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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The Public Radio App

Happy Monday!

As a media professional, lately I’ve been asked — no solicited, begged, beseeched — by several classical music organizations for help with their media needs.  It’s getting harder and harder for groups to promote their music in the traditional media.

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A Rising Tide Floats All Boats in the Arts

Mike has started a great thread about programming, and I hope to give it some real thought next week, but today I’m going to digress to a topic that has come up because of the economic mess we’re in.

Like most of us who work in classical music radio, I go to a lot of concerts.  I serve on boards.  All of us in radio use the power of the airwaves to promote live concert-going.  But right now, with the shrinking of arts coverage in newspapers the music organizations have lost a major means of communication.  Is it the job of radio to make up for that loss?

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