Sunday Morning Odds & Sods

55° - clear at 10:55am

Good Morning from Michigan.

Baseball: Our local minor-league baseball team - The Lansing Lugnuts - have their home opener tomorrow night - hope to attend, depending on weather. My in-laws arrived here from Denver yesterday for a week-long stay, so baseball would be a great part of their visit.

Listening. My usual Sunday Morning fare. WDRV/Chicago's Bob Stroud featuring music from this day in 1967, followed by 1972. Lots of AM radio favs. Later: Steve Palec on Milwaukee's WKLH.

Reading: John Gorman's Buzzard Blog. John posts here about WMMS World Premiere Exclusives and the cease and desist orders from the record labels that usually followed:

"We promoted them as “WMMS Weekend World Premiere Exclusives.” It wasn’t an original idea. Top 40 radio in the sixties scrambled to be the first with a new single by the Beatles, the Beach Boys, or the Rolling Stones. The station landing the exclusive would play and promote it with great fanfare. To keep our competition from taping it off our air – we’d had a spoken-word “WMMS World Premiere Exclusive,” which we’d run a couple of times within the “hooks” of the song."

Some more great WMMS (and radio) history here.

Rock The Vote. Dave Lange shares some great ideas for stations to get the most out of the upcoming election, especially with their websites. Read Mr. Lange here.

And Fred Jacobs shares results from a mock poll conducted as part of his firm's Tech Poll IV - and offers suggestions and examples of what stations are doing with their websites and email databases. Read Mr. Jacobs Here.

Websites: Making a statement. Earlier this week Fred Jacobs offered some great examples of making a statement with your website, citing Google as an example and what they did a week ago Saturday for Earth Hour. Read here.

April Fools and 97 Rock. Earlier this week this blog posted a web banner from Buffalo's WGRF announcing a "Gay to Z" weekend; and that was only part of the April Fool festivities on the station this past Tuesday. PD John Hager has a review of what the station did posted on the station's website here.

Spring Book. Randy Raley writes on his blog about the ritual many PDs go through every year as part of his series on "Things Radio People Like":

"All you have to do is take something you would do on a daily basis that might be for recreation and replace that action with the word “tight” or “tighten” and you can create your own Radio Person Spring Book Catch Phrase, which I think the Nintendo Wii version is coming out in 2009."

Read more here.

Memories. This week Rick Kaempfer's Chicago Radio Spotlight shines on Chicago legend Bob Hale. Here.

Very good read: Bob Hale was the MC at a concert in Clear Lake, Iowa on February 2, 1959. Need I say more?

More memories: Had a nice note/comment this past week from Fred Johnson of Ames, Iowa - who added his memories of WVFV/Dundee to a post I wrote on air talent Greg Brown last June.

Fred worked at WVFV when it signed on (1967, as I recall) and shares a few stories from that time. Scroll down to comments here.

Have a great Sunday.

Sunday Morning Odds & Sods

76° - sunny at 9:30am

Good Morning from Okemos.

Feelin' Groovy. Spent some time Saturday listening to Milwaukee's WKLH via the web (I'll be visiting Milwaukee in a few weeks) - heard a cool promo for a cool website spread on "40 Years of The Summer of Love". See it here. WKLH is simply a great sounding radio station; can't wait to hear it over the air.

More Groove: WDRV/Chicago also celebrating the "Summer of Love" on Friday. More specials to keep the format fresh. Listening to Bob Stroud this morning as usual this morning.

Nice Numbers. Classic Rock KZOK - with the legendary Bob Rivers in Morning Drive - remains #1 12+ (yeah) in the latest trends. Awesome job by a staff headed up by Carey Curelop; who I remember on-air as "Carey Cure" in Albuquerque (KFMG) circa 1979.

Programmers on the sideline. Programmer/Blogger Gary Allyn writes: "Today, more than ever, programmers are sitting at home listening to poorly programmed stations, and wishing they could just get their hands on them.". Read Gary's blog. No pity party here - but Gary is so right.

Getting started in radio. This week Rick Kaempfer profiles here Chicago's Greg Brown on his Chicago Radio Spotlight. Greg details his story of getting started in the biz.

I've been a fan of Greg's work since the 70s when he was on-air and programming WVFV/Dundee, IL. Top 40 in glorious FM mono. Still a great sounding suburban radio station in its time.

Greg mentions the primitive facilities of then-WSTK/Woodstock, IL. I visited that operation back then and his comments brought back some personal memories. I also recall a WVFV visit too and briefly meeting Greg.

Added: A quote from Bill Figenshu via David Martin: "It's time to take our audience back. We have great brands, let's invest in them again. The age of cutting is over. Consolidation 2.0 is on. And it's all about the operators. I love that!"

Have a great Sunday.