Welcome, Jack Allen

Co-author’s welcome: I don’t want to steal any of Jack’s thunder, so I’m just going to say a few words and then get out of the way.  Jack is one of those people I turn to for wisdom and advice.  He is on the ground doing the actual work of running a station which makes his perspective invaluable.  Besides that, he’s an engaging raconteur, a deep thinker, and exactly the kind of leader who can rescue and reinvent classical music radio.  With that, here’s Jack’s opening post, with my gratitude. ~ Marty Ronish

If you had told me back in 1966 when I was 12 and recording Star Trek episodes off TV with an old Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder that some day I would be watching live TV on my smart phone while streaming radio over my laptop computer, I would have exploded with anticipation. If you had said the audio I was hearing in real time would be “my” radio station, I would have grinned from ear to ear. Really? Cool.

I was an “early adopter” of technology even back then and radio was my favorite vice. I helped my dad build a short wave set and a CB radio for his Oldsmobile. I slept with a small transistor radio under my pillow. I could often be found flat on my belly in my room, traveling around the world via short wave – Moscow, Rio, Dublin. Popular Science magazine fired my imagination with stories of the future, flying cars, death lasers, and moon bases. If I recall correctly, the future, I read, would be void of radio because of Television. Radio would die. Even though most of that particular future never materialized, I am much happier with where we ended up and where we appear to be going. In 1968 Stanley Kubrick added to that vision of what might come in his landmark film, 2001: A Space Odyssey followed by a a second film adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two. Well, here we are, beyond 2001 and ringing in 2010 – surrounded by radio, Strauss waltzes and all.

Marty Ronish asked me recently if I would consider contributing to this blog. I wriggled and wrangled and said I was too busy running a radio station to spend time writing about it. She persuaded me that my daily reality of fighting the good fight (publicly-supported-dying-breed-format) in this economy would be relevant. She knows I love the medium and the music, and that I’ll be watching and experimenting with new media all the while. She also knows I work with an incredibly gifted group of broadcasters and perhaps we’ll turn up a best practice or two.

I don’t know what the future holds but I’m excited about the possibilities. We’re in a complex and evolving media environment and our audience is being pushed and cajoled in myriad ways. One thing I can say with some certainty – radio won’t die. It will evolve like everything else. You can’t kill or replace something that is so personal, intimate, immediate, engaging and magical. As humans, we’re hard-wired for radio. Radio is designed for us and our imaginations. It mixes and mingles with our dreams. Radio is full of surprises. Radio is good company. In this exciting and transitional media landscape, we’ll find new ways of taking radio and this marvelous music with us, allowing it to accompany everything we do, and we’ll talk about it here on Scanning the Dial. Be sure and tune in. I’ll write a little something from time to time just as long as you plan on joining the conversation. Ok, now beam me up, Scotty…