Revisiting "synergy"

I know that concept is soooo 2005, but I wondered if anybody out there is working hand-in-hand with any (unaffiliated) radio or TV stations in your market on any kinds of projects/products.

For instance: The local radio station in this market is so pathetic, they're reading stuff out of the paper anyway. Why not provide them with some headlines as long as they'll give us credit?

One of my guys has had an additional thought relating to high school football nights and some sort of combined effort in the market.

Just end-of-the-year brainstorming, really. I don't see a profit angle on any of it, so I'm not that enthused.

 

We share stuff with the local (non-affiliated) CBS affiliate. We get their weather, they get our movie reviewer.

 

My paper owns a radio station in town. I do some high school color commentary for basketball, but other than that, folks on the print side only see those on the radio side at the Christmas dinner.

 

I knew he'd be a multimedia mogul someday.

 

We plug the local radio sports guys, I've called them with updates and been on their weekly talk show. One of the radio guys writes for me sometimes too.

 

Those who bash using wire stories keep saying that the answer is unique content. Then, in an attempt to promote that product, we spread varying forms of our unique content over multiple media until it's no longer exclusive to the medium that spent the time, effort, money and creativity to gather and develop the unique content.

 

Depends on your definition of "unique." For me, it's our audience, our readers. Region-specific. If we can broaden it for general consumption, fine. But we need to be the reliable source of that "region-specific" content. We're the spigot. I don't give a shit who becomes the bucket.

 

The local radio station would plug us during the Friday night broadcast and I would join them for the pre-game show and give them halftime stats and shit.

Worked out OK, I guess.

 

Just don't use the word "synergize." Ever. Under any circumstances. OK, Lumbergh?

 

A scoreboard show live from the newsroom would be a neat thing to do. Have someone from the paper or the radio station hosting it, with reporters coming on the air to talk about their games.

Only problem is, the AM sports station you speak of doesn't have a strong nighttime signal. It dies when you're about 10 miles out of town. That AM station has a sister FM station with a Friday night scoreboard show, but the disc jockey reading the scores spends more time doing shoutouts to cheerleaders than giving info about the games.

The FM station carrying the local big high school's games would be the best bet. Its signal is one of the strongest in the state. Or, how about the Jesus station with all the sports talk shows?

 

Sounds like you gave them some good shit.

 

That'd be cool. Faithless hosting the scoreboard show on the Jesus channel. Ha!