[Speed Gibson,
Wednesday November 16, 2005 at 9:30pm]
Attention Deficit Radio
I was up eary this morning and got the idea to record on my Pogo an hour of morning drive on WCCO-AM, about 6:30 to 7:30. Here's what I got for this 61 minute sample:
20:00 Commercials (18)
10:40 News (4)
8:00 Union Gospel Mission PSA (11)
4:40 Sports (2)
4:30 Weather (11)
4:00 Entertainment news (3)
3:10 Medical news (1)
3:00 Traffic reports (6)
1:20 Promo's, station ID's (6)
1:10 School closing announcements (4)
0:30 Business news (1)
20 minutes of commercials per hour is alas typical these days. But rather than bunch them like the Patriot does in 4 minute onslaughts these were short bursts from 10 seconds to 2 minutes, eighteen in all. That's what the parenthesized numbers are, the number of segments, 67 in all.
So what we have here is an intense stream of sound bites, the longest "content" segment being a whopping 4 minutes of local news at the end. The average segment lasts less than a minute. And the segments don't follow any theme. What you hear this minute cannot be used to predict what you'll hear the next.
I'll do the same for some other stations, and maybe I'll do WCCO again. Today they were fund-raising for the Union Gospel Mission and its annual holiday meal programs, certainly a worthy cause. I'm curious what those 8 minutes are normally used for.
20:00 Commercials (18)
10:40 News (4)
8:00 Union Gospel Mission PSA (11)
4:40 Sports (2)
4:30 Weather (11)
4:00 Entertainment news (3)
3:10 Medical news (1)
3:00 Traffic reports (6)
1:20 Promo's, station ID's (6)
1:10 School closing announcements (4)
0:30 Business news (1)
20 minutes of commercials per hour is alas typical these days. But rather than bunch them like the Patriot does in 4 minute onslaughts these were short bursts from 10 seconds to 2 minutes, eighteen in all. That's what the parenthesized numbers are, the number of segments, 67 in all.
So what we have here is an intense stream of sound bites, the longest "content" segment being a whopping 4 minutes of local news at the end. The average segment lasts less than a minute. And the segments don't follow any theme. What you hear this minute cannot be used to predict what you'll hear the next.
I'll do the same for some other stations, and maybe I'll do WCCO again. Today they were fund-raising for the Union Gospel Mission and its annual holiday meal programs, certainly a worthy cause. I'm curious what those 8 minutes are normally used for.