Tuesday, April 13, 2010

What Have I Been Up To?

While trying to get up the gumption to post more on my blog, a friend on Twitter told me about a new Internet radio station for conservatives. This was RFC Radio, Radio for Conservatives. I became first a fan, and then was invited to become part of the technical staff. I worked to fix things that broke on a day to day basis, and then to improve the overall stability of the station.

Unfortunately, the primary founder treated it more like his toy that he sometimes let his friends play with than a business. This not only frustrated us as we tried to grow, but repeatedly caused the volunteer staff to have to drop everything for a day or two in order to deal with the latest crisis created because someone felt like making a change RIGHT NOW.

A month ago ago six of us who did the day to day work that kept the station operating and grew the talent pool and traffic to the web site reached a point where we could no longer go on with the situation as it existed. Three weeks ago we reached a point where we could not reach an agreement with the founder of RFC on how to reorganize in order to move forward.

The upshot was that we left RFC Radio, and began our own station, From The Right Radio.

In under a week the people who understand things like HTML and CSS (notice that this is still on Blogger; I am not one of them) had a web site live. In another week we had a server configured, patched, an ftp server set up for hosts to upload their podcasts to, and all of the software installed and configured to operate an Internet radio station. There was much creating of special scripts to automate the operation of the station, testing, swearing, fixing, testing, swearing, fixing, etc. That was my part of the job. Meanwhile the folks who work directly with the talent and show producers were talking to people we had worked with in the past. Over 90% of the hosts who had worked with us at RFC joined us at FTR Radio.

Meanwhile the founder of RFC had ceased operations and sold the assets of RFC Radio to a podcast producer we had worked with in the past, Take That! Media. The folks at Take That! decided that they didn't want to operate a streaming internet radio station at this time, so they sold the assets of RFC Radio to FTR Radio.

FTR Radio is conservative talk radio. You won't hear talk radio hosts who are famous yet. FTR Radio is a grass roots organization. We don't have a sugar daddy; no astroturf for us. We're running it out of our own pockets and in what is laughingly referred to as our "free time." We're building a reliable platform, a stable of talented but so far little known hosts, and working hard to build a loyal audience. We aren't doing this to become rich, but we ARE capitalists and this is not a non-profit corporation. If we can advance the conservative cause and become prosperous too that's a Good Thing- But first we advance the cause.

You can find From The Right Radio at http://www.ftrradio.com/



No comments: