The Jacobs Media Blog

It’s the most over-hyped night of the year, which is why many of us will probably spend it watching TV or hanging out with friends and family.  If you’re looking for something to read, let me suggest one of our most-devoured posts of 2014.  In “Live & Local?” this past February, we took a humorous but hard […]

As the holiday season continues, so does our Best of JacoBLOG end-of-year playback. This was one of my favorite posts of the year, because it’s a call to action to broadcast radio that “‘Good enough’ is no longer good enough.” – FJ This morning, a reminder that radio no longer operates in a vacuum.  And important […]

As we finish up 2014, we’re looking back at some of our most-read posts.  One of the big stories in personality radio in this past year was the surprise (to some) announcement that Seattle’s Bob Rivers was hanging up the headphones, and moving on to other opportunities.  Bob is a morning icon, and someone I’ve been […]

The Best of JacoBLOG continues on the day after Christmas with some of our best efforts from 2014.  This  past August, we took the opportunity to review the NPR One app, a revolutionary content and delivery mechanism for both national and local public radio.  In the process, there’s a lot to think about here in terms of […]

The holiday season is the time of year to reflect back.  And that’s what we’ve done the past several years on this blog.  Analytics tell us the most-read posts of the past year, and in most cases, those numbers are very telling.  They almost always reveal some of the best, most thought-provoking entries. This post […]

This is our last new post of 2014.  Starting tomorrow, we’re continuing a tradition that we started a few years back – replaying the most popular blog posts of the past year.  Thanks to all of you who read our blog, make it a part of your conversations, comment on our posts, and provide me with […]

One of the downsides of spending most of your waking hours on social media platforms is that you run across an awful lot of banal, boring, repetitive posts. That’s the price Lori Lewis has to pay for specializing in the social space. As clever as people try to be socially, the fact is that so […]

For those of you outside of Detroit radio circles, this morning’s post won’t have the impact that it will for the Motown media community. It’s been a tough month for TV and radio icons here in The D. Earlier in the month, the most famous anchorman in Detroit history, Bill Bonds, passed away. And then over […]

Remember the first time you played with an iPod and you saw that fabulous album artwork on the screen? It was one of the early signs that digital technology could rock our worlds, and change the way that we listen to and enjoy music. Old school vinyl records have made a comeback in recent years, boosting a […]

The end of the year signals those incessant lists – best movies, best books, best songs, etc.  Some are frivolous, others are fascinating, and somehow we tend to read them all. While lots of this list-making is purely opinion, there are some rank orders that are truly quantitative, containing no subjectivity, bias, or guesswork. Thus, we already […]

We hear a lot these days that consumers love a great story.  Maybe this goes back to our adolescent days when parents and grandparents sent us off to sweet dreams with a make-believe tale or fable. In fact, there is some amazing storytelling happening on the radio. One of my favorites is The Moth Radio Hour, […]

As time marches on in the radio industry, it has become more apparent to broadcasters big and small, commercial and public, that personality is, in fact, the “secret sauce” that will keep the industry healthy and compelling.  As we have learned since the invention of the iPod to the emergence of pure-plays like Pandora and […]

As you can gather from the not-so-subtle, cheesy title of this post, holiday music is in the air, it is already impacting PPM ratings, and it’s just a matter of weeks before the industry trades and Nielsen glowingly report on the stunning story that this end-of-year stunt was wildly successful once again. But what does […]

In her social media training with clients, Lori Lewis talks a lot about how so-called secondary social media platforms are becoming more important to radio brands. The question is, once you get beyond Facebook and Twitter, how do you really know which of these social media sites attracts a critical mass of your listening audience? The […]

It seems like everyone’s obsession these days is to determine how the consumer’s media usage share is being divvied up, thanks to the proliferation of gadgets and content options. Problem is, everyone’s research studies look a little different, from Edison’s “Share of Ear” study to Nielsen’s new “Let’s Total It Up” report. So when I across […]

OK, so maybe it’s corrugated cardboard. But last week, Amazon launched a promotion that started in Seattle and San Francisco and is expected to fan out to 15 other locales during this holiday season, according to GeekWire. It’s fascinating that last week in this blog, we discussed how Jeff Bezos is bringing new thinking to […]

At a time when TSL continues to erode, many critics of commercial radio claim that industry CEOs are out of touch with the changing media landscape. Or that they’re running out the clock on their careers, sticking the next generation of executives with the problems that are besetting their legacy media brands. But we all […]