Re: Arbitron's 'little gadget' causes major static

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: Steve Dahl has a very similar themed column today: : : Radio is losing its voices : Steve Dahl : Chicago Tribune : December 9, 2009 : : Last Saturday marked my one-year anniversary of being off the radio airwaves in Chicago. I haven't been off the air that long since I was 15 years old. (I'm 55.) : Apparently radio can go on without me, and I guess I'm getting along without radio. I miss it, but my daily one-hour podcasts keep me off the streets. My podcast hasn't penetrated the general population to the extent that people have stopped asking me, "When are you going to be back on the air?" but I'm working on it. : With the release of Jonathon Brandmeier last month from his WLUP-FM 97.9 contract, the only man standing from the WLUP heyday of the late '70s and mid-'80s is Garry Meier. Garry is now on WGN-AM 720, which, like this newspaper, is owned by Tribune Co. : Ironically, the banality of WGN was one of our targets when Garry and I were a team. Back in the Loop days, we used to refer to radio as high school with money. These days radio has more of a GED feel to it. A prison GED feel. : A lot of radio personalities have been negatively affected by Arbitron's new Portable People Meter (PPM) system. The PPM results seem to favor music, sports and news over wacky personalities. I'm still getting paid, thanks to some good negotiating on my part. The rest are doing whatever they can to keep busy. Look for Eddie and JoBo in Cirque du Soleil's "Banana Shpeel," currently playing at the Chicago Theatre. I hear Brandmeier has applied to be a waiter at Ed Debevic's. Those last two sentences aren't true yet. : Until September 2008, radio ratings were taken by Arbitron using a diary system. The user would write down his or her daily listening and turn it in within the appropriate time frame. This apparently favored personalities with large, loyal followings. To take part in the PPM survey, listeners have to carry a pagerlike device all day and then put it in its "cradle" at night to have their listening count. Sounds like a great combination of fun and science, doesn't it? Maybe too scientific. : The meter also picks up anything that one might be inadvertently exposed to. The day the first PPM results came out back in 2008 and I began slipping into ratings obscurity, I was at a luxury car dealership buying a very expensive new car, and they had The Drive on in the background. Don't get me wrong, I like The Drive, but it wasn't my choice to listen to it. : If I were wearing a PPM, The Drive would inadvertently be getting three hours of credit for something I didn't consciously choose to listen to. I was thinking maybe I should just keep my old car, since things weren't exactly looking up for me professionally, but I was unable to stop the deal. I was too busy watching my career flash before my eyes. : Since Sept. 9, there have been more than 750,000 downloads of my "DahlCasts." That makes me think there is still a very viable audience out there somewhere for personality-driven radio, and that someone needs to figure out a better way to measure it. Either that, or the future of this local, wacky personality-driven radio is probably going to be on the Internet. : If that's the case, I'll adapt, but I have to admit that flying into Chicago for the last year just isn't the same. I used to look down from the plane at the city knowing that my voice reached the farthest corners of it. I always imagined everyone was within the sound of my voice, and that sooner or later I would find him or her. Being on the Internet has neither the same cachet nor the same cash. I'll get used to it, but will everybody else? Don't answer that ...

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