The Unfortunate Mr. Rehr

It looks like history is repeating itself: TV guy crosses swords with NAB leader, compels resignation. Whether it’s Lombardo v. Fritts or Sanders v. Rehr, the result is the same: leader gets curbed for all the wrong reasons.

I like David Rehr and I think he’s a bright, earnest, driven lobbying professional. Whether that is the ideal profile for the NAB job is open to debate, but I don’t think the job itself is: no one in that position can stem the tide of power-hungry political ill will toward our industry.

I believe our NAB should be operating on four levels:

1. Working feverishly the corridors of power to marshal support for our causes
2. Mitigating and deflecting the forces arrayed against us
3. Publicly reflecting absolute confidence that our brand of reason shall prevail
4. Privately helping its members confront and cope with likely outcomes

While the NAB is generally effective on the first three levels, it can be more so on the fourth.

I wish David well on his career path, and I hope his successor is given the opportunity to succeed where possible—and artfully deal with defeat where necessary.

An Open Letter to the NAB Search Committee

Anyone who has spent any time in small market radio knows this scenario all too well: we hire a talented, capable employee, and it’s only a matter of time before said employee is wooed away to a better gig.

Over time, most of us have learned that the best, most stable, longest-lasting employees are people who (a) love radio and (b) have another good reason besides the job to live and work in the market.

When the selection of David Rehr as CEO of the RAB was announced, I was not alone in expressing my reservations about the choice. There was no doubt in my mind that Mr. Rehr was—and is—a very bright, committed guy who knows a lot about the lobbying industry. My reservations had nothing to do with his skills; but he failed the two tests I always ran on people I considered hiring:

1.    Are you passionate about what you do?
2.    Do you have a reason, other than the job, for working here?

Define “here” as “in broadcasting” and you have pretty good criteria for hiring our next NAB CEO.

Another experience I had in my small town that may be pertinent: We had a Chamber executive director who wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, and who wasn’t the most dynamic guy on the planet. But he was a lifelong local whose passion for the community was so strong, so heartfelt, that he did a lot of good for us all. After he retired, the Chamber hired a chamber professional. He did a good job, but it was by the numbers. Two years later, he was off to a bigger town.

We in radio know—as do our brethren in TV—the value of consistency and longevity. Our morning guy may not be the best in the business, but he’s a decades-long listening habit. (Ditto that venerable TV anchor.) Say what you will about Eddie Fritts, but for over 20 years he conveyed passion and conviction that can only be the product of true belief.

I’m not saying we should recruit another Eddie Fritts; the world, and the industry, has changed. But there are some excellent candidates in the ranks of broadcasting, and they should be taken seriously. What about lobbying experience? you ask. Any involved broadcaster has way more lobbying experience than, say, the average beer distributor; we enjoy unique symbiotic relationships with our elected representatives that no one else can touch.

We can agree, I think, that our next NAB chief should have these qualities:

•    Passion for broadcasting
•    Relations with key DC players
•    Lobbying skills—a.k.a. product knowledge and salesmanship
•    Mental commitment to the long haul

When looking for Eddie’s successor, there was a strong feeling among certain NAB Board members that we needed to look outside our industry for a professional lobbyist. We hired a professional lobbyist. And now we have to look for someone else. I hope this time that coming from broadcasting will not be a black mark against the candidate.

The Fight Must Go On

In talking with a reader of our newsletter shortly after the NAB news broke, he expressed concern that this might disrupt the many ongoing battles we wage, most importantly the war on the performance tax.

From my perspective, there is little cause for concern. For one thing, the NAB staffers who wage these fights day after day will keep doing so, and they’re very good at it. But no less important, a big part of those fights is waged by the local broadcasters who have unique access to the Washington deal-makers. . .and no one is more committed to winning the fights than we are.

Ratings: Value or “Tribute”?

Bill O’Shaughnessy is one of the finest broadcasters to grace our industry, having established a small-market-radio version of the Algonquin Round Table in tony Westchester County, NY—not to mention having the heaviest Rolodex in the business.

But I respectfully disagree with his characterization of broadcast ratings as “tribute.”

Ratings are like chainsaws: in the right hands, they are valuable tools. . .but in the wrong hands, they can hurt you. The Arbitron County Studies are out, and from all the chatter I see from clients and readers, ratings misuse continues to abound.

Ratings, especially in small markets, should not be used to aggrandize your station.

First, despite the introduced and proposed advances in accuracy, the potential for bounce is simply too great to ignore. If you brag about your ratings, you are giving the ratings a disproportional role in your sales/service arsenal. You paint yourself into a corner should you experience a ratings downturn—which, over time, you surely will.

Second, improper presentation of ratings information violates Rule One of sales, which says it’s always about the customer, not us.

This is a big topic and I can’t really do it justice as the last Last Word, but here are a couple of ways to use ratings safely and effectively:

First, downplay them when you do well. “Sure,” you can say, “we’re proud of the fact that our community seems to like what we do, but that’s not as important as how we can help you get more business.” Not only do you refocus attention where it belongs, but you protect yourself from the ratings downturn by putting the numbers in perspective.

Second, make use of whatever qualitative data are available to you to help your advertiser’s marketing objectives. That transforms the ratings from station-focused bragging to client-focused service. And that’s what we do.

Conflict of Opportunity

Small market radio has always lived hand to mouth, and our current economic “opportunities” have not improved the situation. Even when a small-market broadcaster achieves some scale, with some to many stations in his or her group, the practical, manage-by-checkbook mentality never quite goes away.

But small market radio is inhabited nowadays by a different breed as well—actually, two different breeds. One is the large- or medium-market operators who invested their investor money in a bunch of small stations, thinking they were just smaller versions of their kind of radio. Some have adapted; some have not. The other breed is the small-market-at-heart operators who rapidly got to be big group operators—often losing heart in the process.

I don’t believe any of the breeds so described are more or less capable of success in the small-market sand-box, but each breed responds differently—whether due to mindset or circumstance—to the challenges and opportunities before us.

But wait—there’s a fourth breed afoot as well. Take, for example, our friend Peter Smythe. Peter is a big-market guy with big-market stations in his group, but he’s a small-market guy at heart. (In other words, we small market folks would say he’s a real broadcaster; his words and actions are those of someone who knows what local radio is all about.)

But where the Peter Smythes and his well-funded brethren differ from most of us today is, well, that well-funded part. And nowhere is that more evident than in his essay about the importance of webcasting to radio.

The wonderful, magnanimous streaming-fees concession made recently—over which not a few in our industry are back-slapping and congratulating themselves—changes absolutely nothing. It’s a joke. No, it’s an insult—that some people in our industry are so out of touch with small market radio to think this is a victory. (To be fair, many of our small-market leaders are still on the case, viewing the latest episode as progress but by no means a win.)

I think the rest of the industry has gotten the small-market memo about HD: pass. As important as it might be from an industry public-relations perspective, it is the last thing small market operators want to spend money on—even when they have it.

But webcasting is a different story. I applaud those who are paying the proverbial two dollars to stream their broadcasts on the Internet, even if selectively. (Interestingly, as we note in this issue’s lead story, a small station on Long Island has been streaming 24/7 for years; such was the passion and commitment of its late owner.)

Fifteen years ago, as XM was launching “Rock” and “Roll” to fearsome fanfare, some of us were saying that satellite radio was at best a transitional technology; today, even the hobbled merged remnants of that business realize their future is on the web. (But really, why pay them when you can get anything you want online for free?)

In the early days of what is now known as HD—a decade or more before the first receiver was sold (in Cedar Rapids, IA, I note with some perverse home-boy pride)—I asked my buddy, the director of engineering at Gannett, who was part of the ad-hoc consortium that eventually birthed the technology, “Is this anything, really?” (That was not the first time I was reminded that you never ask an engineer if his/her latest bright, shiny object has real-world relevance.)

So, the scoreboard reads thus:

Feeble attempts to supplant the hegemony of the Internet: 0
The Internet: 2

Paul Harvey Wannabe?

All of which is my wordy way of saying. . .

• The Internet is vitally important to us.
• We should do everything we can to put lots of our audio online.
• We should plan to put all our audio online as soon as we can—and then some.
• We should raise our disproportionately-loud small-market voice to ensure that the industry powers that be understand the streaming-fee battle is far from over.

Or, in the slightly less-wordy words of Chancellor Churchill, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never.”

Come to think of it, Sir Winston would have made a heckuva small-market broadcaster.

Political Wrong-Headedness

As I’ve said before, I’m apolitical. I think that all political factions have valid points of view—but they also have a big stash of stupid pills. Right now, it seems, at least when it comes to issues important to our industry, the majority party is popping those pills like candy corn at Halloween.

Take this Fairness Doctrine thing. Debbie Stabenow says that there is an imbalance in the points of view expressed on the air and, by gum, it’s up to the government to right this grievous wrong.

Let me get this straight. Our economy is a shambles; people are losing their jobs, their homes, their hope. But our elected officials somehow find the time to indulge their petty retributive feelings to make sure there is an equal number of idiots on the air from the far left and the far right.

Here’s a novel idea: let the market decide. Personally I think there is a resurgence in the offing for progressive talk. Just the fact that the very smart people at Dial Global are snapping up marquee liberal talkers is a good bellwether. But if not, that’s the way it works: popular programming survives, the rest doesn’t.

While they’re at it, our too-much-time-on-their-hands legislators should redress another disgraceful disparity: the lack of Westerns on network television. There ought to be a doctrine ...

The Perils of Irrelevant Media

This week we had two reminders of why certain media are doomed ... and why others are fated to survive all challenges.

Both the venerable Muzak and the embattled Sirius-XM are facing Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At first glance the two have little in common; one is the very definition of “old media,” 75 years old, limping along; the other burst on the scene purporting to be a game-changer, full of sound and fury.

But on closer examination, Muzak and Sirius-XM are but two sides of the same coin. Neither is providing meaningful service to its consumers. Neither deserves to survive.

When I was a kid I sold Muzak for a while, and at the time the story was somewhat compelling: the music was scientifically designed to have a specific effect—energizing for a factory, soothing for a dentist’s office. But at its core, it’s just repackaged music.

Although Sirius-XM has myriad talk channels, most are music. And with certain high-profile exceptions—the over-exposed Howard Stern and Oprah Winfrey, for example—the wobbly satellite radio outfit offers nothing the media consumer can’t get elsewhere for free.

And then there’s radio. As we and others have said many times, our medium does pretty well, considering how badly we screw it up ... and right now we’re really excelling at that. But there is just enough genuinely relevant content—mostly in smaller markets, I have to say—to stave off the grim media reaper.

As long as we specialize in content that our communities find relevant and of service, we can survive. Actually, if we’re truly committed to our communities, we can do much better than survive.