May 30, 2011

3:37 a.m.--It appears this site (that is, Your Plainsman) may owe an apology to The Dancing Bear at First Base, one Ty Walker by name, who an Anonymous commenter reported had been suspended for Tweeting a Jeff Catlin email.  I had my suspicions, since I could find no Internet reference to this having taken place.  And if this report was wrong, then apologies are also owed to the CTO as well.

But they're still screwed up.

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8:09 a.m. -- Cannibalizing from some of my later-last-night comments:

Because of the existence of message boards and sites like this one, there are lots of ways Ticketarians could communicate dissatisfaction to listeners, not to mention through their own Twitter accounts and blogs. But there wasn't much of that, and I almost never heard discouraging words from Ticket guys behind the scenes.  That suggested to me that employees felt loyalty to The Ticket and, perhaps derivatively, to Cumulus.

But now, we do hear a lot of public grumbling in different forums and on the air.  This suggests that Cumulus and local Ticket management no longer inspire that loyalty.  /What we're hearing from hosts and JV has job-losing potential all over it; it follows (to me) that the conditions that gave rise to the previous loyalty must have changed, and changed dramatically.

Conclusion, as if you didn't know if you were a faithful reader of Your Plainsman's speculations: Things are much worse at The Ticket than they were even six months ago, so bad that the risk calculus for Ticketarians has changed.  Grumblers may risk the loss of a paycheck or two, or even a job. But the grumbler gains something, too -- he's embarrasses a management that for the last six months has done little but embarrass him and his professional colleagues. Worth it? Not it things are cool; maybe, if the grumbler thinks things are headed off the rails anyway.

So it's not the content of the grumbling that is of the greatest interest -- it's that Ticketarians think it things have gotten so bad (and believe me, it's not limited to catastrophic remotes, crappy Internet feeds, and bungled hardware/software implementation in the studio, although that would be enough) that they want to risk telling the P1 about it.

And by the way -- if you accept Danny's invitation to contact the CTO, send them the link to this site.  They can start here (http://myticketconfession.blogspot.com/2012/05/apocalypse-sometime.html) and work their way forward.

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2:40 PM -- NUMEROUS REPORTS THAT JAKE KEMP MAY HAVE BEEN INVITED TO RELAX AWAY FROM THE TICKET FOR A WEEK. 

See comments below for possible/likely reasons for this generous offer by the CTO.

I'll be by the station if I can, but if anyone can confirm, please post.