What’s the Vector, Victor? Or Whose 4th was it, anyway?

These lazy days of summer are turning out to be anything but lazy for me.  One of the problems with writing a blog is keeping it up, and I’m so buried in the new American Music Festivals series that the blog has languished.  I did promise you some comments that were running on the AMPPR Listserv but they petered out and frankly were not very substantial, so I decided not to bother.

Thanks to Jeff Skibbe of KXMS in Missouri for writing a guest post on programming.   With apologies to the movie Airplane! here it is:

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Just sayin’.

We’re drowning in a river of words: blogs, emails, text messages, tweets, comments, speeches, oratory, rhetoric, verbal engineering, commentary, and spin, spin, spin.  Sure, we contribute our fair share right here on Scanning the Dial, but our contribution to the torrent hopefully sets just the right tone, is just clever enough and feels just right. *wink*

There are good words, hate words, and comic words. When you think of good communicators, who comes to mind? President Obama? Jesse Jackson? Jon Stewart? What kind of words tend to capture your imagination? Depends on our mood and needs, doesn’t it.

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Kicking the tires of philanthropy.

To give or not to give, that is the question.

Not-for-profit radio stations around the country are entering into the spring fund-raising season, facing the same challenges as last year and the year before that, and the year before that. The perennial challenge is engaging the listener in a conversation about the relevance of the station in peoples’ lives and the need for voluntary contributions to cover the station’s expenses. There’s a cause and effect dynamic at work. Programming causes listening, good programming causes loyalty, loyalty causes giving. In theory. Is that all there is to it, do the best we can with creating content and then ask for money – and we shall automatically receive?

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Programming – Our Ongoing Controversy in Public Radio

Responding finally to Mike’s query last week about how programmers choose their music, I think a good place to start is to look at how the successful stations program.  Of course I have my own opinions but I’ll save them until the end of this post.

If you look at the big commercial stations, WQXR in NY, WFMT in Chicago, KDFC in San Francisco, you’ll find they all have one thing in common: they all play classical music!

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