Just got back from a whirlwind week in mostly southern California with my family. We put on 1100 miles on the rental, visited 6 media markets, read the USA Today and Orange County Register…and are glad to be home. Let me share some media randomness with you based on the trip:

•  Add KFI/Los Angeles to my Top 10 radio stations in America. They have captured how to make talk radio move quickly and sound current for young audiences. Local bumpers all sounded like we were listening to Z102.3 instead of a sleepy talk station. Breaks were heavily caffeinated: fast news, weather, traffic, getting back into a syndicated show like Rush right at the last second, maximizing local sales opportunities. Exciting to hear, and right on the money with what Randy Michaels is trying to pull off with the new Merlin stations in NY and Chicago
• Why doesn’t PennDOT offer traffic cams in our District 1? Having those CalTrans cameras all over the local news lead-in to the TODAY show and throughout really help commuters
• Erie holds it’s own when it comes to smaller market TV news. Fresno news was pretty unfortunate.
• Not to be mean, but some of the news personalities on LA TV are starting to look like that Bill Hader character on SNL, Herb Welsh, the old news reporter. Got to be tough for a young person to break into mega-market TV these days.

• Love how the Orange County Register’s website has breakouts by local towns. I was able to find out crime info, latest news, features based on the individual towns were were visiting in the OC. Given the Erie Times-News heritage with the Brown-Thompson community papers of old, I’m surprised that localism hasn’t been built into GoErie since the beginning.
• Time for Yosemite National Park to get cellular service. My GPS is on my smartphone and only works if it can ping both to the GPS satellites and to the wireless network. No wireless…no GPS, so I was nearly clueless during my 70+ mile trip in the dark leaving the park on terribly-winding roads toward Merced. No radio available either. Considering there are 3 million visitors a year to that beautiful wilderness, certainly they can hide the towers among the Sequoias.
• When it comes to a comprehensive branding experience, no one holds a candle to Disney.

When I visit large markets anymore, I don’t drool and say “We should totally do this in Erie,” but I look for aspects of excellence that are scalable and sell-able and wonder, “What if?”