The annual Week Of Interviews With People Who Have Nothing To Say is almost over. I'm referring here, of course, to the buildup to the Super Bowl, and the Radio Row stuff that it seems every sports station and network does. Sometimes, you get good radio out of that. More commonly, you don't.

Part of it is the nature of the assembly line. You have a lot of stations crammed into a hall, with interview subjects going from station to station to station to station to station, answering the same questions or being plunged into shows with characters and inside jokes and situations of which they're not aware. How can that be a good thing for radio? By the third or fourth interview, what does the guest have left? And there's the ...

So much of what radio does is governed by ratings that I thought a little perspective was in order. Even though we've discussed here how advertisers are increasingly looking to paying on the basis of actual product sales, responses, or clicks, audience shares are still ...

A few scattered thoughts this week: -One leftover thing from CES is how the ad agency people in attendance kept talking about engagement. They were talking about how to measure the effectiveness of new media campaigns, and it all came down to looking for engagement with ...

Your future was on display at the International CES convention in Las Vegas this week, but it had little to do with any of the specific gadgets being touted. Those were a little underwhelming. Other than a prototype 8K ultra-ultra-high definition 85-inch TV being shown ...

While I was spending the last couple of weeks in a fruitless attempt to disengage from work and radio and business -- I have to face the fact that I'm incapable of really relaxing -- I thought a lot about the future of media, and radio in particular. It's been a trope of ...

Last year at this time, I wrote a "last column of the year" piece in which I voiced what I hoped we'd see in 2011. How'd we do? Let's check: Back then, I said, "I think we'll see more podcasts start to generate revenue." That's happened -- I'm hearing a few more major ...

So you've been fired, huh? Canned, let go, released, made a free agent, contract expired, made redundant, seeking new opportunities, now available, exited, left by mutual agreement, whatever term you want to use, it's the same: You were employed, and now you're ...

The last few years, the radio industry has been telling anybody who'll listen, especially politicians, that radio is a critical part of America's emergency indication system. That was the argument advanced for putting FM tuners in cell phones, and it's what the NAB ...

If anything struck me while I attended the talk radio convention–type thing in Dallas last week, it was the feeling that our industry lives in a bubble, in which nothing ever really changes much. That might not be a fair characterization, but after over twenty years of ...

So, you've been RIFfed. That, apparently, is the new jargon. It's what we used to call "getting fired," "getting canned," "getting the ax," "being made redundant," "getting sacked," "laid off," and "being thrown out on our asses." I guess "Reduction in Force" sounds ...