Practice - A lost art (2)
Posted on May 28, 2008 - Filed Under Finance
So, keeping that in mind, here’s yet another story. My wife and I own these two radio stations, okay? WZON-AM, which is sports radio, and WKIT-FM, which is classic rock (“The Rock of Bangor,” we say). Radio is a tough business these days, especially in a market like Bangor, where there are too many stations and not enough listeners. We’ve got contemporary country, classic country, oldies, classic oldies, Rush Limbaugh, Paul Harvey, and Casey Kasem. The Steve and Tabby King stations ran in the red for a lot of years—not deep in the red, but far enough to bug me. I like to be a winner, you see, and while we were winning in the Arbs (that would be the Arbitron ratings, which are to radio what the Nielsens are to TV), we kept coming up short on the bottom line at the end of the year. It was explained to me that there just wasn’t enough ad revenue in the Bangor market, that the pie had been cut into too many slices.
So I had an idea. I’d write a radio play, I thought, sort of like the ones I used to listen to with my grandfather when I was growing up (and he was growing old) in Durham, Maine. A Halloween play, by God! I knew about Orson Welles’s famous—or infamous—Halloween adaptation of The War of the Worlds on The Mercury Theatre, of course. It was Welles’s conceit (his absolutely brilliant conceit) to do H. G. Wells’s classic invasion story as a series of news bulletins and reports. It worked, too. It worked so well that it sparked a national panic and Welles (Orson, not H.G.) had to make a public apology on the following week’s Mercury Theatre. (I bet he made it with a smile on his face—I know I’d be smiling, if I were ever to come up with a lie so powerful and persuasive.)
Taken from : Everything Eventual : Stephen King
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