May 31, 2011

8:40 a.m. -- Let's keep talking about unrest at The Ticket, it's delicious if rather unsettling to those of us who would prefer a smoothly running Little One with hosts and JV focused on bringing us only the highest-quality sports-guy-talk entertainment.

But I do have an off-topic question:  I keep hearing these Driverselect.com ads by Bob, Dan, and Donovan, and I ask myself -- are those prices for the described vehicles really that good?  Aren't those prices for late-model used vehicles about in the ballpark for car-lot prices?  Those discounts they trumpet are not from the purchase price of the vehicle, but from MSRP.  Not trying to screw BaD's endorsements up, but offhand those prices seem pretty un-head-turning to me.  I recently did some car shopping and checked the used prices on the model I was looking at -- nothing to write home about.  Any car guys out there:  What's the deal on Driverselect?


9:15 a.m. --  OPEN THREAD NOTICE:  Our priceless colleague AP from The (Incomparable) UnTicket has requested that Confessors assist in creating a list of all the screwed-up broadcasts, events, and technical issues that have plagued The Ticket in the last six months for a project he is compiling.  Please respond with dates and details if possible, and if not possible, describe the problem you heard.  I'll start with a couple.


    --  Frequently overdriven microphones (some use the term "overmodulated").

      --  Mics missing spit guards or screens, according to Danny, so that Ps and Ss pop and hiss.  (Gordon's live spot this morning was awful.)

      --  Televisions not timely installed in the studio, and installation is a physical mess (see the photo Cash Sirois sent awhile back)

      --  TeeBox transmission took place in the midst of a swamp of static on May 12, I think it was.

      --  TeeBox remotes are always of poor sound quality, Rick and Craig end up with a gargly, gravelly, need-to-clear-throat sound to their voices.

      --  Last Friday's complete Hardline meltdown.

     --  I'll let others detail issues with the stream and mobile access, but we should at least note that access is being reduced to IHeart.

Let's support AP in this -- even if you think "oh, AP will remember THAT one," list it anyway.  Thanks to all.

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12:25 p.m. --  This situation harks back to something I wrote about in my "Apocalypse Sometime" post, from which I now liberally quote:

"Consider the position of the hosts, and maybe even a guy like Rich, who also seems unhappy with what's going on, even though he is Rich the Suit.

"They're placed in a terrible position. They don't like what's going on. They would like to advocate for the P1, but what can they do? If they complain too much, they could get disciplined, or perhaps even squeezed when renewal time comes around -- or nonrenewed. Some of them may have been made well-off by their years of service, but, like Deion, they can't do without their salaries. But if they hold their tongues and broadcast like nothing's happening, the listener begins to think of them as compliant, even complicit with the CTO. Their bond with the P1 is compromised as the growing crappiness is ever more apparent coming out of the speakers."

Isn't this what is happening?   In the past we've enjoyed the fairly harmless and fairly occasional barking by the hosts about management issues, it's what we all do at our own places of work, the difference being that our workplace utterances don't go out on the air, and we don't Tweet them.   But when management has really fouled up and the anger is genuine, widespread, and constant, it's not so fun for management anymore, and the whip comes down.

And our guys seem, well, whipped.  They have to take the crappy chief engineering and crappy management decisions and shut up about them.  They can't be on "our side" any more, which makes all the happy horseshit about how P1-oriented The Ticket is sound completely ridiculous.  Certainly not the hosts' fault -- but you can see the point I've been banging on for some time now:   Eventually, bad management seeps into the product and damages what comes out of your ear buds.  Confessors, you are hearing it even now and it is going to get worse.  

It's easy to say that "oh, The Ticket will never change as long as the hosts are there, and they're not going anywhere, The Ticket has survived crap management in the past, so no worries."

But it is not true.

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.