Something happened around 2000 that increased the homogeneity of the Billboard Top 10. The article explores some ideas, which include a change in the way record sales were tabulated, the dominance of a few producers and the increased prevalence of digital music-making. More recently, however, the charts have seen the return of some musical diversity.

RT @AngieCoiro: Passionate about #radio? Get out tissues and Xanax before you read this.

#KGO #KFOG #bloodbath

“One simple lesson is that audiences want comedy, that comedy works great in an audio format,” he said. “The truth is the radio industry has basically left that money on the table for the last 30 years.”

“I’ll tweet out a link to our blog,” he said, “and I’ll get responses from people clearly on their phones…saying, ‘The audio is garbled on my random cellphone!’ People are just getting to a point where they expect everything to work on handheld devices.”

PBS’ radio cousin, NPR, still relies on humans for transcription, paying a third-party service to capture 51 hours of audio a week. In-house editors do a final sweep to ensure accuracy of proper names and unusual words. It’s expensive, though NPR does not disclose how much, and time-consuming, with a turnaround time of four to six hours.

“We continue to keep an eye on automated solutions, which have gradually improved over time, but are not of sufficiently high quality yet to be suitable for licensing and other public distribution,” said Kinsey Wilson, NPR’s head of digital media.

That pretty much sums up the Eighties to me, and I think that's why people still gravitate towards that period, when people were so open-eared and experimental. It's a sense that these boundaries had been crashed down by artists like Michael Jackson or Duran Duran or Grandmaster Flash. There was a sense that rock could be influenced by disco and hip-hop could be influenced by pop. There was this really kind of glorious moment where every station that was playing the Human League and the Clash was also playing the Pointer Sisters and Marvin Gaye. I thought that was going to be the future from now on.

“There’s nothing bad about it. And with the rest you just have to have some humor. Your hair is grey and there are lines on your face. You look at women and say, ‘Wow.’ But wait, they’re half my age. There are all these things that you have to say to yourself, ‘that’s not an option anymore.’ And you have to laugh at it and say, ‘rumble young man, rumble,’” quoting Muhammad Ali.

He continues, “And so if anything turning 50 has been good in that it gets me up and gets me down the road with way more urgency than I had when I was 20. When I was 20 you couldn’t tell me anything. I said, ‘I’m 20 and I need nothing. I can live on nothing and the world is my oyster.’ Now I’m older and I have more of a grip. There is something at stake and I have a few more laps around the track and then I’m out. So, I might as well make as much trouble as I can before I go. And for me that’s all the motivation I need.”

So I think we need to do two things here.

First is to pay more for what’s now free stuff. This is the public radio model, but with much less friction (and therefore higher contribution percentages) on the customers’ side. In ProjectVRM (at the Berkman Center) we’re working on that with EmanciPay. Here’s a way EmanciPay will help newspapers. And here’s our Knight News Challenge application for doing the same with all media sources. You can help by voting for it.

Second is to develop self-hosted versions of Flickr, or the equivalent. Self-hosting is the future we’ll have after commercial hosting services like Flickr start to fail. Fortunately, self-hosting is what the Web was meant to support in the first place, and the architecture is still there. We’ll have our own Flickrs and Zoomrs and Picassas, either on servers at home (ISP restrictions permitting) or in a server rack at the likes of RackSpace. But somebody needs to develop the software.

“The upside of having information first is fleeting,” said Garcia. “The downside is enormous, painful. Everyone feels awful.”

So what are people doing less? Listening to the radio and reading things like newspapers and magazines offline, according to the survey. (We at Digits guess they might be spending less time doing other things too, like “going outside.”)

We can probably spend a minute thinking about all the things that might be lost without the model of the album as a coherent statement-- the same way we can worry about what happens if people rarely sit down for deep, focused engagement with something like a book. But you can't really deny that this ongoing-stream version of following music is a good match for how people experience life and consume information. It's actually the same vantage on pop music that's always been held-- by radio listeners, party regulars, mixtape shoppers, pop-chart followers, folks everywhere. Packets and bursts and narratives.

"We definitely have gotten calls just like every other station," Christine Dempsey, chief content officer at Philadelphia's WHYY, said yesterday. "It did not seem like a organized campaign, but in some cases, staff members would get calls saying people would no longer give, and they'd look them up in database and find they never were members to begin with."

Dempsey said she was surprised by the volume of calls supporting Williams, former host of Talk of the Nation, but not exactly a premium NPR personality. "I don't know if that has to do with his relationship with Fox [but] I think we got fewer calls and complaints when Bob Edwards was taken off Morning Edition, and you're talking about a morning staple."

[...] The sickness, as I see it, is not tech addiction but consumerism. Disagree with me? Then explain why all discussions of technology in the media are governed by the assumption that there’s an “average” consumer — and that said consumer is professional, college-educated, middle-class, and presumably white? And then explain why, if you hang out at the emergency room in East Oakland at three in the morning, you see a hell of a lot more people texting than you’ll ever see at a high-end cafe?

These panicked discussions of technology focus on the behavior of those perceived as having average interests and “typical” behaviors. But this very idea is bankrupt, and assumes a life made fantastically rich by such “average” interests — by implication, said interests being family, God, and middle-of-the-road politics.

But I contain multitudes, bitch. What about the people, like me, for whom learning and reading were agony until computers made it interactive? [...]

"If you want to understand my business, you just have to come from the point of view of: What did Leo want to do?" he said, half-jokingly. "I wanted to be my own boss. I didn't want to commute. I wanted to choose the shows. I wanted to cover shows that I was interested in. And if you understand that, then everything makes sense."

[...] The one most often spun by station managers is that lifestyles have changed: They’ll cite market research showing people are waking earlier for longer commutes and also building in time for pre-work routines such as the gym. And they have research showing these people want fresh news and information.

The more important reason is that these early risers are advertisers’ darlings. They’re usually employed, interested in what’s going on in the world, younger than news’ aging audiences and have some money to spend – whether at McDonald’s, the home decorating store or the cineplex. That’s why you’ll see big-brand advertisers all over the 5 a.m. broadcasts, while bail bondsmen and truck-driving training commercials populate 5 p.m. [...]

I'm still just a beginner, but I feel that this perspective provides you with an acute awareness of data. You start looking for data structures, for ways to manipulate data (in a good sense) to make them work for your community.

When covering a story, you'll think in terms of data and interactivity from the very start and see how they can become part of the narrative. You'll see data everywhere -- from the kind that floats in the air thanks to augmented reality, to the more mundane version contained in endless streams of status updates. Rather than being intimidated by the enormous amount of data, you'll see opportunities -- new ways to bring news and information to the community.

You probably won't have time to actually do a lot of the programming and data structuring yourself. But now you're equipped to have a valuable and impactful conversation with your geek colleagues. A conversation that gets better results than ever before.

The best reporters add value to news by choosing sources wisely and by making the right kind of connections among circumstances, evidence, events, people and sources. It doesn’t matter if they blog, tweet or publish a story in print. It doesn’t matter if they work for a newspaper, an NGO or as a citizen. No institution has a monopoly on leading the public conversation. The rest is economics and moonshine.

Ever wonder who decides what is Associated Press style and what isn’t? How new words enter the AP Stylebook and why others are amended? To learn more about how this well-revered style and usage guide came to be the industry standard for newspapers and also many broadcasters, magazines and PR practitioners, PR Tactics spoke with two representatives from The Associated Press Stylebook.

People will argue that the scrapers create value by pointing to many obscure stories that captured the imagination of linkers and got unexpectedly high traffic for a very obscure site. Fine, but was that site able to monetize the jump in traffic? And, how likely is that site to create a sustainable business by consistently winning a surfing game of serendipity?

Others will say that the site that gets linked to can keep the user using the site. But the opposite is happening – users are being trained to increase their usage of (and thus value to) the linker rather than the creator.

An interesting shift occurred in 2008, the report said. For the first time, consumers spent more time with media they paid for, like books or cable television, than with primarily ad-supported media, like newspapers and magazines.

“It’s not that people aren’t willing to pay for content, because they are paying for video games, fantasy sports information, music downloads,” Mr. Rutherfurd said. “There’s just some content they’re not willing to pay for.”

Thankfully, it’s not hard to build a community on Twitter that will offer you real value. Always keep in mind that Twitter is not about you. It’s about being social. It’s about the community.

Here is a little guide to getting people to follow you [...]

Media workers are the heaviest drinking professionals in England, consuming the equivalent of more than four bottles of wine or more than 19 pints of beer a week, according to government research. People in the profession drink an average of 44 units a week, around double the recommended limit, a Department of Health survey finds. The NHS recommended maximum alcohol consumption for men is 21 to 28 units a week – three to four units a day. For women, the maximum is 14-21 units a week – two to three units a day.

"If you were an alien dropped down on earth and watched popular or tabloid media, you might think we are a country of Internet sex predators and spoiled children of billionaires and want-to-be reality contestants," says Isay, a MacArthur fellow who has won five Peabody awards for his radio documentaries. "That is not who we are as Americans. The real Americans are the vast majority of people who care about their families and communities and live lives defined by quiet acts of courage and kindness."

"People are increasingly wanting a strong connection with the person delivering them the news. We are talking about the Oprah-ization or the Ellen-ization of the news," Copeland said.

"There is incredible brand loyalty on these sites," Copeland said. "Facebook is great. But people don't have a loyalty to Facebook. They have a loyalty to their friends who are on Facebook."

"You do good work. You want people to know about it. But how do you spread the word? This Web site will show you, with a step-by-step guide to creating a media plan and writing a news release. [...]"

"This American Life's great mortgage crisis explainer, The Giant Pool of Money, suggests that 'information' and 'explanation' ought to be reversed in our order of thought."

"People naturally like to know what is going on in their communities. But communities are an endangered resource in America. Fewer and fewer people stay put where they grew up or stay put as adults. Increasingly, we live among strangers, without strong community. So, yes, the demand for that kind of news is down. Similarly, as the American educational system decays, Americans know less about their own history and about the world. So they have less fertilizer to feed curiosity about the world. Demand for that kind of news is down, too."

When I stick till the end of karaoke at the Pop-Inn, Kirk the KJ's last song is usually "Closing Time." Chad'll sing lead. I'll harmonize. (Plus, dude was pretty cool in "Shut Up and Sing.")

"For classic rock programmers and consultants, part of this conservative cultivation was canon-creation, and they closed ranks around a white, hyper-masculine notion of rock music."

"Certain songs seem so structurally robust, so well put together, that they always work. Maybe these songs are perfect. Which isn't necessarily to say that they're the greatest songs or my favorite songs."

"Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see?"

"Today I see journalism falling into two traps. One is the passive abandonment of responsibility that sometimes comes along with the 'objective' mode, and the other is the crass exploitation of divisive opportunities that you see from infotainers [...]"

"I don't know, necessarily, if someone's budget is cut, that their choice will be to go to newspaper, because newspaper is very expensive to buy. When you start looking at how many people you're reaching and how much it's costing, it's an expensive medium

"If I was just starting out ... I wouldn't do a record anymore. Every four months I'd release a single with a bonus track on iTunes. That way what radio gets is brand new every time. And then at the end of four or five singles, I'd release a record ..."

"The word 'meaning' has become a very important word to me. If there's anything I can do to tell you the meaning of what you already know, I feel I've done my day's work."

"Journalists don't peddle goods, they offer a professional service, a relationship. [...] News can indeed be recast successfully as a menu of competing distractions. The question is whether we can afford the price of such success."

Badass! :-)

I got to hang out with the fellas (Jimi, Ruben, Terrance 'n'em) yesterday. Only the painstaking application of high-powered audio-editing software made me sound coherent. Nonetheless, I had a good time.

"This morning on NPR, I heard a line I'd not heard before. It said: History is written by the winners. Literature is written by the losers."

"Aggressive journalism is still a vital part of every community's defenses against corruption and crime. It can save lives."

"In fact, this problem is often more difficult to avoid online since many online ads are delivered through automated ad-serving systems, varying which ads display on pages viewed by individual users."

"Even amid circulation declines, newspapers in many markets reach an audience that is competitive with any single broadcast channel, a strength that online editions are bolstering."

"[It] summons up two kinds of nostalgia at once: nostalgia for those endless summer vacations, and nostalgia for an age of unanimity — a (fictional) time when we were all listening to the same radio station and buuying the same CDs."

"Somewhere out there, there are some folks who are deeply, deeply ashamed of what they've done. And after hearing a few seconds of that song, I can't really say that I blame them."

"[S]ome recent surveys have overestimated young people’s news consumption and the capacity of non-traditional media to take up the slack from young people’s flight from traditional news sources."

"The men in this week's Barbershop discuss recent Obama and Clinton campaign parodies, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's advice for Latinos, and comedian DL Hughley's controversial comments on former radio host Don Imus."

"[M]ore than 65 percent of respondents said they got most of their news from local TV. The biggest draw: weather. Newspapers were second, at 28 percent, followed by network TV news, local radio news, and the Internet."

"Sites like Negrophile.com, maintained by blogger and writer George Kelly lists hundreds of African American blogs, each one of them in turn linking to other sites you might enjoy." Heh.

"Mario Armstrong, News and Notes regular tech contributor, and Gary Dauphin, News and Notes Web producer, travel with Farai Chideya into the black blogosphere to respond to questions posted to the show's blog."

Do what you can on the Net to build up some kind of online reputation. [...] You may want to start working on your own personal brand. Maybe start a blog and see if people will pay attention. You may be your own network."

"So you broadcast this into my home and I find it offensive, I can change the channel. I can turn you off. If we're sitting on the train and you're using that kind of language, I don't have any options. [...] It is not quite an analogous situation."

"Language is catchy. I go around saying things my students say all the time. I don't think it's excusable. But we hear (racially tinged words) all the time, and it's OK. Until it comes from the wrong person."

On the good side? It's Vegas! On the bad? It's, uh, Vegas. Hmm.

"[A]d spending on newspaper Web sites jumped 31.5 percent last year compared with the year before, to $2.7 billion. The bad news is that online spending accounted for only 5.4 percent of all newspaper ad expenditures in 2006 [...]"

"Professor News believes the foundation for good journalism is not arguing or even advocating. It's coming up with good questions: Who? What? Where? When? How? Why? Can you provide examples? Do you have evidence? Let's call it the Asking Culture."

"From the outside we look like closed books, hiding behind our headphones and laptop screens, but we are connected a vast world that is updating itself in real-time, constantly evolving like an organism."

"But while country radio does well in large cities of the South and Midwest and even areas of the Northeast, it has struggled in some of the largest urban centers - no big surprise [...]"

"[This last week] has opened up my eyes to the gay population and what they do. I'm getting a lot of knowledge about them that I didn't have. Which is going to make me a better person. And if it doesn't, then I'm a damn fool."

Jeff Chang: “The whole industry shifted to massive economies of scale, and mixtapes are a natural outgrowth and response to that.”

Unearthly and thrilling beauty

"In the online world, personal journalism will be the only journalism people consistently seek."

This is what became of the local oldies station

“The distinctive effect of technology has been to enable us to get entertainment and information while remaining entirely alone. [...] the social isolation means that we don’t share information and values and outlook that we should."

"Mommy, can I just say something? You think every time you hear a black guy's voice it's automatically going to be something bad. Are you against hip-hop?"

"Rappers can frame their gruff demands and commands as the perfect antidote to all that schmaltzy stuff. And crooners can frame their gentle, sentimental pleas as the perfect antidote to all that nasty stuff."

"Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away."

"[Y]ou can imprecisely state the nature of the disaster. … Then you draw attention away from the real story, the magnitude of the destruction, and you kind of undermine the media's credibility."

"Radio has ceded the younger demographic to other media. I just don't know how we're going to get back people who didn't get into the radio habit in their teens. It really becomes problematic down the road."

Eddie Izzard on "The Goon Show": "It wasn't until years later that I worked out that you can only do an ethnic-minority accent if you give the character high status."

Pretty much my teen and college years' soundtrack; the first time I heard Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was on this station

"Almost overnight I went from being a geeky Asian kid, who people called a Paki for no apparent reason, to being someone who people wanted in their crew to help them tag the sides of buses."

"Because as humans, we adapt. That's what we do." Beats the hell out of the alternative.