The Manmosa

On a recent vacation with my friends we were participating in the usual debauchery, which in this instance included the Champagne of Beers, Miller High Life. While previous consumption of High Life has led to drinking it from a champagne flute, this time we dabbled in mixology.

The traditional mimosa is a blend of OJ and champagne. Our collective thought process of course led us to substitute the champagne of beers for Dom P. The initial blend of 1 to 1 was described as "not that bad", so a second attempt was made. With a ratio of 2 parts High Life to 1 part orange juice we found success. The cocktail was dubbed The Manmosa. Drink and enjoy.

Interview: Mike Crane, COO, Wisconsin Public Radio

As part of my history of broadcasting class I had to conduct an interview with the head of a local media outlet. My group I had the opportunity to sit down with Mike Crane, Chief Operating Officer for Wisconsin Public Radio. We discussed the challenges facing WPR, future plans, and even Twitter.

Transcript below. I apologize for any run on sentences, it was a quick and dirty job.

What do you think the future is for public radio?

I feel as if public radio is, other then the funding questions that all businesses are facing, in a really good place. We have very high quality content and miracle of miracles, people who voluntarily help pay for it because there is no required subscription fee, we just go on the radio and say hey would you help us out and the biggest challenge is that with the Internet becoming so important to what we do we always feel like its hard to catch up with what the users would like. We know how to put on a radio show, but how do you interact with us, we still aren’t there yet.

Do you see any different sort of programming strategies coming into play with the younger more tech savvy generation, or are you keeping with same traditional programming, or how do you evolve?

I think that some of its sort of evolves overtime anyways, for instance out of nostalgia I was listening to a recording of All Things Considered from 1978, they spent about 20 minutes about one topic, they never spend more then 10 minutes now, 7 minutes would be a lot now, as with everything in the media things have gotten shorter, cause of our attention span, change and so on I think some of that’s happening I think. The biggest difference for young people and also happening in older groups to some degree is the expectation I can have it now and I want it and to some degree we get in the way of that in public radio and we are trying to figure that one out. Ex: because morning edition and all things considered, they have been the source of strongest income for a lot of public radio station.

We have a rule that the show cannot be offered online at the same time unless it is through a station, so if you wanted to download a story into your ipod you have to wait til the afternoon to do it until the last west coast station has had their first play, that’s going to become more of a problem, cause people want it now.

Another issue has been that some of what we do has always been of more of interest to people who are older, if that something that isn’t of interest when your 25 it might be when your 35, so trying to figure that one out has been interesting.

So you say you are not so much targeting the younger group?

Yeah that’s right, in the long run I don’t know if that’s the right strategy but part of the strategy is that a 48 year old not necessarily as good at trying to figure out what to say to a 2 year old much less a 15 year old, so I think the way to work on that is to actually bring those young people into what we are doing and then have them filter it, instead of have me try to figure out what they want.

Other broadcasters are conducting an interview with someone on the radio and having it edited for the radio and later when it goes on the internet have the full stream, do you think you will be doing this in the future?

Yes, we do some of that now, we have a show on Saturday nights called higher grounds that’s very broadly musically connected to African traditions, Jonathon will air a little bit of the interview on the air, because the purpose is mainly to play the music, and then he will have a podcast that’s available to download on the internet, I think this is a great idea, cause there is almost always more that we have talked about with someone then we can necessarily put it on the radio at one time, its maybe a little bit less of an issue for us cause we also have all our interview shows on another network, and there is an hour with each person.

More embracing the use of the internet to intertwine in with the radio, constantly growing media outlets for news that are available online, has it had an impact on radio?

Oh absolutely, its really worrying us is when you look at the top news sites nationally, national public radio is just not there it is way below. The thing we are talking about these days, someone will visit nytime.com and cnn.com multiple times a day, npr.org once a week and once a month, figure out both nationally and both locally to show up in those searches is a real issue. One of the issues there in the past are orientation toward the internet, put a story on the radio and then get the audio version of it online, I dont know about you mostly I want to read stuff online and then maybe listen to it, that’s been hard for us to do because traditionally we haven transcribed things we just edited put it on radio and we were done.

So are you making more forays into electronic print in the future?

Yeah I would say so, for instance one of the steps we need to take for our website is to make the news searchable as text and also finable as individual stories, right now you can click way to many things and get to a summary of the news on one page, but if you search a keyword on google it might or might not find it, so that’s an issue we are wrestling with.

Why do you think that CNN and the New York Times are getting so many more views then? Because of the type of news?

Some of it is that and some of it is that we have been slow to deal with the audio vs text thing, for me a brand new term in the last few months, that I suspect they knew at ny times a couple years, you need a search engine optimization officer, it makes perfect sense now that I hear it but the overall tendency and I think most companies are like this is to think I put out my website the way I think of it, if you go all the way up you have the university above us but even if you just come to WPR and there are programs and below that there are segments of programs and by that time as someone trying to get a news story, I’m gone because I've done much too work to find it. So I heard from the head of new media at Minnesota Public Radio and he said that instead of trying to redesigning their site starting with the homepage they are redesigning their site from the article page because they want people to find the article page using search, influencing how we are trying to think of things as well.

In regards to more print based things and the fragmentation of messages - have you thought about making any of the forays into SMS or cellular, mobile-based content?

A little bit, we did an experimentm, which I say was interesting rather then successful so far. We have a joint website with Wisconsin Public Television called Wisconsinvote.org when we just had the spring elections the guy that runs that site was compiling things from both TV and radio on that sit. For mobile devices we did for the fall election, a version that was specifically for mobile devices, it was interesting but did it get a lot of uptake? Not so sure.

I received a lot of emails about wisconsinvote.org.

Ok so someone has used it and this is national rather then local There are a lot of efforts to deliver content specifically to mobile devices in the form of a public radio tuner and then some stations have their own version of those apps as well and the basic idea is that naturally starting with the iphone since its the big one but there is a lot of pressure on the people going the public radio tuner is that it will go to the Blackberry and whatever else is the lastest thing that someone wants.

Because one of the things and I'll narrow it back to Wisconsin Public Radio, there are now more people tuned into our online stream then are tuned into our radio stations around the state, realizing that some of our radio station in small communities in places like Park Falls where there just aren’t a lot of people still that tells you that live streaming much less the on demand stuff that you can choose what you want increasingly people want to be able to find it.

One place we see this a lot is in office listening, if the company hasn’t blocked it, which does happen in some places and people don’t have a radio in their office necessarily but they do have their computer so they put it on that way.

Whats been holding you back from doing the on demand service?

Money, setting priorities, all the usual sorts of things, part of what gets in your way when your trying to prioritize, you think well the radio service serves 450, 00 people a week between the two networks, where as the online service is still a lot but serves an individual if we get them what they want, we haven’t spent the money and the people time need to get there and we are trying to reorient that, partly because we are at a university, our habit is to think that what part of what we are doing is really good and we want to conserve and keep that so its really hard to give up anything that we are doing, and probably financially that’s what you have to do well its great that you do all these services, but if we didn’t do that much maybe we could hire someone to work on the web.

Since money is such a big issue do you think that donations would change or donations will change now that the economy is changing?

They have actually changed some our goals for donations this year, the fiscal year ends June 30th, goal is 5.7 million dollars, after the holidays we looked at it and we were 300,000 dollars behind then we should be and past years we were usually over the goal, when we analyzed it was pretty specific most of the gap was a reduction in additional gifts, gave me 100 dollars last year send you something in the mail can you give us an extra 50, and they would, but now people say we really care about public radio, but I cant write the extra check and so one of the things we did well I people rent feeling they can give extra, maybe we can find more people who are willing to give something so we asked for 35 dollar gifts cause it feels like an easier amount to give, because of a cost of acquisition, we have a call center and we have to pay for each call they take, we made it a web only pledge donation which doesn’t cost us anything, so if you pledged on the web and you did 35 dollars we sent you an Eco bag, so use that instead of plastic or paper, and that we had a couple thousand people who signed up for that and a good number of them probably hadn’t given ever or hadn’t given in a while so I don’t know we haven’t made up the 300,000 yet but we are trying.

So would you say it was at all inspired by president Obama’s campaign where he got many small donors instead of few, large donations?

Not directly, but I bet if you went back to what are fundraisers thinking these days, it would be no surprise that they would have some of the same sort of thought. Like I got an email the other day from obama asking for 25 dollars in the past it would’ve been 100 you know when he was running it may be the same instinct on the part of all fundraisers

How about corporate sponsorships, how have those been affected?

Down a little bit but there is a real difference local vs national. What I’m hearing its been true for us, we have fallen 60 or 70, 000 short of our goal for corporate support locally but nationally national public radio has had huge drops in their corporate giving and it appears the difference has to do with the kindof purchase that that is, for instance if someone is buying announcements for national public radio, it’ll be a large trying to reach the whole country buy these cars, locally, local business that also has an investment in supporting community, they might still find the money.

Thinking on a day to day basis, operations that you have to do, are you affected by any specific media policies that you could think of off hand?

Media policies, flush that out a little bit.

I suppose some certain regulations or restrictions that other radio stations have to face as well.

Yeah, sure the one that’s always there every single day, we are licensed as a nce, or as a non commercial educational station, whenever we run an announcement for a corporation we follow special rules for what is allowed to be said and not, the simplest example is pricing we ant tell people that something is on sale because we are alowwed to give pricing information, we also aren’t allow to have a call to action, so the verbal gymnastics are the number is, as opposed to call this number, and that can be hard to tell someone who isn’t familiar with public radio and that can be hard. And finally the last big restriction is that we are supposed to have value neutral statements of products and services as opposed to value latent promotional sorts of things and that can like as you know the cliché how many angles on the head of a pin, it can be arguments like that, they could say “I really think that promotional,” I don’t, and so in this case it’s the federal communications commission, what they ask us to do as non commercial educational stations is to make a good faith effort to interpret the rules and so we try to do that
That’s a biggie and there are all kinds of things that go with it, we hold a license in this case actually its about 25 or 30 licenses a few of them we have a partnership but most of the licenses of Wisconsin public radio are held by us although its unusual and it would be difficult for the whole process to happen they can be challenges by the public and someone else theoretically could secure the license instead of us so we are always mindful in defending that by providing good public service, it would be extremely unusual for it to be something where a license was actually taken from a licensee you would have to of done a really bad job but we remember that in terms of figuring out our service.

Being associated with the university you are probably somewhat isolated from the financial turmoil, but do you think you are in a position within the university is a boon or a kind of a weight around your neck in transition times?

I think its been in many ways, what you say there is a kindof insulation because the university is strong, Wisconsin public radio is probably better connected with its licensees then some of the stations around the country, some of them have had the university there license to decide they dont want the station anymore, the most dramatic one in the last 6 or 8 months, Miami university ohio actually has given up their license and their station ahs been taken over by cincinatti public radio, everybody was like ohh, that’s usually but has happened, I would say, as is often true for us it is a complicated answer on a simple basis the fact that when you go back to our founding in the early 20oth century, it was professor terry playing with these new fangled wireless radio things that started us, and so im sure you’ve encountered this whole thing about the Wisconsin idea that’s in our dna because professor terry and the other profs and students and so on were trying to figure out from the very beginning what can we do with this, its that its more then a toy, we can really do something with this, so our entre history ahs been working on that, one way in tat we are a bit insolated in that being license to the university Wisconsin extension we share with the extension a statewide mission and provide through the radio the kinds of services the extensions want to provide which is education and the outreach of the wisconsin idea and so on, however and this is where it gets a little complicated Wisconsin public radio is a partnership between the extension and the state agency which is called the educational communications board and they actually hold more then half of the licenses for Wisconsin public radio and as a state agency they have been a little bit more subject to cuts and things then the university may once it reaches our level cause there a small state agency whose entire charter has to do with broadcasting and transmitters and infrastructure for all that where as we are a part of a much larger institution of the university extension and ultimately university, so yeah have to watch both sides of that when we know we are going to get some cuts this year, the university is going to handle it a little bit differently then the ecc and so we are subject to both when we figure out how it all meshes together.

Do you think those layers of beauracracy hold you back in anyway?

Um that’s a great question, yes and I think that I've worked for both radio and television stations for that matter in other cities that were community licensee so there was no university it was a part of our organization and sometimes because you are essentially operating as small business you can be a little bit more nimble, the machinery at the university moves pretty ponderously usually, on the other hand the station I left a year and half ago in Orlando is not part of a university and so in fiscal crisis it didn’t have a university to look to either and so they are on their own and that might not be such a great thing for them for me the bottom lien is that any of these things are just systems created by humans and they have their strengths and weaknesses. I mean there was a time earlier in my career where I had worked for a university station in Tampa an found it very difficult in that setting because we did end up getting passed around in a couple of different parts of the university, we were in university communications, then we were assigned to this dean and that stuff fortunately doesn’t seem to be the case, we seem to be in a good solid place with the extension.

I know in some cases the commercial television stations they’ve had such a hit in their income from their commercials that they have done layoffs and things like that.

Things feel like they are a little better here then that, we are facing a deficit we are going to cut back and so on to make sure that we are balanced, I think that they are facing an even tougher time, newspapers are crazy of course, whole newspapers that have shut down around the country, that kind of scared us.

I know that you are doing dual casting in analog and digital now do you plan on continuing that into the near future or do you plan on letting the analog signal go at some point?

In the television world the analog is already gone, for our television there are a few stations around the country yet that wait until the end of the hd tv transition which is the end of june, radio is an entirely different story, in the radio situation there is no requirement ever to turn off the analog and in fact at the moment the regulation requires us to keep the analog on, so the reason for that is a combination of history and technology.

To answer your question I don’t envision turning off the analog soon in fact ever, its interesting radio will be the last analog medium because you have satellite radio which is all digital and you have cable which is all almost digital they are getting there and now broadcast tv will be almost all digital in the next few months, radio will have analog forever, so what that means is that all of the old radios that have am and fm anyway they will continue to work until the actual machinery dies where that’s a problem is that the digital for us there isn’t strong market force for adoption, so getting people to buy the hd radios is pretty hard we are in the business of making programs not selling radios, and yet selling the radios is the way to get that out there I think what s probably going to happen though is going to be the internet that will go right around that because now you are are starting to see car manufactures putting internet right into the car and so you can at that point you can stream all ten thousand radio stations that are on the net right into your car probably connected to the same sort of account that work son an iphone so then you might not need hd because you will get even more choices, so well see, that’s the type of thing we wonder about, because we’ve invested a lot in putting digital radio up but I think its probably in the thousands and that’s it of people to have those radios yet, and that’s in Wisconsin.

Well I know you have at the university a strong tradition of experimentation. Do you have any other new technologies coming into place keeping you at the forefront of broadcasting?

Not that I can think of. Not so much new technologies but what were experimenting with and sort of learning as we go use of the technologies that exist, for instance a year ago, if we had anyone that had a fb account, we could probably count them on one hand and none of them were dealing with them for work at all it was just something that they were playing with for personal reasons now we’ve got an number of shows with fb fan pages and that’s growing we have a couple of shows that its funny it seemed that I was revolutionary six months ago, oh well we will use aim and we will have people and we have a screename for here on earth and they can send us a message on aim well now its like yeah I used to use chat but if I use chat at all its within facebook and now its all about twitter, for met he most interesting thing I read about, they are not seeing a lot of uptake below the age of 30, so apparently twitter is more of an older group, which surprises you because its a lot like texting.

When I signed up for it it was at a conference for the integrated media association, so its all like internet geeky type people and those of us that work with them and half the place was twittering, so I was like I need to figure out what this thing is and I don’t tweet much because id rather it be something worth tweeting but there are people that I started following at this conference, who use twitter as a type of live blogging thing for instance this one guy from npr, andy cardigan when he goes to a conference there is just a constant stream of what he is experiencing. g when I was at this conference it was like the new president of npr spoke, and I was watching it on my mobile, it was like she was being captioned there was so much going on and because she had good content people were paying attention and pulling quotes from what she said there was another point that someone made a presentation and you could tell they were really clueless about technology even though they were trying and so it was all snark. Can you believe they are putting this thing up?

Now I dont know if twitter is really going to make a difference for us in the long run but a number of our shows are trying to see what it is about and that’d be an example of that and now something else big is going to come along.

Although I did hear about Flutter. The idea of it was at 140 characters tweets were way too long, so they made up this thing called Flutter that’s only 20 characters long, so messages became things like "me go coffee." I doubt we will have a flutter account.

Skittle Vodka

Here's another fun experiment I tried with infused vodka. This time it's Skittles!

The Prep
You're going to need a liter of vodka. (I once again went with my faithful standby, Gordon's) and a large bag of Skittles. You will also want to have several empty bottles, bowls, and coffee filters

handy.

The Process
First, open up your Skittles and sort them by color into bowls. (Feel free to eat some as you go). Next, clean a bottle for each color and add vodka. I filled a 12 oz. bottle about halfway with vodka. After that's finished add the Skittles - one color per bottle.

Now it's time to shake. *At this point things get tedious* Shake, shake, shake these bottles until the Skittles are dissolved. This takes quite a while. I would suggest inviting people over for some kind of dance party and mandating that they carry a bottle at all times. This might make time go faster.

After the candy is all dissolved there will be some white goop floating in the bottles. This needs to be filtered out. I suggesting pouring your concoctions through coffee filters. Just make sure you use a different filter for each color. After each color is strained pour it into a clean bottle.

The Review
Drinking this stuff straight is a surefire path to gut rot and most likely a headache. It is sickly sweet all alone. However, by adding Sprite or some other non-cola you will have created a sweet, tasty drink that looks good too.

Bacon Vodka

Recently I've gotten interested infused vodkas. I was doing some research and I found a way to put the greatness that is bacon into a liquid form. This was how I did it:

The Prep

You will need some bacon (I went with the delectable Hormel Black Label) and some vodka. I prefer Gordon's because it is extremely cheap and doesn't taste half bad. It is the world's smoothest mixing vodka after all... You'll also need access to a stove and pan or a microwave.

The Process

Fry up three or four strips of bacon. While that's sizzling away fill a jar medium sized jar with abour 4 cups of vodka. I used an empty pickle bottle. After the bacon is cooked pat it down with a paper towel to remove some of the excess grease and then toss the strips into your jar. Cover the with a lid and stash it somewhere for around three weeks.

(Note: At this point your concoction will look like it belongs in a biology class, but have courage friend, stay the course!)

After your three weeks are up grab your jar and chill it by tossing it in the fridge or freezer. This will solidify all the fattiness floating around in the jar. The jar won't explode in the freezer because booze doesn't freeze at those temperatures. Once the fat is good and cold pull the jar out and strain the contents through a coffee filter or something similar to remove all the particulates (repeat until you're satisfied) and you're done.

The Review

This stuff is not to be consumed on its own. The stuff, by itself, has a very smoky, slightly salty taste that to me, wasn't all that great. There was also a taste of dill pickles, but I think that may be my fault. I made the vodka in an old pickle jar which may or may not have been thoroughly washed.

The bacon vodka really shines through when mixed. As an ingredient in a bloody mary it really brings something extra savory to the drink. I also made a bacontini and while it wasn't great to me, I could see other people enjoying it.

Overall, bacon vodka was a fun experiment, but it was just that, an experiment. I don't see myself repeating this study in the near future, but I would love to hear what you have to say about it.