But you say, “Wait a minute. We’re making progress. Over 15% of our billing is digital?” While that’s admirable, it’s like believing a rowboat is the Queen Mary. We’re kidding ourselves, telling ourselves that we’re cool with digital—while others make billions. But there’s hope.

I think the problem started with the Telecom Act of 1996.

It took radio from the hands of the a couple hundred entrepreneurial owners and turned it over to the consolidators. Radio’s new management (lenders and investors) fixate on one method of improving earnings; cutting costs. As a result, radio started a deadly surgical procedure I call Content-ectomy. R&D, innovation or new product discovery is as foreign to them as the Planet Gnarf. Many great ideas were stopped by the investor’s favorite question, “What’s the downside risk?”

First, let’s ask where radio’s 70-year run of innovation came from? History says it came from Mom & Pop companies like Edens, Adams, Stuart, Heritage, Saga and New City—plus a hundred small market operators. They built the value proposition called radio. Then we ask where did the digital revolution start? Same kind of answer; Bill Gates and Steve Jobs started their revolutions in a garage. Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook in a dorm room.

We’re no longer in the Mom & Pop business, thus trying to innovate from the wrong place. It’s tough for ground breaking innovation to occur in a conference room with all the “stakeholders” in attendance. When a radio group’s digital people gather, they're just as bright and talented as everyone else, but there is a political component. Let’s go around a typical group conference table:

• “The boss doesn't like the color blue. No blue on the home page.”
• "Click-through is the only way to make money on the web." (Then that guy takes over the conversation.)
• “The boss's wife is all hot for Brad Paisley. Got to have a picture of Brad Paisley on the homepage.”
• “Programming doesn't want to junk it up with ads and sales stuff.”
• The boss (thinking to himself) “Damn, this is a nasty hangover. Will everyone quit yelling?”

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs didn't have to run anything up any flagpoles. They didn’t have to “check with corporate.” There was no one to facilitate the meeting in order to “achieve consensus.”

So where do we find web innovation in radio? As you'll see below, it still comes from comparatively smaller organizations.

• Music Mine at KCRW.org the Alternative public station for the Los Angeles area. Look for their unbelievable, incredible app, exclusively for the iPad, that’s making huge waves in web-dom. Go to iTunes and download KCRW Music Mine. It’s not a website—it’s an experience.
• www.MyMotherLode.com. If you live in or around Fresno, California, you know what that phrase means. This site is all about the region—not the four stations of Clarke Broadcasting. Check it out. Go to www.ClarkBroadcasting.com and click on Portfolio. They’re in the web creation business!
• www.discovermoosejaw.com Golden West. The group operates a separate and very successful web business in nineteen markets in central Canada.
• www.brookingsradio.com, Three Eagles. Again not station-centric, but a resource for Brookings, MN.
• www.kmaland.com. KMA, Shenandoah, Iowa. The quintessential small market website. Tons of stuff for the listeners.

Look what they have in common. They’re not brochures for the radio station; they're resources for the community—just like radio stations used to be. There are no artists or station personalities blazing across the sites. The information is all centered on the web user. UI is everything. That's why they work and make money.

Now breathe deeply.

Management and Sales—feast your eyes on this baby and savor:

http://www.radioadvertisingportland.com

The example here is Larry Wilson and Bob Proffitt’s Alpha Broadcastings seven-station group in Portland, Oregon. As you’ll see, it’s a pure sales site, but it offers eons of free advertising and marketing help for the small business person. Bob reports that they’ve done a significant amount of business that they wouldn’t have had without the site.

It’s a product of one guy acting on his own. iradiosales.com is owned by radio veteran Gregg Murray. He’s been a web/radio guy from the start and has now built that site for Portland and 24 other markets. Gregg’s at gmurray@iradiosales.com and (304) 437-2346. (PS. I’m not getting a dime from this—I just admire his work.)

Just like Murray, there’s Triton, Emmis Interactive, Presslaff and a bunch of other suppliers who have been handed the role of innovation that was formerly performed in the stations. Indeed, in my recent experience, the major hurdles they face aren’t the lack of new ideas, but rather the (a) paradigm paralysis and pushback of management, salespeople and internal “web experts” and (b) risk aversion of our new investor-owners.

The interesting thing is that we can do it—we’re just in the way. Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.”

PS. And boy oh boy did we miss the mobile app thing, but it's not too late. Why don’t YOU create the Hiney Wine app? Can we play High-Low with an app? How about Trick or Treat Street for the iPad and Droid?

And why not YOU?