Author: Brian Lambert

I feel like the guy sweeping up after the elephants. Only I’m also the elephant. My lovely bride and I are enjoying a little beach time with family in sweltering, blustery Florida this week: Captiva Island — where, before you start building, a quarter acre of limestone gravel with no view of either the Gulf…

An earthquake rattled Twin Cities radio this past month. It cracked open the notoriously unstable Clear Channel fault line and took down a legendary monolith, Mick Anselmo, previously thought to be impervious to corporate shock waves. Until his firing, Anselmo ran the seven stations Clear Channel owns here in the Twin Cities—Cities 97, KFAN, K102,…

Among the 14 Pioneer Press employees who took the latest buy-out and departed last Friday was Matt Peiken. Perhaps not a household name like Joe Soucheray or Bob Sansevere, Peiken, 44, is the sort of character who shouldn’t be completely out of step with modern newspapers, but is. I first met him in 2000, not…

OK. Here’s a pop quiz. Which of the following headlines strikes you as the most routine, to the point of no longer even being newsworthy? “Mideast in Turmoil” “Bush Says Surge is Working” “Gonzales Can Not Recall His Own Name” “Rumors of Firings and Low Morale Wrack Ch. 5” I know. I know. The trivia…

Those of us with any interest at all in the immediate future of radio are highly skeptical — to the point of fatally suspicious — of the proposed merger of the two satellite radio companies, XM and Sirius, AND the regular promises by terrestrial radio giants, like Clear Channel, that High Definition radio will ……

Several times in recent weeks I have mentioned that as bad as this moment is for newspapers, local TV stations, by some key measurements, are even worse off. Ratings for Twin Cities late news shows are down 15 percent from May ’06 to May ’07, a greater decline than circulation at either of our benighted…