Followup -- innovation on Long Island.

I confess to commenting (below) on The Morey Group's flip of their three Long Island stations to music machines with no DJs and hour sponsorships with a hint of a sneer and my tongue in my cheek--I have low expectations for radio guys' use of the word "creative."

But I read the other day that the Morey stations are also going to sell those sponsorships via forms on their Web site, presumably with a credit card, like Amazon.com. Now this is creative, for Marconi radio station guys. (As a matter of fact, I recently suggested this to our local commercial-nonprofit classical station, which is trapped in the ratings-sales system by relying on a corporate station group to sell their time.) Wish I could remember where I read it. It was a newspaper. The radio trades haven't picked up on the significance of this move yet.

That (1) they're obviously breaking out of the ARBITRON-ratings-selling box. This is big. Maybe their most significant move. They're betting they can make money by cutting the programming costs that produce little in the signal-rich LI ratings market and (2) going totally small-town in their selling. It's not a creative programming move, but it is creative business management--they're going totally local in sales--that'll be their local content--the advertising. Even Aunt Sally can sponsor an hour on one of these stations--just like buying a Valentine's Day for-your-sweetie ad in the local newspaper. This could work. Of course, they'll be streaming to the world, too. But stations have to realize that since more and more listeners will be getting their radio via the Web, their computers or their cell phones, your programming has to be there to be in their world.

Though I hate Morey's programming decision--it's nothing new--I am beginning to love them for their decision to go local, embrace the new Web-Satellite-Ipod music environment, and slip out of ARBITRON's suffocating embrace.

Takeaway: Find a way to go totally local--programming and sales--but be sure you're streaming on the Web, get out of the ARBITRON straitjacket, and embrace all new-tech distribution systems. Even HD Radio, which is crawling toward us. But that's another post.