fires; such as an aerosol-based system.

Okay, back to business. If you’re a college radio station, try talking to your college's marketing or public relations office, which may be willing to pay for your ISDN in exchange for free/cheap access to your production studio. The rest of the time you can rent your ISDN to bring in some extra bucks to your station, or use it for remote broadcasts like concerts and sports.

An installation note: strictly speaking, ISDN is a special data telephone line from your local phone company, or the campus telecommunications department. It’s a somewhat esoteric technology, and telcos are slowly retiring it in favor of IP-based technologies, like VoIP. It may take several calls, and four to eight weeks, to see if ISDN is available and get it installed. To cover your bases, try to get a codec that can handle IP/internet audio connections as well as ISDN. However, I'd also suggest asking your telco if and/or when they plan to “retire” ISDN in your area. Assuming you're talking to someone who will give you an honest answer (first-level tech support is not going to give an honest answer here!), and the answer is "more than five years" then go ahead and get ISDN now and plan to upgrade to IP codecs later. Five years probably is long enough to amortize the cost.

For help with your installation, three major ISDN hardware providers, Tieline, Comrex and Telos Systems, have excellent “ISDN ordering guides” in the Support sections of their Web sites: www.tieline.com, www.comrex.com and www.telos-systems.com.


Okay, I’ve got this ISDN but no one to call!
To fix that, a little marketing and some patience is required.

First, set up a Web site page just for the studio. Include lots of details: directions with maps, parking information, equipment lists, availability guidelines and your rates/charges. I cannot emphasize this enough: time is critical in booking; so include enough contact information that a producer can reach a booking agent quickly and easily. Whenever some pubradio producer is looking for an ISDN studio to put a guest in, they're usually frantically looking...calling at least three or four potential studios. First one to answer the phone "wins" the rental. And I mean "answer the phone". Here is one place that e-mail is useful but it won't cut it alone; you have to have a live person that answers the phone when the producer calls.

Next, make sure your studio is listed on the appropriate websites. When I’m looking to rent a studio, the two I use the most are the “Wisconsin Public Radio’s ISDN Directory” (www.wpr.org/isdn) and the “DigiFon Digital Dialup List” (www.digifon.com/aboutddl.html).
If you’re a college campus, make sure every department head knows about your studio and that their professors can use it to be interviewed by so-called “prestigious” public radio. Make sure the campus public relations/marketing office knows, too. And while you don't want to be obnoxious about it, you probably will have to remind them every once in a while, too. If you hear about a professor getting on the radio and they haven't come into your studio...sent a polite letter saying "Next time, think about coming in to our station - we have ISDN!".

Don’t forget to just call up NPR, PRI and APM, and also any local public radio stations nearby. (Not sure who the local stations are? Try Radio-Locator and search on your ZIP code.) Call 'em up and ask to speak with whoever handles their studio booking on their end, and ask them to keep you in mind if they ever get overbooked. It’s not uncommon for other studios to get requests for studio rentals they just can’t deliver on, and they’ll usually be happy to send you the business.

Even after all this effort — be patient. Most of the time, a producer will find you by stumbling across you through Internet searches. Or because they call a potential guest and, if you're lucky, the guest remembers that they can come to your station. Still, over time you’ll build up a reputation; as more producers find you the first time, they'll remember to call you the next time.

Finally, how much should you charge for your ISDN?
There’s a lot of variation, but to get you started: rates typically run from $40/hr to $250/hr, with a one-hour minimum. The most common is $100/hr but that usually includes a trained engineer to run things for the guest. If you don't have a trained engineer, be ready to offer a steep discount.

If you’re a college station, offer free rentals when it's one of your campus professors being interviewed; it helps build good relations with your parent college.

It's not uncommon for studios to offer extra fees, like $10-$50 to make a backup recording on CD or MiniDisc. Or charge an extra "ISDN usage fee" in quarter-hour chunks to offset the ISDN per-minute fees your telco provider will charge you. Personally, I don't recommend this; I don't like the nickel-n-dime approach and I think it just complicates things unnecessarily. If you need the extra money, just charge a higher main rate.

Conclusions
Getting ISDN…or if you have it, getting the word out about it…is a great way to help turn an empty room into revenue generator; your business manager will love you!

Plus, it can open up a new avenue of free publicity on a national platform; your college PR office will love you!

And you’ll help some poor public radio producer, like I used to be, have it just a little easier. Spread the love! :-)