My daughter Cristina

This means nothing I guess and is purely anecdotal, but could you construe anything from this?

My 20 year old daughter Cristina is a full-time junior at UNC-G and a part-time waitress at an area restaurant.

I may be biased of course, but Cristina is very out-going, friendly and caring, and this works well as a waitress since those attributes pay-off in tips, the main way she makes her living.

For the first time in her life, she voted. Participated in early-voting at the Guilford County Courthouse. She was very proud and displayed her "I Voted" sticker on her order pad at work.

That night, a couple came in and noticed it as she was taking their order. The man said, "I bet you a million dollars you didn't vote for Bush did you?" Cristina just smiled and told him he was correct. She didn't offer any other comment or say anything else about it, but she could tell they were unhappy. They ran up a bill of over $60.00 and left her a $2.00 tip.

Later, another group came in and asked Cristina if the restaurant served anything besides Heinz Ketchup. She said no and asked why that was important. One of the men in the group started in about how they couldn't support the Heinz company because of John Kerry. ( I know, the guy was too much of a frigging idiot to know that Kerry has nothing to do with Heinz, but that's another story.) At this point she notices he has on a big "W IN '04" sweatshirt. He then asked her if she had voted for Bush. Again, she just smiled and said no. Then the guy goes on about how it is OK to make one mistake in your life. Again, Cristina just smiles and makes no comment, even though by now she wanted to. She should have gone ahead and said something because this group ran up an $80.00 plus bill and left her a $3.00 tip.

To rub salt in the wound, the same group came in again later in the week, got a waitress that was vocally pro-Bush, ran up another $80.00 plus bill and left the pro-Bush waitress a tip in the double digits.

Some people are just jerks.

WZTK Ratings

Lots of talk this summer when the Triads first Newstalk FM came on the air on July 6th.

WZTK's first full ratings book may be a disappointment for them. The results of the summer ratings period of July 1st through September 22nd is in and the 12+ numbers are lower for them than the spring book was when they were still country. You can see the results here. They are in 17th place in the market now. They were in 13th place in the spring.

Of course there may be some encouraging news deep within the book. Maybe they have some increases in men 25-54 or some other subset. But with a 12+ decline, it will be hard to find any good news.

It takes a long time to build up a newstalk audience. I wonder if Curtis is in this for the long haul? Will they try making changes yet or give the current line-up some more time?

We'll see.

Could High Point lose one or both of the Furniture Markets?

Ivan Cutler writes the Inside Furniture Blog and writes a piece about the problems of the twice yearly market in High Point.

Cheney's Gaffe

Got this in an e-mail from Media Post. It is an e-mail newsletter called "Just an Online Minute...

Thursday, October 7, 2004

Dennis Elliott,

Something interesting happened during Tuesday night's debate between the vice presidential candidates. The fluke had the unintended consequence of sending people to a Web site run by billionaire financier George Soros who's known for his dislike of the Bush administration.
Here's what happened: Vice President Cheney, attempting to answer questions regarding his interests in Halliburton Corp., inadvertently directed television viewers to FactCheck.com, instead of FactCheck.org, a non-partisan site run by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, for fact-checking with regard to his ties to the company. The Bush administration's ties to Halliburton, and in particular, Cheney's ties, have come under increasing scrutiny in recent months; Cheney served as Halliburton's chief executive from 1995 to 2000.

In citing FactCheck.com, Cheney's gaffe had the unintended consequence of sending people to an advertising site based in the Cayman Islands. Oops.

In response to what must have been a deluge of traffic to its site, FactCheck.com redirected traffic to the Soros site. Nearly 100 viewers per second were redirected there after the debate, John Berryhill, an attorney for FactCheck.com said, according to an AP report.

Ironically, the Soros site was chosen because FactCheck.com decided Soros could afford to field the traffic surge, and site administrators decided not to direct surfers to fundraising sites, Berryhill told the AP.

The flood of visitors to FactCheck.org caused the site to crash several times yesterday, and through this morning, The Minute was unable to access various sections of the site.
For its part, GeorgeSoros.com, posted a notice saying that it doesn't own FactCheck.com and wasn't responsible for re-directing readers from that site to the Soros message.

Oh boy!
It all goes to show what dropping the names of a few Web sites can do. Cheney meant well. But where are millions of undecided voters going on the Web for answers to their questions? Does anyone out there have the names of some good non-partisan sites that seek to tell the truth? Let us know.

In the meantime, I wish all four of the candidates would address the issues more directly instead of speaking in glib generalizations designed for sound-bite replay. Let's tone down the histrionics and get some real answers on how the candidates are planning to address the issues at hand.

Comment to Lex Alexander

Lex Alexander had a post about the death of commercial radio.

I wrote a reply to him in his comments section, but it would't let me post more than 1000 characters, so I had to truncate it. My entire comment is posted here below.

The reports of commercial radio's death is still a bit premature I think Lex.

Obviously I'm speaking from within the belly of the beast, but at least from inside I can see what needs to be done to remain competitive and the industry see's the threat from Satellite Radio and is taking it seriously.

Broadcast Radios death has been forecast many times before. When TV came around, it was announced that radio would die. When music videos and MTV came along, again radio was pronounced on it's deathbed. You remember what the first video shown by MTV was? "Video Killed the Radio Star." It didn't happen.

Now the same predictions are being made with satellite radio. But the industry will make the necessary changes to remain viable. Radio may be different, but it will still be around.

Digital radio is coming soon and we will also have broadband Internet access in our autos before long. This could make internet streaming of broadcast radio even more important because it would make broadcast stations as available as satellite stations.

HBO and its counterparts have prospered just as satellite radio will. But just as HBO has not killed broadcast TV, satellite radio will not kill broadcast radio. But I don't deny that everything will be radically different in the near future.

The broadcasting company I work for is cutting back on commercials by 19% beginning in January. This is a move to remain competitive in a changing environment. Our four stations in Greensboro are also going to be streaming once again via the Internet beginning in November.

Radio may indeed die and slow and painful death, but if history is any guide, it will make the changes necessary to remain a viable medium.

I could go on for much longer on this subject, but I will just leave it here. I enjoy your blog. You do some good writing.

When Bloggers go bad

Professor Pursued by Mob Of Bloggers

WSJ Reporters E-mail about Iraq

Everyone needs to read this.

From Ed Cone via Poynter Online.

I'm not depressed anymore

I'm not depressed anymore. Not after the debate last night. Kerry did a great job and Bush did a poor job. Not a piss-poor job, but it was a poor job none the less.

Kerry, for the first time, was able to get his message across and counter the Bush attacks on his supposed flip-flopping. The Bush attempts to keep pounding that point fell flat.

A lot of the questions were open-ended and Bush does a bad job on open-ended questions.

The Town Hall meeting next Friday should be interesting. But you know Bush is going to try and come back better in this one.