Blogging can liberate New Jersey media

by Jeff Johnson Jr.

There are exactly two things I like about New Jersey 101.5 FM. The rest of the station's offerings don't thrill me—and they make me thankful for blogs.

I like the cheesy 70s and 80s pop music that the station plays on the weekends, with special (if implicit) focus given to New Jersey artists. (Ever heard that song "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" by the 1970s Jersey band Looking Glass?)

Only slightly more than that, I like the unrelenting focus that WKXW, as New Jersey 101.5 is officially designated, places on the Garden State. Its slogan—"Not New York, not Philadelphia, our own radio station!"—makes the station's target audience clear.

In fact, in its traffic reports, heard every fifteen minutes around the clock, the station doesn't even utter the names of those two out-of-state cities whose metropolitan areas encompass much of New Jersey. New York City is referred to as "across the Hudson", Philadelphia as "across the Delaware," and road directions described as "leaving" or "entering" the Garden State.

What I don't like is the chatter that New Jersey 101.5 plays around the clock from Monday until Friday evening. And that's a lot of programming to not like.

Sometimes the chatter is downright offensive (as when the Jersey Guys, the station's afternoon shock-jock team, fostered hate against Hispanic immigrants), but mostly, it's just plain boring (as when night host Michele Pilenza talks about New Jerseyans and their kinky sex. This ex-Californian yawns.)

New Jersey 101.5 is an artifact of two things: (1) the way old media defines "markets," and (2) the demographic anomoly that is New Jersey.

In broadcasting, "markets" are designated as geographic areas where everyone can receive the same television or radio signals. Nielson Media, the organization that is responsible for what most of us know as "the ratings," ranks these markets according to a formula that basically shows how many listeners or viewers are likely to hear a broadcaster's message.

Obviously, this rating is partially a function of population, though if one market's viewers are found to watch more TV or radio than an adjacent market's, it could potentially affect those market rankings. (Maybe that's how, according to the list, the market of Lima, Ohio, jumped 11 spots from '07 to '08? 'Cause, if I had to live in Lima, Ohio, I'd probably watch more and more TV all the time ...)

It should come as no surprise that the main purpose of these market rankings is to estimate the potential size of target audiences for advertisers. The operative word here is estimate. I'll get back to that.

It also probably seems logical that these geographic areas usually center around a major population center. Hence, New York City is DMA (Designated Market Area) No. 1, and Los Angeles is DMA No. 2.

It's the "major population center" part that leaves room in the media landscape for a successful niche broadcaster like New Jersey 101.5.

As of the 2000 census, 8.4 million people lived in New Jersey, ranking it 11th in population. Meanwhile, the state ranks 47th in size. This easily makes the state the most densly populated in the U.S., but with no clear center.

New Jersey as a state is not on Nielson Media's list—and neither is any place in New Jersey.

Meanwhile, right at New Jersey's borders is not only New York City, but also Philadelphia—DMA No. 4.

That doesn't mean that New Jersey issues don't get covered in the media. Obviously, New York City's and Philadelphia's radio signals don't fall out of the air and sink into the Hudson and Delaware rivers. A lot of people in the Garden State receive these signals, so the Philadelphia broadcast media tend to cover South Jersey and the New York City media tend to cover North Jersey.

But I, at least, have always been somewhat disappointed with the lack of attention these outlets give to state government issues that affect everyone from Cape May to High Point, such as the state budget and the (almost literally) baroque bureacratic designs that drives up costs in ways that taxpayers in other states would have revolted over years ago. New Jersey 101.5 is perhaps the only media outlet that really does make a point of addressing these issues, but I can't stomach the station's populist jabber for more than the fifteen minutes it takes to hear the traffic report on the rare occassions when I drive on the Turnpike.

New Jersey 101.5 exists because it aims toward an audience that is, on the one hand, potentially very large. On the other hand, though, there is very little comparable data on this audience—certainly not enough for traditional media outlets to be willing to take the risk on setting up a large-scale operation here. If you've ever listened to New Jersey 101.5, one thing you can say about that station is that its owners are willing to take risks. These risks pay off in terms of advertising revenue, at least for one station.

If you're like me and you're more conservative about the tone of news (and I mean conservative in terms of prefering blandness, not in terms of political views), then you're probably not interested in the kinds of risks New Jersey 101.5 takes.

Print media's audience may not be constrained by the natural boundary of airwave range, but is slave to the fairly textbook dynamics of cost associated with the time, fuel, and materials necessary to carry their message over a great distance.

The Trenton Times and the Newark Star Ledger, arguably the most state-focused daily newspapers in New Jersey, share a web presence with several other New Jersey publications at nj.com and at least try to address these Garden State needs—but they seem to be having a hard time figuring out their identity. (Witness what dennisl, a user at Blue Jersey, calls "this travesty of the graphic arts.")

Blogging throws a wrench in the plans of the traditional media marketing models by making geography relevant only to the degree that it frames common interests.

Blue Jersey keeps a blogroll of 44 Jersey-centered blogs (inner sidebar column, scroll down, underneath their "recent comments" sidebar), most of which are generally updated regularly. I don't find all of them interesting, but I find it copelling that there are so many and that they cover such diverse topics. Several—including Blue Jersey—fund themselves in part with advertising.

Old media should take note of this, because it doesn't follow the old model.

Web advertising, of course, caters to a much more fragmented audience than broadcast or print advertising does. But one crucial difference is that you can track web advertising's effectiveness very easily.

Remember what I mentioned earlier about the purpose of Nielson Media's market rankings—to help estimate the potential size of target audiences for advertisements. There's no way you can no for sure how many people are actually tuned in on a given day to hear a radio advertisement.

A web advertisement on a blog may reach a smaller audience than a broadcast message on New Jersey 101.5—but anyone who knows enough to set up a blog also has the know-how to track the exact size and behavior of that small audience down to the type of web browser most visitors used to access the site. I talked about one of these tools, Google Analytics, briefly in my Facebook blog recently. Columbus, Ohio, blogger Leigh Householder has a post on the science of measuring web visits on her blog Advergirl.

Blogging could be liberating for New Jersey media because it enables New Jerseyans to develop an identity that transcends Sopranos references and tough-guy clichés.

And we can always download our cheesy Jersey Shore pop songs from the Internet, if we still miss them.