Out of the Newsroom

During the course of this week, I’ve read that two new media pundit-types have endorsed the same “big idea” as the future for local television stations on the internet. Since one of them is actually someone I respect (Steve Safran of AR&D fame)–I can’t just dismiss their opinions as the latest fad of consultantcy-fee-driven thinking. (The excellent LostRemote.com blog features coverage of both presentations right here.)

If I get what they are selling, their premise is that local tv stations (and in turn the schmucks like myself who work inside of them) who are desperately trying to figure out how to survive the free-fall that the arrival of the future of all media has sent us into, just need to get over themselves when it comes to building our online biz off of our heritage brand–our call letters.

So that means we need to get away from using (and promoting the shit out of) our four letters, as assigned by the federal government, way back in the late 40s to late 50s. You know those names that all begin with either an “W” or a “K”. No, we now need to have some fresh new rockin’ internet sounding local brand name and then a collection of various web properties that live underneath this new brand name.

A new name which of course will also be our brand spanking new internet address. You know something snappy like “allaccessanywheresville.com” You know–much easier than typing in the same four letters that you’ve heard since birth, and that in some cases–actually stand for something. Kind of.

OK, as you might have detected through the thin veil of sarcasm here, this topic has some special meaning for me. Why? Well because I wrote a school paper once on the fabulous meaning of broadcast station call letters. You know, back in the dark ages before you could use Wikipedia to look it up in about two seconds. I got an “A” on the paper, mostly I think because I did the research to find out that a radio station in the small town of Chester, South Carolina had requested the call letters WGCD, to celebrate its status as the “Wonderful Guernsey Center of Dixie”–a fact that Wikipedia doesn’t seem to know even now about WGCD, which is still on the air in Chester. Ha! Suck on that you great knowledge collective!

Our little side trip down positive academic memories lane aside, I can’t buy into this new found religion of my friend Steve and some research guru named Gordon Borrell. Borrell’s claim is that he can sell you a handy research report on his findings about all of this (including many nifty charts and graphs) for a mere ten crisp new portraits of Ben Franklin, recently printed by the US Treasury. Not that I am against trying new things or building new brands in the new media space (I am so not, just for the record) but rather because it seems to me that this has been done before, with limited success.

Way back in the early days of TV station website launches (also known as the mid-90s) it sure seemed like there were a bunch more Channel4000.com (oooh, that is so future sounding!) and icflorida.com variations than there were WCCO.com and WFTV.com types. It should be noted that these were not small thinking TV stations jumping on the web, but major players like CBS and Cox, to pick out just a few.

But to be fair, the thinking was that these online properties might someday be “bigger than just TV brands” so they would also need to be websites that were more than just TV stations repurposed on the web. (Remember, video on the web wasn’t really out of the gate yet, and audio on the web was still a bit of a struggle.) A few braver souls even went down the road of being “local portals”, when the thought really was that you could be all things to all people–even though there still weren’t that many people online yet, to make “all people” all that large of a number. And we all know how the portal game has worked out (See Yahoo v. Google)

A lot of what Safran pitched to the nation’s TV station creative gurus this week was solid creative thinking, the kind of stuff that Steve is loaded with and likes to throw into a room like a grenade with its pin dangling off his finger. So even though I think he may be a bit off the mark–I am now forced to give up my lifelong quest to one day buy a small radio station (West of the Mississippi, alas) that I could have sport the same call letters as my first name. Of course I will have to wrestle them away from the present holder of KIRK, which would be a smaller FM station in Macon, Missouri. KIRK is of course “Your Home for Adult Contemporary and Easy Listening Favorites in North Central Missouri, at 99.9 on the FM dial”.

Turns out that the metropolis of Kirksville, Missouri (Pop, 16,988) is right smack in the KIRK-FM coverage area. So it seems that I may have to become wealthy enough to not only buy the radio station, but also the whole town of Kirksville. But then it turns out that when I want to set up KIRK.com to go along with my radio and municipal empire, I will have to go payoff a Kirk Scott in San Francisco, who owns the domain name I would be coveting for “all things Kirk.” Damn it!

So now, I have to go think up some cool new brand name to be the umbrella for the websites (yes, all searchable and sharable, Steve) that will be the brand for my ever expanding personal empire.

I’ll let you know how that turns out for me, but rest assured a winning Powerball ticket will need to be involved at some point.