Guess Who's Going To Be On The Radio?

ANOTHER LIFE ADVENTURE
Life is full of new things, right?  Yes, even at my age!  Well, Sunday presents a new experience for your humble correspondent.  Your previously mute purveyor of information and opinions will be a guest on "Sunday Brunch with Tom Johnson and Lynn Selich" on KOCI, 101.5 FM, beginning at 11 a.m.

DON'T EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM ME
Don't get your hopes up, dear readers.  Unlike many of our local politicians, I've never considered myself a particularly strong public speaker, but Tom Johnson asked me to appear on his program this weekend - Lynn's off at some exotic locale - to talk, as he put it, "all things Costa Mesa".  He asked me previously, but I was under the weather with what many of you have had since Christmas.  It's my understanding that it will just be Tom and me, chatting a little about the city that's been my home for more than four decades while you chow down on your Bangers and Mash and sip Mimosas.

WIDE OPEN AGENDA
I really have no idea what we'll discuss.  I suspect the growth-oriented initiative - which is properly identified as "An Initiative To Require Voter Approval On Certain Development Projects" - will find it's way into the conversation, but I don't pretend to be an expert on that subject and Jay Humphrey already covered it on this show recently.  We will probably talk about the upcoming election and politics in general.  We may talk about the staff shortages in Costa Mesa, and what caused them.  We won't have a lot of time, so we'll just play it by ear.

WE GO WAY BACK
I've known Tom since the early 2000's.  He was the publisher of the Daily Pilot when I wrote my first commentary, responding to a column by Byron de Arakal, which they published.  That's what started this whole thing, so I guess he has to share some of the blame, right?  Over the years he, his editors and their successors have offered me a weekly column more than a dozen times, which I gratefully declined.  Tom asked me to be one of the local folks on his advisory board when he and Bill Lobdell began their fledgling online news source, The Daily Voice.

WE DON'T ALWAYS AGREE
He and I do not always agree on issues - some of you who follow the blog already know that - but we've remained cordial over the years and I admire his long-time community involvement.  The Daily Pilot was in good hands when he was in charge.  He's a man who gets things done.

WARMING UP THE AUDIENCE FOR CHIEF LEWIS
I'm told my segment will lead off the show and will likely be a warm-up for the really big guy, recently appointed Newport Beach Police Chief Jon Lewis.  Now THAT interview will be worth the price of admission!

RADIO OR ONLINE
So, if you're not doing anything for a few minutes at 11:00 a.m. on Sunday, March 20th, tune in to 101.5 FM or you can listen to it live online if you go to their website, www.kociradio.com.  I guarantee nothing except to fill up air space for a quarter hour or so.  Even better, stick around and hear Chief Lewis tell you about his vision for the Newport Beach Police Department.

The Future Of Media

A WONDERFUL OPPORTUNITY
I was fortunate to be included in a panel discussion Thursday afternoon with the current class of Leadership Tomorrow during which the current condition and future of media was discussed.  I was part of a panel, moderated by former Daily Pilot Publisher Tom Johnson, which included Daily Pilot Editor John Canalis and dynamic restaurant Public Relations representative Mona Shah-Anderson.  Unfortunately, a representative from the Orange County Register was unable to attend.

SOME FAMILIAR FACES
For an hour we responded to questions posed to us by Johnson and members of the class, which included some familiar faces.  Dane Bora and Leigh Chalkley of the City of Costa Mesa were in the group, as was Andrew Smith - a member of the Costa Mesa Charter Committee.  Click on that link above and you can see the full roster of this year's class.

 BUSINESS USING MEDIA
Shah-Anderson, the highly-acclaimed restaurant strategist, discussed her approach to getting media coverage for her clients - high-end restaurants throughout Orange County.  She, for example, had just returned from a video shoot at Fox News in Los Angeles that morning and was scampering out to another client commitment following our meeting.  The tries to "personalize" the restaurants by focusing on the chefs and their skills.  Plus, she uses all the current social media sources to the maximum to entice people to the restaurants.  I, personally, have been the victim of her skill.  She posts photos of yummy dishes prepared by her client chefs and I immediately feel like Pavlov's dog - salivating to get a taste of the food.  She is married to former Daily Pilot City Editor, Paul Anderson, who now is the presence of the City News Service in Orange County and a REAL newsman.

CONDITION OF LOCAL MEDIA
We discussed the current condition of print media locally - it's on unsteady ground.  The drama around the Register has been widely chronicled, as has the ownership of the Los Angeles Times - parent company of the Daily Pilot.  There are still some great unknowns about those organizations.  The Register, for example, made a huge commitment to growing it's print presence - acquiring the Riverside Press Enterprise and creating brand new newspapers in both Long Beach and Los Angeles.  Those last two efforts were spectacular failures and the financial condition of the entire organization is precarious, at best.  We learned from Canalis that the Pilot is on solid financial footing right now, but that he'd always welcome the chance to hire more reporters and staff to support them.

IT'S NOT JUST A LOCAL PROBLEM
In doing some research for this opportunity I found that, since 2004, 187 newspaper printing facilities have been closed nationwide - a bellwether of the condition of the print product.  Between 2003 and 2013 the advertising revenues for the print media has dropped 49%!  More journalism jobs are available in digital media sources than print sources by far.  And, it's not only newspapers that are suffering.  If you subscribe to, or regularly read ANY magazine these days, you realize that they are rapidly becoming mere shadows of themselves.  Folks just don't subscribe as much - because so much of that information is available online at NO COST.  And thereby lies the problem.

COVERING ALL THE BASES IS A TOUGH JOB
The difficulty of covering every story with a reduced staff was part of the discussion by Canalis.  I opined that, being a huge fan of the Daily Pilot myself, I thought they did a good job of balancing their news coverage.  I suggested one measurement of that success was the fact that they've managed to anger folks on both sides of an issue - each presuming that the editors and writers favored the other's point of view.  It's actually amusing in a sad sort of way.

THE BURDEN OF FACTS WITHOUT OPINION
Johnson prodded me about my aggressive opinion-writing on Costa Mesa issues, which I readily acknowledged.  As a blogger I have much more latitude than any of the "real" news outlets.  They are burdened by the responsibility of providing the facts of issues, clearly and accurately and as quickly as possible.  They also must cover a breadth of issues where I can focus on one specific story at a time.  In my opinion - there's that word again - both the Daily Pilot and the Orange County Register do a good job of presenting the news fairly and accurately.  Yeah, I know some of you disagree with me, but I challenge you to point out one issue where they have NOT done so...

CAULDRON READERSHIP CONTINUES TO GROW
Johnson also asked me to quantify the blog - how many people read it, for example.  Well, I told him there are many ways to quantify it, but purely from a "pageviews" standpoint, we have had well over 2 million page views with the current host platform - more than 500,000 each for the past two years.  The readership, based on all the measurements I have available to me, continues to grow.  Thanks to all of you for that.  That being said, those numbers pale when compared to the pageviews tallied by the Daily Pilot or the Register - which is how it should be.  We simply need a viable, thriving, free press in this country.  Otherwise, how do we know what the heck's going on?

LOCAL COMPARISONS
I will, unashamedly, tell you that the numbers for this blog far outstrip those of two "competing" blogs in this city.  That "kinder, gentler" blog seems to have lost all traction - not unexpected when his unreadable,  pseudo-intellectual bilge has devolved into comparing activists in this city to Muslim terrorists. The much more established blog operated by our racist laureate has lost readership so significantly that it doesn't even show up on many measurement tools.  I guess that's a good sign.  It tells me that folks just got tired of wading through all the manure posted there looking for a pearl of wisdom.   Typically, you'd come away from a session reading that thing and feel like you need a good shower.

DIGITAL IS THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE
The more than two dozen people in the class covered the spectrum age-wise, as you can see from the photo above.  Most of them, in response to Johnson's first question, acknowledged that they do NOT read a newspaper each day.  Several did, but most did not.  Many of the class members get their news from smart phones and/or tablets - which, according to the research I did, is the wave of the future.  Unfortunately, nobody has yet successfully found a way to make money selling the news that way.  That's a problem that simply must be solved.  We cannot let the future of news in this country be blogs like mine or, God Forbid, those other two!  That's completely unacceptable.

FACTS...
Here are some snippets of information extracted from a recent Pew State Of The News Media report from last year.

• News is part of the explosion of social media and mobile devices, which could be a way to reach more people than ever before.
• Half of Facebook users get news there even though they did not go there looking for it.
• Facebook users who get news at the highest rates are the 18-to-29-year-olds.
• The same is true for the growth are of online video.  Half of those who watch some kind of online video watch news videos.  Again, young people constitute the greatest portion of these viewers.
• Despite evidence of news consumption by Facebook users - half of whom report getting news across at least six topic areas - research data finds these consumers to have rather low levels of engagement with news sites.
• Their study found that roughly 5,000 full-time professional jobs at nearly 500 digital news outlets, most of which did not exist a half-dozen years ago.
• Local television remains the primary place American adults turn to for news, and the audience increased for the first time in five years.
• A quarter of the 952 U.S. television stations that air newscasts do not produce their news programs. 

You can read that report in it's entirety HERE.

THANKS FOR THE OPPORTUNITY
Thanks to Tom Johnson, Chairman Joe Stapleton and Vice Chairman Jon Lewis - recently promoted to Deputy Police Chief in Newport Beach - and the Leadership Tomorrow class of 2015 for inviting me to participate.  I hope my input was helpful to them - and I hope they become regular readers here.