In a new post on The AV Club, Steven Hyden makes the case that Jimmy Fallon has become the best host in late night, and I agree with much of what he says. Fallon’s rise is a classic example of not judging a show based on its first few episodes (or even months), but giving […]
The first radio station I was paid to work for (after several years of volunteering at non-commercial college and high school stations) was WRCN/Riverhead. It was a classic small-town station on the east end of Long Island that played “album-oriented rock” to an audience that tripled in size as soon as Memorial Day rolled around […]
Judge James Zaget listened to Rod Blagojevich plead for leniency yesterday, then slapped him with a 14-year prison sentence for corruption and other charges. Blagojevich’s statement, in which he finally admitted guilt and accepted responsibility, was a big 180 from the public entreaties he’d made in the previous three years, a period in which he […]
Airborne traffic reports are a mainstay of large-market radio stations, but the people who do them don’t get nearly as much credit as they deserve. Most of them work split-shifts, getting up well before dawn to get to the airport, spend several hours flying circles around town, then landing, spending a few hours on the […]
Grade for this afternoon’s federal test of the Emergency Alert System: a big fat F. I punched around on the St. Louis radio dial at 1pm and heard all the radio stations relaying the EAS test, but there was some confusion. At least two of them didn’t know the exact hard start time, others didn’t […]
At 1pm CT today, there will be a test of the Emergency Alert System, carried by every radio and television station in the country. It’s a waste of time and money. If there’s one thing we don’t have a shortage of in the USA, it’s information. When there’s an emergency somewhere, word gets out pretty […]