Month: January 2009

“The Schilling Show” has been off the air for just about two weeks, and people are already feeling a void. But, fear not! Fans of former Charlottesville city councilor Rob Schilling have created the “Bring Rob Schilling Back” blog, a place, they say, for fans, information and activism.

On the introduction page, the fans state their mission: “The purpose of this blog is to act as a forum for fans of Rob Schilling to voice our support for him, and our desire for WINA to put ‘The Schilling Show’ back on the air.”

The blog invites Charlottesville and Albemarle listeners to write WINA and its owner, Saga Communications, to reinstitute the conservative host.

On December 22, WINA 1070 AM pulled the show because of budget cuts, reported The Daily Progress. According to WINA’s website, "The Schilling Show" has been replaced by Laura Ingraham.

Schilling was a co-host, along with Jane Foy, of the WINA Morning Show, for close to a year, and went to his own afternoon call-in program in January 2008.
 

Rob Schilling was elected to City Council as a lone Republican in 2002.

The new year began with a bang for Charlottesville’s daily newspaper. The Daily Progress reported on January 1 that Media General, the Richmond-based owner of the newspaper, is planning to put the Progress building, and the property on West Rio Road in Albemarle County, up for sale.

The Progress moved to the Rio Road facility after leaving its Market Street offices in downtown Charlottesville in 1983.

It was only in July that the local daily laid off 25 employees after it shut down its in-house printing operations. The 25-year-old printing machine needed an estimated $3 million in updates.

The paper immediately started rolling out of a Hanover County press, where the Richmond Times-Dispatch is printed.

The decision to sell was prompted by Media General’s review of its real estate assets and plans to use the money made from sales to pay debts.

In November, Harbinger Capital Partners, an activist hedge fund with seats on the Media General board, cut its stakes in the communications company due to a 5.8 percent revenue decrease in October led by declines in classified ad sales.
 

Say bye-bye: The most recent Albemarle County assessment, done on January 1, 2008, valued the land and The Daily Progress building on Rio Road at an estimated $4 million.

The John Paul Jones Arena isn’t the type of venue that screams "long, strange trip," but in April, local Deadheads can get their kicks all the same. The surviving members of the Grateful Dead—Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart—will perform at JPJ as part of a 19-concert tour dubbed "An Evening With The Dead" on Wednesday, April 15. Plenty of lead time for tickets on this show, folk; seats go up for sale on Friday, January 23, at 10am.

I don’t mean to digress, but…actually, you know what? If you’re a Deadhead, you live for digression. So, tell me: Can you teach the Dead dogs new tricks? Read on below the skull.

A press release from publicity firm Mitch Schneider Organization says the tour comes on the heels of "months of fan speculation" following the Dead’s gig at a Barack Obama rally in October and "three recent viral Internet videos." This is interesting, in part because (a) I seem to be able to find only one copy of each video on YouTube, on this guy’s account, and (b) saying that a video released a day ago is "viral" is like calling 2009 "the best year ever"—a bit early to say, you know?

But the viral videos also interest me because so much of how the Dead marketed their music—encouraging soundboard and audience recordings, show swapping, etc.—affected how we value media. Roughly 40 years before Girl Talk and Radiohead put out records with blank price tags, the Dead essentially did the same by opening their live performances to folks with tape recorders, so that they could encourage more folks with tape recorders to buy tickets to see them live. Music managers like Coran Capshaw have built upon the Dead’s business model, in some respects, to great success, yet websites like the Internet Archive hold more than 6,000 free Grateful Dead concerts.

Which brings about an interesting question: If you can hear the Dead’s show at John Paul Jones Arena, note-for-note, on the Internet a week later, why would you pay for a ticket? The lines are now open; hit me with your knowledge, Deadheads.

Current listening: Grateful Dead at The Strand Lyceum, May 25, 1972.