Howard Owens

There are nearly 300,000 people living in eastern San Diego County, but apparently they aren't very important to area broadcast mogul John Lynch (btw: father of football star John Lynch). His radio station the "Mighty" 1090 doesn't have the signal strength to reach East County. That might not matter, but Lynch's station somehow managed to wiggle its way into winning the Padres radio broadcast contract.

Forget for a moment the incredible stupidity of the Padres in not ensuring their broadcast partner could reach the entire market, what sort of businessman would even pursue a business arrangment that he knows upfront he won't be able to satisfactorial deliver on? How about one who doesn't care?

... But Lynch did say "no additional stations" would carry the Padres. It's 1090, period.

"We're real pleased with the way the (2004) season went and I think the Padres are, too," Lynch said.

I wrote a profile of Lynch once for a magazine in San Diego. Went to his house. Met his son (then a stand out high school quarter back). (The resulting article was not one of my finest moments as a writer, as my profile writing style was still immature at that time -- fortunately the magazine went out of business and you probably can't find the article anywhere except the bottom of my closet.) Based on meeting him, I thought Lynch was a good guy. I think I need to reassess my opinion. Lynch's cavalier attitude toward an important region in San Diego County is appalling.

Those of you concerned about California will want to read this story -- another business is leaving. Lured by a lower cost of living in Tennessee and tired of California's workers comp costs and ever higher taxes, Buckaroo Communications -- a magazine publisher with 31 employees and a $2 million payroll -- is leaving Oxnard for Dayton.

The Space Brothers is not some '60s psychedelic rock group. They are the extraterrestrials who are with us now, omniscient and everpresent, guiding the enlightened toward peace and harmony and a higher conscientiousness, or so teaches Unarius, a 50-year-old UFO contactee group based in El Cajon.

The Unarius Academy of Science has been on Magnolia Avenue since 1974 and is one of San Diego's more curious buildings. It's plain exterior hides the spritely glitter and grandiose decorations inside.

Unariuns believe that the Space Brothers, aliens from 32 other planets, are in the process of preparing earth and its inhabitants for membership in their interplanetary federation of love. One of these days -- and they've canceled previous arrivals -- they will land their flying saucers in Jamul (just outside of El Cajon), where Unarius co-founder Ruth Norman bought land for the purpose, and form a tower of spaceships high into the sky, and show us the way.

The cult -- which at one time reported 10,000 members -- also believes in angels, reincarnation and channelling. Original visionary Ernest Norman claims to have been Jesus Christ. Ruth had come to earth previously as Buddha, Socrates, King Arthur, Confucius, and King Poseid of Atlantis. Any member can channel either one of these or other historical figures, as well as specific Space Brothers, when important messages must be shared.

If you're lucky enough to live in a community where Uniriuns have secured public access television time, you can see for yourself what Unarius is all about.

More fascinating background here.

Business Week offers options for those among us who are tired of radio and think the same-old, same-old iPod playlist. Podcasting ranks high on the list.

IPTV is helping to fuel digital television growth in Europe, according to this article. Note, however, that only 600,000 homes are currently wired for IPTV. Based on that, can experts really project 11 million households in ten years?

Allison Bruce produced a fairly information rich story about IPTV. No real answers about when it will get here, all that it will make available to customers, whether the broadband will be adequate for all that consumers might want to do, and specifics on SBC's plans. Those are all still unknowns to just about everybody, of course, so Bruce looks through the dark glass and tells us what she can.

I been unable to get out of the office the last couple of days to see for myself, but apparently, the Ventura coast has been getting pounded by some pretty big waves. Here's some nice shots from a Brooks student on the Star's Buzznet site. 

This sad little hamburger shack on Fletcher Parkway in La Mesa has managed to survive for decades now. It was my high school hang out. Quite a few punks made this a regular stop around 1978 and 1979. The manager was Dave Astor, a thirtish guitar player with a wife and baby son and member of the Standbys, one of San Diego's first punk bands.

The food was good, the company better, and it was something to do in what was then a pretty boring town for a teen-ager who wasn't into ASB or football.

This is where I first met San Diego's version of Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas K. Arnold, who wandered in one day with a stack of newsprint, which turned out to be his new publication, Kicks, a rock and roll magazine for San Diego. T.K. had never been to East County and didn't know his way around, so I showed him where the local record shops were. Years later, after I established myself as a journalist, he would refer to me as his former "East County distribution manager" and tell people he "discovered" me. Funny.

The Standbys were a heck of a good band. I still have a copy of their lone 45 single. One of these days maybe I'll rip it to MP3 and upload it for you all. (After I left town, Dave and the two other Standbys joined Battalion of Saints, but I never saw that band perform -- I was gone. )

Dave and I drifted apart, and one day after not coming around for a year or more, I hit the drive-through and his wife was at the window. I asked about Dave. I didn't know. He had killed himself a few months earlier. It took me a long time to get over that. The idea of this guy who always seemed so happy and full of life when I was around him had chosen a gun over a guitar. Sad.

I've hit this topic before -- how El Cajon screwed up years ago in its downtown planning. Yesterday, I gathered some photographic evidence.

Shot 1: 50,000 books is gone. The first bookstore I ever tried to get a job at ... and for years, the owner and I would remain on friendly terms. Eventually, I profiled Tom for the Daily Californian. Tom was as much opposed to what the city planners were doing to downtown as anybody. He knew eventually the poor planning would kill his business. As this picture proves, he was right. On the day I took this picture, I discovered for the first time that 50,000 books was out of business. This building has so much potential. There's nothing wrong with it that a good facade rebate program wouldn't fix, but the city, I'm sure, is too dimwitted to see it that way. I expect the next time I visit downtown El Cajon, this old building will have met a ball and chain.

Shot 2: Standing on the corner of Main and Magnolia in downtown El Cajon, you can see the Salvation Army story. It's surprising the store has remained in its decades-old location. The city leaders pretty much despise thrift stores downtown, much to their discredit.

Shot 3: On the corner of Main and Magnolia, looking toward the corner where once stood the grand old Harding building, a beautiful red-brick structure that former City Manager Bob Acker swore would come down before he retired. And it did. Sad. Short-sighted. The destruction of the building destroyed much of downtown's character. Note the vacant lot. It's been a decade since the building came down and the City still can't do anything with the lot. Pathetic.

Shot 4: The city did something right in recognizing that this corner needed improving. At one time a dilapidated Winchell's donut shop stood here, so it's hard to argue that the corner needed improvement. Unfortunately, the cure was worse than the disease. Gone is a great bookstore and a landmark restaurant. The buildings you see in this picture came years after the original shopping center was built. At first, this was just an empty corner filled with a big parking lot serving a giant grocery store. They gave Smith's food tens of millions of dollars to come in town. The chain didn't even last two years at this location. It's nice that the new buildings (there's still a grocery store behind them) make an attempt at pedestrian-friendly (something the city promised from the beginning), but note the open space right on the corner. Poor planning if you're trying to create a true downtown atmosphere, especially after Magnolia was widened, basically cutting a once-quaint downtown in half. The architects behind this monstrosity should have their licenses revoked. Also, in order to build this poorly conceived shopping center, an the beautiful El Cajon Theater was destroyed, despite numerous community protests to save at least the facade. (When I was in high school the theater was known as the Pussycat and it's where I saw my first porno -- sneaking in underage, of course, but it was that long-lost affiliation with porn that set the city's moral majority (who ran the council) against the theater).

I didn't get any pictures of Main Street about a block east from Magnolia. There are a couple of nice looking restaurants that have opened up, both with outdoor, European cafe-style seating. They look good. It's the kind of thing El Cajon should have started with, not tacked on after destroying it's main intersection. There is some evidence that downtown El Cajon is turning a corner, but with the likes of the Harding building gone, 50,000 books gone, the Santee-style shopping complex on one corner, and the widening of Magnolia, downtown will never been what it could have been. It's potential as a truly vibrant hub of East County living and culture has been cut in half. It's a shame.

Dave Ely puts forward a pretty convincing argument against SBC's IPTV plans. The data pipe won't be big enough and other technologies available today are already better. Plus $99 is an outrageous price point.

On a related point, Ely makes a comment that "I don't see live TV as ever fully going away," well, neither do it, except, of course, the last time I watched a state of the union, I timeshifted it. I watch most sports timeshifted -- there are a lot of events that are better saved for later. There's nothing magical about live, and once you realize that, then timeshifting seems perfectly natural. For example, we didn't watch the Oscars in real time tonight.

I'm not looking for any IP delivery, regardless of the size of the data line, to much more than deliver timeshifted content. The only reason to deliver real-time content, I think, is for interactive purposes where audience responses only hold value in real time, but BSkyB in England is already doing that with a combo of satillite and landlines. I'm sure DirecTV will offer a similar service within a year or so.

Maybe IPTV isn't it, but the day is coming when lots of people will download a whole feast of video content over IP and watch it on regular their living room teevees. That just strikes me as inevitable. And if SBC's price point is $99 per month, the product is doomed.

More news favoring IPTV -- better video compression (via J.D. Lasica).

What I don't get though is that some people seem to think that viewers will watch IP video real-time, as a stream. I doubt it. Seriously. Doubt it.

Any system that does IPTV right will allow users to download shows ad hoc (surf the Web, find them, download them), or use and iPodder like system to down load favorite shows as they become available. All shows will be watched at the viewer's convenience, not when some programmer wants them to watch it. So better compression is great, but it isn't about watching the stream as it comes in. I don't think.

I've used Flash and Cold Fusion. I've used FeedDemon. Is Brightcove in my future? Sounds very intriguing. If it's from Jeremy Allaire, you know it's well conceived.

Look for IPTV to drive Internet-related revenue growth over the next five years, according to this article.

While I'm a big fan of IPTV, I'm not sure adoption will be fast enough, nor will sound business models emerge quickly enough to drive this kind of growth ... but the gaming portion of this projection is probably pretty close to right.

Phillip Swann thinks the idea of Apple buying TiVo is rotten to the core.

But Apple, whose core business is personal computers and portable music players (the iPod), could not deliver one cable and/or satellite subscriber, at least not immediately and perhaps never. Over the years, Apple has developed few, if any, relationships with TV-based companies. With Apple as its owner, TiVo would not be any better off than it is today. In fact, it would probably be in worse condition because it would have to go through some transition pains from the sale.

TiVo needs an innovative leader like Steve Jobs, but it doesn't necessarily need Steve Jobs.

A diversified media company with good relationships across the cable and satellite industries might be a good bet to save TiVo, but it makes sense that Apple isn't a good fit. Being innovative may not be enough.

Rusty Coats is one of the brighter people in new media. He's a natural leader who really understands how media is changing. It will be interesting to see what he does with TBO.com now that he's taking over. It gives him a pretty powerful platform to try some of his ideas on.

OK, instead of asking Sprint to change it's collections' department number, maybe the guy could have changed his own number. Still, his ultimate solution is much funnier.

I haven't seen Peter Jennings' special on UFOs yet (it's tivoed). Who knows? Maybe it's just a egocentric exercise in pandering and hype, but having seen Jennings on The Daily Show last night, I don't think so. And -- even though Jennings is on television -- I don't think he's the kind of journalist to tackle a subject less than professionally.

But what I really don't understand is why would anybody think this isn't legitimate journalism?

UFOs are a part of our culture, and one that -- as Jennings pointed out to Jon Stewart -- has not been given the kind of serious journalistic treatment the subject deserves. There are a multitude of interesting angles here that have nothing to do with whether you believe UFOs are spaceships, hoaxes or delusions.

The truth is out there, and Jennings is doing the journalistically honest thing (or so he says) in trying to shed some light on a fascinating topic.

Journalism isn't all about social security reform, budget deficits and Iraq. When it's at its best, it's also about what's going on in society. And society is into UFOs in a big way. Just do a Google search. There's nothing pandering about covering what interests people. That too can be service to civic discourse.

I generally keep a safe distance between my blog and my work -- not because anybody told me to, but because I blog for my own personal amusement and my opinions, whether dealing with my industry or not, are my own. These days I do tend to write more and more about topics related to my industry. And I'm sure I'm getting a growing audience of readers who know exactly who I am and what I do.

So I'm breaking a bit of a personal rule here by drawing your attention to a couple of links, but I think they're just so damn interesting, or should be to anybody who follows citizen journalism.

The first is a column for Poynter by John Moore about how a person in Thousand Oaks broke a story on the Ventura County Star's photo blog . The second is the comments on a breaking news story from today ... at this writing, more than 430 comments left by readers. One thing you might want to note about the story -- there's a link to a KCBS video. I know there are purest out there who think you shouldn't send traffic to another site or link to a competitor, but I've come to the conclusion about the Web -- you want people to come back, and they do that when you give them good stuff. If a link helps us tell a story better, we should use it. Web traffic is transient and fast moving. We want to be a daily habit for a core audience, but we can't expect to be any user's only source of news, so why ignore another news site when that site has something that will expand the value of a story? Of course, that takes a certain amount of confidence that over the long term, audiences won't prefer that other site. That said, I'm not afraid to link to any other news site.

Steve Outing defends citizen journalism, picking up on the same link I responded to here. Of course, Outing is more insightful.

I know a some webloggers think blogs are the beginning of the end of MSM, or at least that blogs are somehow superior to what professional journalists do. It wouldn't surprise anybody that I disagree with that; however, the sanctimony from some in the MSM about the purity of journalism, with an attitude that blogs have nothing really to offer, is equally as shortsighted. Blogs and MSM need each other. Neither is per se superior to the other. Each has a place and role. It's better to recognize that than fight against it.

Apply buying TiVo -- seems like a natural match. And that seems to be the rumor. It would be interesting to see what Steve Jobs and his fellow innovators at Apple could do with the best DVR system on the planet. The speculation is trying up Apple's stock, according to this report.

It's hard to get past the opening words of this story on IPTV:

Internet Protocol, the language of most online communications ...

Funny, I've never thought of IP as a language. It's, well, it's ... a protocol. It's just packets zipping back and forth. There is nothing language-like about it.

And was IP supposed to revolutionize the way we watch television by now? Who said?

What a dumb lede.

Beyond that, the story doesn't really offer anything new to comment on.

Adam Curry, the godfather of podcasting, is featured in Wired.

Although podcasts don't conform to any formula, their hosts do share one passion: circumventing the restrictions imposed on traditional broadcasting by industry and government. Partly in political protest and partly out of legal necessity, podcast music tends to favor songs that aren't policed by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Podcasting is still so young, we don't know what new stars will arise. The biggest podcaster of next year may not even have heard the word yet.

Wired sees a new golden age of radio on the horizon, and it's all about Steve Jones blasting assorted underground punk tunes into the Los Angeles smog, it's also about the same technological innovations that is changing all media:

Ultimately, broadcasters will have the chance to spray multiple streams of bits into listeners' dashboards and homes - as many as six streams per station, depending on the fidelity requirements of the programming. Because the 1s and 0s in HD radio are functionally identical to those sent across the Net, says Jim Griffin, founder of media consulting firm Cherry Lane Digital, "digital audio implies the ability to carry video, software, email, text messages, you name it." Within a few years, he says, radios will have what he calls a buffer - a TiVo-like device that stores broadcast signals at the listeners' command. "You program it to store All Things Considered for the drive home. Maybe on the show there's an alert about a new virus. You punch a button and download an antivirus update into your buffer from NPR B, then take that into your house when you get home." Or perhaps you hear a review that makes you want to get a movie or an album, which you download as you drive. Meanwhile, your radio, which taps into the automobile's GPS unit, is constantly scanning for local traffic reports, and when a pertinent one appears, interrupts and then resumes the stored All Things Considered. "At the other side of the transition," Griffin says, "digital radio isn't necessarily radio in the way we think of radio, other than the fact that it uses transmitters. It's all about pushing and pulling bits into the buffer."

The future is on-demand and personalized across all media. And only by embracing digital can radio escape a death spiral. If radio broadcasters can't narrowcast and provide timeshift options, they will simply fade away.

News sites take note: Google has a new encroachment on the local market -- type "movie:" followed by a title and/or a zip code and you get times and listings. Here's my search for local theaters showing Aviator. Here's what's playing in all the theaters locally. This is scary. Scary good and scary smart. I don't know of any regional news site that has movie listings done as well. No ads. Quick download. Links to every known review. Times, location, map. Wow. Here's what you can expect next from Google to monetize this (I'm guessing), a Fandago-like service.

Jeff Jarvis picks up on the theme started by Om Malik (first linked to here) and adds his own thoughts. Much of what's being discussed sounds a lot like what SBC is proposing already for its own IPTV service.

In a way, my writing life began in the Air Force (first paid gig, at least). Until today, I didn't realize that Hunter S. Thompson also served in the USAF and began his journalism career as an airman. That's where our careers diverge -- he was ushered out of the military early and I finished my hitch. He became internationally famous as a gonzo journalist and I joined the Rotary.

If I could ride a magic carpet to anyplace in the world, it would be South Korea, just to see what's going on with broadband and how it's changing society.

The Dead Parrot Society uncovers a quote variance that is fairly significant. Whichever news organization changed the quote, and I blame Fox, there is no excuse.

Years ago, there was a series of public service ads in news week about writers, and one of them featured John Irving, who admitted that he couldn't spell. I think of that story every time I run spell check. Long time readers of this blog would probably find it hard to believe I was once a copy editor. My wife eviscerates me every time she happens to read this blog (which, fortunately, isn't often). There's a reason I resigned as copy editor at my former daily paper and went back to being a reporter. Fortunately, I'm not alone.

My step son is in a punk band now. We went to his show tonight at the Majestic Ventura Theater. I've posted pictures on Buzznet. Charlie's the one in the white shirt playing bass.