Technology puts Brad and Britt back in the mornings

The Curtis Media Group took Brad and Britt away from my morning routine. But technology has allowed me to bring their entertaining and informative show back to my mornings.

This is one of the best shows on radio and, as I wrote on this blog in January, they were a fixture of my morning routine. They were just as much a part of my morning runs as lacing up my Saucony shoes.

By using their podcasts, Brad Krantz, left, and Britt
Whitmire are back as part of my morning routine.

That all changed last month when Curtis Media took Brad Krantz and Britt Whitmire off of WZTK 101.1 FM and shifted them to afternoons on WPTF AM 850 in the Triangle and WSJS AM AM 610 in the Triad. As I wrote last month, this change made me (and probably many others) very unhappy. It's now La Ley 101.1, a Hispanic station.

I knew that Britt put up a podcast every night, but was skeptical about whether their conversations on news of the day would still be of interest 12-14 hours later.

I tried Bill LuMaye, who 850 shifted from afternoons to mornings, but got tired of his cynical right-wing view of everything really fast. He can be interesting at times, but he's not nearly as entertaining as Brad and Britt.

I've had a very small MP3 player for a while that I've barely used since all of my music is now on my phone. But I decided to use it to try downloading the B&B podcast for my morning runs.

I'm glad I did! And hearing the show 12-14 hours later doesn't seem to matter.


With these podcasts, I've turned a negative into a positive.

I only run 6 days a week (I take Mondays off after running long on Sundays). I only got to listen to the show during my runs 4 days a week when they were on 101.1. Now with the podcasts, I hear the show on runs 5 days a week, including Saturday mornings.

It is a pain to sometimes have to fire up the computer, download the podcast and transfer it to my MP3 player each morning. But lately, the podcast has been put up on their blog page early enough for me to take care of that before I go to bed.

It sure beats the live radio options in the morning. And, unlike when I listened to them on 101.1, there are no commercials, no news breaks, no Panthers report (not that there would be this time of year, anyway) and no Wall Street Journal report.

A bonus to the podcasts is that you get to hear occasional Lil' Rush reports (Britt's humorous impression of Rush Limbaugh), which they apparently have been told not to do on the air. I've heard Britt do some George W. Bush impressions on the air. But, as I wrote in last month's blog post, many others, including The Rather Report, seem to have been lost in the move to afternoons.

In addition, the flow of the show on the podcast isn't interrupted by the incessantly frequent traffic reports you hear when you listen live in the afternoon. As busy as I am at work, I really can only listen live on the way home from work and during the "Triangle Power Hour," as they call it, from 6-7 p.m.

For all of you Brad and Britt fans frustrated by the move, I suggest you try the podcast solution that is working well for me!

Breaking through paywall with social media

If you wanted to read a newspaper for free in the old days, the only honest one way was to head to the library.

It turns out that there is an honest way to read some of a newspaper's content for free when it throws up a paywall. At least in the case of one of my former newspapers, the Daily Press of Newport News, Va.

As I wrote in this blog earlier this month, the Daily Press began on April 9 requiring readers to either subscribe to the print edition or pay a subscription fee in order to read stories on its website.

The newspaper has left a back-door entrance, though. If you click on a link posted by the Daily Press staff on Twitter or Facebook, you can read the story for free.

If you are mainly a sports fan of the teams the Daily Press covers, all you have to do is follow its sports department's Twitter feed, which I started a few years ago. (Considering how popular Twitter has become, it's almost funny how hard I had to work just to be allowed to use it initially.) You can also slip in the back door through the paywall by way of the sports department's Facebook page.

If you're more interested in high school sports, you can follow its high school sports Twitter account HRVarsity, like the HRVarsity Facebook page or follow on Twitter Peninsula District beat writer Dave Johnson or Bay Rivers District writer Marty O'Brien.

You can follow individual Twitter feeds if you enjoy the work of columnists David Teel and Dave Fairbank, Norm Wood, its beat writer for Virginia and Virginia Tech, or Melinda Waldrop, its local colleges beat writer.

This gives Daily Press writers visibility through social media that appeared to be be significantly reduced by the paywall.

All of this is a break for me. I've been back in North Carolina for nearly two years and don't read as many Daily Press stories as I did when I actually lived there. The current introductory rate of 99 cents for the first five weeks is no big deal. But I doubt I'd pay whatever the rate will be after that.

Does this back door access to free content defeat the purpose of putting up a paywall? Is this analogous to, in the old days, giving away newspapers at some of your racks?

I'm happy as a reader to find a way to read stories for free. But if the reason for putting up a paywall was to help the bottom line, the newspaper seems to be hurting its chances to do that with the social media back-door access to content.