“Broadcasting Needs to Party Like It’s 1999” writes Harry Jessell in TVNewsCheck. He ticks off the once-great broadcast conventions like the NATPE whose last year in Vegas was a shadow of its former self.

He looks forward to the 2010 NAB Convention in Las Vegas this April, and tells legacy broadcasters they need a good party, and laments how few station badges are at the shows these days. The comments are even more revealing. One wag says it should be renamed NANB, for National Association of Non-Broadcasters.

We’re now seeing the fruits of an organization that saw the handwriting on the wall long before its legacy members did, and was open and accepting of new media. I remember not long ago a broadcast industry that said non-linear editing would never work and a motion picture industry that said film would never die.

Legacy television broadcasters have nobody to blame but themselves. Like the RIAA and radio before them, they were in total denial about the changing media landscape. Instead of embracing digital technology, they cried poor and used their diminishing political influence to block its implementation.

So new delivery mediums simply built infrastructure without them, and now they’re on the outside looking in. YouTube is delivering 1080p while even legacy networks are still delivering content in SD.

We’ll be at the NAB this year, and while it might be fun to look at the big powerful transmitters, that’s not where the leading edge is, and the terrestrial folks ought to just accept it and move to the final stage of grief; acceptance.

Which I suppose is a good excuse for a party.

A letter to the editor received from a young reader:

I am 8 years old.
Some of my friends say there is no Twitter Pro.
Papa says, if you see it on THE INTERNETS it's so.
Please tell me the truth; is there a Twitter Pro?

VIRGINIA O'HANLON
115 West Ninety-Fifth Street

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what Apple and Microsoft tell them.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Twitter Pro. It exists as certainly as user entry form mockups and vaporware and unfunded startups exist, and you know that they abound as dead and moribund webpages on servers this whole world round.

Not believe in Twitter Pro? You might as well not believe in boo.com, or etoys.com or Webvan.

You might get your papa to hire men to watch Source Forge night and day, but even if they didn’t see beta versions coming down the pipe, what would that prove?  Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

No Twitter Pro? Unfathomable. Because VIRGINIA if we tell ourselves that Twitter Pro is nothing but a fairy tale, if we come to believe its just a hoax on the unsuspecting, then we must again ask ourselves that much scarier and vexing question: “How can Twitter monetize itself.”

The Editor

[Snark Rosetta Stone: "Twitter Pro" was an April Fools Joke promulgated by the folks who brought you the Shorty Awards. It was an alleged invitation to participate in the beta program for a rumored paid enhanced service on Twitter that would monetize it. But it really was nothing more than a website that took your twitter avatar and put a "PRO" banner on it, and sent you to your twitter page to replace your avatar with the "enhanced" one. It then let you tweet an invitation to others. A lot of people were fooled, and I was one of them.]

I Don’t Read The Newspaper

There I’ve said it!  I am officially a heretic.  I teach journalism, but I don’t read a newspaper.

And I doubt that most people reading this blog or others do either. — Blog post from @Teach_J

The 1920s saw an amazing change. The automobile was overtaking the horse, the telephone was becoming an appliance for more than the rich and early adopters, and the radio was replacing word of mouth and the evening newspaper as the method the public first learned of a new important event. Instantaneous communication changed everything, and the radio has lived on its laurels ever since.

Voltmeter on 1922 Ware Neutrodyne Radio

That is, until the Internet crept in on little cat feet and slowly inserted itself first as an alternative for text communication, growing to a distribution medium so robust that it is easier to distribute high definition images–even moving ones–on the net than through adapted legacy media.

That has brought us to a crisis. We will, over the next few years, see the total decimation of the very technology that changed us in the first place. The change is going to appear far swifter than it really is, because its been going on for a long time, and instead of legacy media using its power to move forward, its used that power to be recalcitrant and reactionary. The best example is the RIAA, which was successful for many years in keeping the status quo through lawsuits and threats of suits, and through rent seeking–ie gaming the system instead of adapting to it.

The NAB has tried the same thing, and for years has been successful because no congresscritter wants to go against their local TV or radio station. But the Internet is a game changer, not only because YouTube can bring you a Macaca Moment, it lets you walk around those local gatekeepers and speak directly to your constituents: even about how your local broadcaster is gaming the system to make you think you’re being served by media that is really self-serving.

Take the Local Radio Freedom Act, which was named by the NAB to try and disguise what it really is: congressional affirmation that radio and television stations don’t have to pay performers when they play their songs. There’s always been an inequity in broadcasting. It had to pay the rights holders for the words and music, but not the performer who actually performed it in recorded form. When paying the talent was at issue for net-only radio stations and audio sources, the NAB was not interested in standing up against performance “fees and taxes.” Thousands, probably tens of thousands, of internet radio stations shut down.

But paying performers is a whole different animal when its legacy media. Its a tax. A bailout, screams the NAB, and they’re blaming the RIAA for it. In fact the only “freedom” in the local radio freedom act is to reaffirm in law the freedom of broadcasters to rip off musicians and artists, which they’ve been doing for years.

While these scorpions challenge each other in the bottle that is a shrinking space occupied by legacy media, we will see more and more of those of us who think about and write about a business we grew up in, no longer be consumers of it, because the new alternatives are just too enticing especially to those of us who follow them closely.

And I’m guilty just like the journalism teacher who eschews the pulpy rag. When I was writing about Randi Rhodes the other day, at a time her show was on, I wanted to make sure she wasn’t on the air but not on the net. I had to go out to my car to do it. I don’t have a radio in the house hooked up to receive an over the air signal.

I was ready to pitch Disney on a sequel. “Honey, I shrunk the phone book.” If I had any doubt that the old media was dying a slow agonizing death, it was put to rest when I picked up a plastic bag in my driveway today. I thought whatever was in that little bag couldn’t possibly be good, and AT&T probably is thinking the same thing.

Any smaller, and it disappears!

Eons ago, the Yellow Pages was the place to find every restaurant, every auto body shop, and every ambulance chasing attorney with 80 square inches of colored ink touting their praises. In Vegas “escort services” was a whole chapter. Selling ads was almost easy; identify a potential client’s competitors, drop a few hints about how big the competitor’s ad would be, and produce the contract.

Newspapers are scurrying for cover and firing their oldest employees first to get the greatest cost savings. Magazines are shuttering daily,  radio is past tense, outdoor feels the pinch of increased air travel and, at least until recently, gas prices that make road trips impossible.

And letting our fingers do the walking? Could that be yet another reason we’re a nation of the obese?