John Higdon wrote:

With all due respect, that is spoken just like someone who is not in the
business. I am days off the NAB convention floor, and even I was a bit
overwhelmed by some of the new tools for production and transmission
that have come out in just the past year. I can't imagine anyone
currently in the business saying that "there is nothing new under the
sun in broadcasting".

Sure, there'll always be new equipment. But, you weren't talking about
equipment. You were talking about *doing* broadcasting -- the production end
of it and I was responding to that. I also pointed out the sound collages
that "Radio Lab" is doing, which wouldn't have been possible in a pre-digital
age, or as easily possible at any rate. You were talking about the teaching
of skills that would lead to innovations in programming. That's where I said
that broadcasting is a mature industry and that there's only a certain amount
of things you can do with the medium.


I never went near one of those schools. But I cannot imagine that such
schools did not teach production, broadcast management, script writing,
technical basics, and the various performance techniques.

When I did a talkshow at KKEY, we had interns from a commercial broadcasting
school, I think it was Columbia. The bulk of what the interns knew were board
opping and talking into a mic. Broadcast management? Shirley, you jest.


If they didn't
teach all of those things, they not only should have failed when they
did, but they should never have been in the business in the first place.

Remember the ads? They showed some guy in a booth talking into a mic and
moving a fader and clicking a switch. "Hi, this is Joe Schmuck. You can be
on the air just like me..." They never showed anybody looking at Arbitron
printouts, writing checks, or for that matter even looking into the back of a
transmitter. They always showed the DJ. So, this was not false nor
misleading advertising. They taught people who to be DJs in an already
overcrowded field of DJs.


Even leaving local broadcasting out of the discussion, are you saying
that not a single talented human being is utilized in syndication,
satellite and Internet audio services? That's truly incredible.

No, but I believe in what Rich Wood (syndicator of Sally Jessy Raphael,
Wolfman Jack, and a ton of other people, along with op mgr for XETRA, WOR,
etc) has always said: "I can teach people how to do radio, but only if they
have something to say when they open the mic."

But again, you led off the reply with talk about equipment and finished with
talk about production. Equipment is not mature, production is, for the most
part.