Mission Statement: By Ron Jacobs

During the ten years I’ve lived in this house overlooking Kaneohe Bay, just makai of Kahekili Highway, I’ve stared at the view, studied the interior, and felt its 50-year-old kama`aina vibes.

On March 1, 2007, I experienced what can best be called an epiphany.  The dictionary says that the word means: 

(1): a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something (2): an intuitive grasp of reality through something (as an event) usually simple and striking (3): an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure b: a revealing scene or moment.

 In the 20^th century, I would have called it a “flash.” Whatever, it was the genesis of WHODAGUY HAWAII. My vision arrived, as they somehow always do, as a complete package in three dimensions.

 I figure I’ve had six of these “Big Ideas That Worked” in my lifetime.  Until this recent one, they all occurred in the 20^th century.

This newest concept, WHODAGUY HAWAII, is by far the most challenging, complex, and potentially, by far, the most rewarding.  I don’t measure “rewards” on a material scale, but by what the thing contributes to society (or at least “pop culture”) that has enduring value.

 Listeners will hear entertainment and information from Hawaii. Those two categories have always been my content priority and criteria since I began in commercial radio in 1953 at the age of 16.

The relevant facts and technical details of this breakthrough concept can be found elsewhere. This is a summary of the major influences on which I have based WHODAGUY HAWAII launching on July 7, 2007.

While I could visualize and hear the end product, I still felt it necessary to re-read sections of the many books that I’ve read since the mid-1960s to better validate and refresh my current thinking.

 The first was The Gutenberg Galaxy by Canadian educator, philosopher, scholar, literary critic, and communications theorist, Marshall McLuhan (1965). In this volume, McLuhan forecast the arrival, via “electric technology,” of a “Global Village.”  This exists today in the form and use of the worldwide Internet.  I have studied and tried to apply Professor McLuhan’s theories to broadcasting since reading this seminal work. In 1995, I visited the University of Toronto to further explore his work.

 The next pertinent volume was Future Shock by the sociologistand futurologist, Alvin Toffler (1970), where Toffler predicts that, to paraphrase, “Things will change at an increasing rate.”

 I continued reviewing other volumes from my library. 

 In Being Digital (1995) by Nicholas Negroponte I read:

Better and more efficient delivery of what already exists is what most media executives think and talk about in the context of being digital.  But like the Trojan horse, the consequences of this gift will be surprising. Wholly new content will emerge from being digital, as well as will new players, new economic models, and a likely cottage industry of information and entertainment providers.

 Unleashing “The Killer App”: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance by Larry Downes and Chunka Mui (1998) summarized the precepts that presaged growth in the Digital Age of today:

Moore’s Law, a prediction by Intel founder Gordon Moore that every 18 months, for the foreseeable future, chip density (and hence computing power) would double while costs remained constant, created ever more powerful computing devices without raising their price… Similar phenomena have been observed by Gordon Bell in data storage and communications bandwidth. The bottom line is simple but potent: Faster, cheaper, smaller. 

Less well known is the observation made by Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com Corporation, that networks (whether of telephones, computers, or people) dramatically increase in value with each user. Metcalfe’s Law values the utility of a network as the square of the number of its users, and can be easily appreciated by considering the impact of standard railroad gauges, Morse code, and standardized electrical outlets in the last century, and the Internet protocols of today.  Once a standard has achieved critical mass, its value to everyone multiplies exponentially.

Media studies expert Paul Anderson, in Digital McLuhan (1999), describes the overall evolution of media with his “Anthropotropic Theory,” in which he states:

From this vantage point, we see the entire evolution of media… And the Internet, with its improvement of newspapers, books, radio, television, etc. All can be seen as the phenomena of the unintended consequences of media — the effects of technology to which we are blind — which, in McLuhan’s parlance, is itself cool.

 In 2006, Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, explained the nexus of his book, The Long Tail: 

Although music was first made more popular by the phonograph, it was radio that created the pop idol. In the 1940s and 50s, “Your Hit Parade” became a fixture of Saturday night…With the rise and youth appeal of rock and roll came personality-driven playlists and the celebrity deejay. Alan Freed and others helped turn radio into the most powerful hit-making machine the world had ever known. 

The machine hit its peak in the form of “American Top 40,” a syndicated radio show in 1970. It began as a three-hour program that counted down the top 40 songs on Billboard’s singles chart. By the early 1980s, the show could be heard every Sunday on more than 500 stations in the United States alone. For a generation of kids…this was the carrier signal of pop culture. Every week, millions of them synchronized to the rest of the nation, obsessively tracked which bands were up and which were down. 

As the 21^st century opened, the music industry basked in its power.  Record labels had finally perfected the process of manufacturing blockbusters, and their marketing departments could now both predict and create demand with scientific precision…The industry had cracked the commercial code… but, the ground was shifting beneath the industry… total record sales fell, for only the third time in 20 years. 

The troubles in the music industry are not confined to CD sales.  Radio, long the favored marketing vehicle for the labels, is suffering just as badly. In 2005, an average of one U.S. rock station went out of business each week. Typically these stations switched to talk radio [or Latin formats], which are more “sticky” (they keep audiences longer).

 In his “Letter From The Publisher” in the June 2007 issue of Talkers magazine, Michael Harrison presented a coherent assessment of the state of American radio plus his calculations of how and why radio is developing quickly — into a form seemingly tailor-made for WHODAGUY HAWAII. 

Though steeped in tradition and still the basis of this industry’s operations, the notion that radio stations are the major building blocks of this culture is based on a 20th century reality that is rapidly fading and is likely to be an anachronism within a decade. The new paradigm of “stationality” in the 21^st century is what Talkers magazine is going to begin referring to in coming issues as the MEDIA STATIONS. 

A media station is that amazing combination of magical properties currently referred to as a “Web site” put to its full promise. A Web site is, in reality, a media station. This puts the potential of what a Web site really means into crystal- clear perspective. Its intrinsic aptitude for “stationality” is geometrically greater than that of the radio station of the 20^th century. 

It isn’t licensed by the government nor burdened by the accompanying creative restraints and financial obligations that rights to a monopoly occur. Yes, it is still only 2007 and we still do business in a world where vision is obscured by Wall Street-driven bottom-line demands.

It is a world in which radio stations and other media have Web sites still presented as accessories or adjuncts to the main properties. But, that will change. 

The broadcaster who… understands this will operate from the most phenomenal vehicle to come down the pike since guys like Gutenberg and Marconi began futzing with ways to bridge the gap between human minds and hearts.