What do people really think of radio? More to the point, do they think about radio at all?

There was a story on local TV news here in L.A. the other day about local residents protesting the electric companies' decision to turn off power in fire prone areas every time the Santa Ana winds start to blow. A woman was livid about the power cuts, and she summed up her argument to a reporter: Without power, there's no internet, and thus no way to get vital information to people who may be affected by the fires.

When we saw the report, Fran turned to me and said, "Isn't that why we're all supposed to have radios?" Indeed, battery-powered or hand-cranked radios are always on the list of emergency supplies to keep on hand in case of one of California's various disasters, right there with canned food and jugs of water. And we're in a market where local radio news and emergency coverage are still alive and well, with stations like KFI and KNX maintaining news staffs and reliably going into wall-to-wall coverage when our region is afflicted by fire, flood, earthquakes, and plagues of locusts. You can still turn to radio in a crisis.

Give them a reason. Last weekend, I was on a panel at a college radio and podcasting conference at Cal State Long Beach, the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System's west coast gathering, and I talked and I observed and I saw a good number of people of varying backgrounds ...

Things look different from the top floor. The disparity between management and rank-and-file in the perception of a business isn't breaking news, but it's real and it's what I observed covering the latest industry conference this week. At the Digital Hollywood podcasting ...

What happens if your media company is run by people who don't really understand or even care about the ultimate product? Oh, we can tell stories about that, can't we, radio folks? That's what came to mind for me when following the recent implosion of Deadspin, in which ...

The radio industry prides itself on its service to the community in emergencies, and so, with large swaths of California on fire once again and utility company-imposed power outages affecting large numbers of people, I dutifully checked up on key news and talk radio ...

Let's stipulate first that voice command is how we're going to summon our audio entertainment and information moving forward. That's not in dispute. At some point, everyone will just say "play X" and X will play. That's going to happen. In fact, you can do that now with ...

It's just now starting to feel like Fall in much of the U.S., so, naturally, it's time for radio stations nationwide to plot their annual all-Christmas music format flips. No, this is not going to be a column criticizing that move, or complaining that, dadgummit, these ...

They're putting another Target store in the empty shell that used to be an Orchard Supply Hardware store in the shopping center at the top of our hill. The shopping center has been there since the hill got developed back in the 1950s, but it's changed a lot, and the fate ...

There was a little stir caused at the radio convention in Dallas last week (the "Radio Show," named by someone who clearly doesn't quite grasp the value of SEO) when iHeartRadio CEO Bob Pittman proclaimed that "podcasting is our birthright," "our" referring to the radio ...

Sometimes, you have to tear it down and rebuild from scratch. Or at least build from the ground up. I thought about that in observing how radio is approaching expansion into podcasting and streaming, but it applies to the radio medium itself, too. As I've written way too ...