A view from the Corridor
The 21st-century media is the message
By Peter Jones
The more things change in broadcasting and telecommunications along with the Corridor, the more they make me feel old. But I’m used to it. I worked for Billboard when Adele was a gleam in her mother’s eye and the international music magazine did not even have a fax machine.
In the 1990s when I was a reporter for what is now Centennial-based Colorado Public Radio (and an occasional NPR stringer), we had one FM station housed in a former sorority house near the University of Denver. Today, my onetime employer, now impressively based at the high-tech Bridges Broadcast Center, boasts multiple frequencies across the state with three streams of programming—classical, news and the decidedly fresh Open Air.
None of this was ever, ever to be called CPR by the way, though some of us used to throw around potential slogans like “radio that could save your life.” Clearly, the general manager’s original dictate eventually gave way to the power of acronym.
In the early ‘90s when the standalone station, then commonly called KCFR, made its first acquisition in Grand Junction, there were plans aplenty to create multiple streams. But in a radio world that had yet to even embrace digital editing, those plans seemed like rambling pipe dreams. It was only after I left the “network” in 1996 that CPR introduced its 24-hour news feed. The more jaw-dropping Open Air signed on a few years later.
Not only did these expansions give a CPR statewide reach, they targeted a sprawling (read: younger) audience that had associated public radio with grandpas in smoking jackets. Splitting off classical from news also put to rest an awkward format change on KCFR every few hours.
The gust of Open Air has been the most surprising. The thought of CPR producing an alternative-rock station (for lack of a better term) would never have even been a hallway rumor in 1995. I remember feeling some devilish glee when I would work the music of Poco or even the Dead Kennedys into my music-related stories on classical KCFR.
Kudos to my onetime colleague, program director Mike Flanagan, who has made Open Air a true destination, even in a world of digital download and satellite radio. An amazing journey—when I briefly re-entered radio in the 2000s, it was already the era of the Internet where everyone could be an international talk show host.
After CPR I worked for another Corridor-based communications outlet. At the time, the Douglas County network of movie channels was still called Encore, named for its first channel of older movies “bought for a song,” as my manager explained. By the time I left the multichannel organization, it had been rechristened Starz Encore, in recognition of its first-string newer-movie channel. Today, the post-Netflix company is simply called Starz.
As my job was to screen and evaluate movies and provide content advisories and channel recommendations, I saw The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in more ways than one. As Starz turned 10, I witnessed this once-determined movies-only organization move into series and original content, facing steep competition from HBO and online—and this was before movie streaming became as easy as flicking the remote.
Newspapers, of course, have also had to adapt to changing times. South metro publications, including The Villager, have increasingly turned to the Web as the best way to deliver breaking news quickly and efficiently.
Like the liquor stores that may soon reinvent and specialize when grocery stores likely enter their industry, media of all forms continue to face sobering realities.
Still, those opportunities are exciting—and I know of no one who entered the ever-evolving world of broadcasting, telecommunications or journalism in search of predictability.
Peter Jones is news editor and staff writer for the Villager.
