[BC] 100000watts.com (was: XETRA-690 to be bought by Spanish network)

[Scott Fybush]

Chris Boone wrote:

>And it was one of the saddest days when www.100000watts.com was sold to
>Clear Channel/M Street..who shredded the listings down to a mere pittance of
>what they USED to be....I refuse to use the site anymore.

Chris,

I'm sorry you feel that way. I hope you'll allow me to make a couple of 
points for the record, after which this is probably best taken offline as 
being largely irrelevant to the assembled crowd here.

100000watts.com in its original form was a labor of love by one individual, 
Chip Kelley from Dallas. It began simply as a listing of the radio stations 
he heard as he drove around Texas for his (non-radio-related) job, and over 
the course of several years expanded to include listings of radio and 
television first in adjacent states and, eventually, in the entire US and 
some border areas of Canada and Mexico. It was a hobby for Chip, and one 
that gradually came to take up more and more of his time. I saw the 
original back end - EVERYTHING was done by hand, in simple text editors, 
which is a heck of a task when you're dealing with more than 15,000 
entries. Everything, you ask? Everything - managing the lists of 
cross-owned stations within a market, updating the engineering data every 
day. Everything. And all for free.

It was as nifty as all get-out, but it was unsustainable. Chip announced - 
sometime in early 2002, if memory serves - that he was going to stop 
updating the site and would eventually shut it down.

And that would have been that, end of story, go use radio-locator.com 
instead...except for one thing. M Street/Inside Radio stepped forward and 
offered to buy the site from Chip and keep it going. It wasn't an act of 
altruism, of course - even the M Street researchers were using it to help 
them do their jobs. But the key point to remember is that there would be no 
100000watts.com now if they hadn't done that.

That's where I entered the picture. M Street has researchers who make 
hundreds of phone calls every day and scour the news to keep their own 
database updated with the latest changes. They needed someone to serve as 
editor of 100000watts.com, though, and I came on board to help with that 
effort, initially taking over the database that Chip had created and 
keeping it as up to date as possible.

Later that year, Chip's database was merged into the main M Street 
database. That brought about a few changes. Chip had been tracking a few 
categories that M Street wasn't: station logos, detailed station histories, 
FM translators (to a limited extent), and TV in Canada. Those disappeared 
(though I'd still like to see the station histories return in another 
form), but certain innovations were added to the database as well: 
automatic updating of cross-ownerships and, perhaps most important, 
automatic updating of the technical data, straight from CDBS. Without those 
changes, there's no way that we'd have been able to cope with all the new 
LPFMs, for instance. Now it's easy.

Over the last couple of years, we've made some tweaks to the M Street 
database specifically to improve the 100000watts.com presentation (like, 
for instance, presenting accurate Mexican calls instead of the four-letter 
abbreviated versions.) As of tonight, as I type this, we're tracking:

1788 TV stations
1677 digital TV stations
9633 FM stations
5007 AM stations
4797 low power TV and FMs

for a total of 22,902 stations. That's compared to just over 17,000 when I 
took over three years ago. I'm not quite sure how that equates to "a mere 
pittance of what they USED to be," and I'd be eager for any insight Chris 
might provide into what led him to level that particular accusation.

By my count, the site's now got at least six people looking for updates, 
day in and day out, including the newsgathering resources of Tom Taylor and 
Frank Saxe on the Inside Radio side of things. I don't think we're missing 
much, and I'm always pleased to hear from anyone who can show us otherwise.

Yes, there's now a charge for the site - it's just under $60 a year for 
unlimited access and considerably less for a one-week pass. That drew a lot 
of flak at the beginning, especially over on the hobbyist message boards 
where the attitude seemed to be that everything ought to be available for 
free at all times. I didn't set the charge (I have nothing whatsoever to do 
with the business side of the operation), but I make no bones about needing 
to keep a roof over my head and feed my family, and if that's what they 
need to charge to keep the site in business and to pay me what they pay me, 
it doesn't seem all that unreasonable. (It is, among other things, only a 
third of what you'd pay for the Broadcasting Yearbook, and I'll put the 
accuracy of our data up against theirs any day of the week.)

Again, the option isn't "free 100000watts.com vs. paid 100000watts.com"; 
it's "NO 100000watts.com vs. paid 100000watts.com."

And yes, if you trace the ownership of the site back through M Street Corp. 
and its parent, Critical Mass Media, you do eventually end up in San 
Antonio, to which I can only say, it is what it is. I have never - and I 
mean NEVER - had any communication about the site from anyone above the M 
Street Corp. level. We get no inside information about what Clear Channel 
Radio is doing, and there's no favoritism shown to CC stations in our 
listings or presentation, nor do they get any break on the price, so far as 
I'm aware. From my end, data is data. I wouldn't know how to "spin" a call 
letter change if my life depended on it.

Back when this was all raising hackles on the message boards, I made the 
point that there's absolutely nothing that Chip did that anyone else 
couldn't do, given enough time and patience. The CDBS data is in the public 
domain (and made available for free at other sites, including Cavell, Mertz 
& Davis' excellent fccinfo.com), and if someone were determined enough to 
hunt down format and slogan information, build the necessary databases and 
keep it updated every single day, there'd be nothing stopping them from 
building a replacement for Chip's site (or for ours.)

That was three years ago. Nobody's done so.

I'm sorry you don't like what the site has become, Chris, but to call it 
"shredded down" is really unfair to my colleagues at M Street who work 
awfully hard, day in and day out, to keep Chip Kelley's vision alive in the 
best way manageable.

(And since I suspect it's been a while since Chris has seen the site, I'm 
going to see if the business end won't make a temporary password available 
to allow readers of this list to check out how the site looks now for a few 
days. Stay tuned.)

Again, I think this is getting off-topic, and I thank Barry for his 
indulgence in allowing me to respond. Let's take anything further off-list, 
if need be...

Scott Fybush
news editor, 100000watts.com