Maine public radio cuts back its music.

Maine public radio cuts back its music for more talk | The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram

This is never easy for public radio stations. After all, we invite listeners to invest in the programs.

Major changes always result in heat and some defections in the short run. Having 4,000 members threaten defection made a lot of staff members sit up and notice when we changed formats.

My past experience with change has yielded surprises. Replacing the opera with coverage of the shuttle disaster resulted in dozens of heated complaints. Coverage of the Pope's death in place of the opera resulted in even more complaints. We temporarily changed programming to offer coverage of the 9/11 disaster. One listener was so incensed by the change he threatened to blow up the station. (We called the police.)

In one case statistics suggested almost no audience and poor loyalty for a stand-alone weekend program. It was easy to understand why. The program had nothing to do with the rest of the schedule. I took the program off the air. The response was really light. There were literally a handful of negative comments. In fact, there was hardly a ripple. Within a few weeks after leaving the station, the program was back on the air. One of the members of that small ripple was able to dangle a check from a foundation in front of senior management. They went for it.

Will UConn join ACC? Maybe not.

An article in the Huffington Post is suggesting the ACC voted to include Louisville for all sports.

Louisville To Join ACC After Conference Presidents' Vote: Report

If true, this is blow for UConn sports. An article in this morning's Hartford Courant pointed out there would be a lot more money for UConn Athletics by joining the ACC.

My impression from the local media was that UConn was a lock for the ACC. Was the local media jumping to conclusions? Cheerleading? Did I get the wrong impression?

The pundits had it wrong. So did many journalists.

WSJ gets lost in the weeds with the Romney campaign

Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review suggests the Wall Street Journal has it wrong about why Mitt Romney lost the election. That is because they paid too much attention to the political pundits. He contends, and I agree, that enough people understand that the economy cratered because of the policies that came before the crash. Voters intuitively understand that the recovery is going to take longer than the pundits want us to believe and, indicators are that the economy is on a slow road to recovery.

Also...Pundits are invested in their opinions. They're getting paid to have opinions. The opinions don't need to be true or based in fact.