Friday morning talk of the town is still here

Lou Marzeles
News Editor

     We had java and we had talk last Friday morning at Sodbuster's. Not necessarily in that order.
New ideas need time to get tried out, and that's why I have no problem with Java Talk, The Sentinel's new community discussion program, taking a little getting used to. And it's clear that some further conversation about what we're doing will be helpful.
     Let me reiterate that while the idea for the program came about after the radio station announced that it was closing its station in town and ending its call-in talk shows, our program was never intended to replace a call-in talk show. We know that we can't fill the role of such a show, with its spontaneity and timeliness; we never intended to. We know, too, that you can't show up to our meeting in your bathrobe. Well, you could, but we'd probably wrap our meeting very quickly if you did. Calling into a radio station is simply not the same as attending a meeting.
     But here's the thing: it's very hard to be happy by making comparisons, unless you're choosing between lettuce heads and similar things at the market. If you try to compare situations, people, institutions-or radio and newspaper-one thing or the other is going to lose. If you try to keep comparing Java Talk with a live call-in talk show, you're not going to be happy. The talk show is gone.      The radio's market manager has made it clear that bringing it back is simply not going to happen, unless to do so were revealed to be a money-making proposition. Well, guess why they dropped it in the first place?
     So if you're not coming to Java Talk because it doesn't compare favorable to what you were used to with live call-in radio, I invite your reconsideration. And by the way, you should know that we're digitally recording the conversation with a view toward putting the recordings online and available for podcasting. If "podcasting" sounds like something from the plot of a science fiction movie, that's OK; we're not all techno smart. Podcasting just means that a lot of people like to download sound files onto their portable media devices-doohickies that look like old transistor radios-to listen to them at their leisure. Wow. That almost sounds like it could be radio.