Getting a Focus on Radio Info

OK. Here's a second idea. This involves radio. Tell me what you think of this one: When we were kids in the late 1940s, my father, mother, and brothers would listen every Sunday afternoon to the Jack Benny program, then to the Fred Allen show. No one was permitted to ask or say anything for fear of talking over the next portion of the show. I was thinking about that ritual a few months ago while driving on the 405 and trying desperately to memorize a 10-digit toll-free number a radio announcer had urged me to call for more information about some product or service.

I couldn't pull off the freeway, and nothing was handy for writing. I could only rely on my memory—a suspect instrument at best as I get older. That incident, however, reminded me how much our lives had changed. We used to listen to the radio and do nothing else. It got our full attention. Now virtually all of us are engaged in doing something else while listening to the radio-driving, gardening, exercising, walking, sewing, reading, or working the Internet.

The idea behind 1-800-FOR-INFO is to capture all key words, phrases, situations, tag lines, distinctive voices, situations, musical themes, and other elements of a typical radio advertisement. These would be isolated, categorized, and then stored in a computer memory cross-referenced to the sponsor's advertising campaign, name, product, prices, availability, telephone numbers, and addresses. All this information would be accessible to telephone operators at the other end of 1-800-FOR-INFO to answer the specific inquiries of callers.

We argue that one of the key aspects of a universal 800 number concept would be that advertisers no longer needed to use inordinate amounts of their 30-second or one-minute spots hammering away at a telephone number, website address, locations, sale dates, and so forth. All the interested listener would need to know was to call 1-800-FOR INFO. If the advertiser were not part of our program—had not paid for us to provide the back-up information to callers—operators would be instructed to say that they had nothing available on that particular commercial.

Although this idea has not yet been implemented, it still strikes me as a good one and still something the public would appreciate and from which advertisers would benefit. Do you agree? Good.

About newspapers

You know that newspapers are now dying—The San Francisco Chronicle has lost 14 percent of its advertising space, The LA Times has fired 85 people from its editorial staff, The NY Times has dropped 700 people this year alone; Knight-Ridder has shrunk by four percent. Network television continues to lose huge portions of its audience to cable, the Internet, video games, and more.

Does this mean that people are no longer interested in knowing what is happening in the world. Probably not. But in my view newspapers need to remember Buckminster Fuller's admonition: "Don't mess with the existing model, make a new one." Newspapers are fussing with what exists, not designing what is needed.

Instead of chronicling the day's events which people learn about through other media, newspapers should be focusing on what progress we are making to solve the nation's and world's big problems: AIDS, Chinese trade imbalances, Iran's nuclear program, social security funding, Gulf Coast repairs, and any other topic. Not what happened in a West Virginia mine, but what changes are being made to prevent a similar accident in the future.

This approach may seem as dull as watching paint dry—because they move glacially—but all of these subjects can be made interesting with great photographs, detailed illustrations, interesting charts, splendid diagrams, clear timelines, constant thermometers of advancement, ten-day, thirty-day six-month moving averages and similar statistical info.

In my view, instead of a newspaper—literally what's NEW; I would like to start publishing something called a progresspaper—literally what's PROGRESSING or CHANGING. Do you think something like that could be of interest to you?

Simplifying Income Taxes

OK. Here is a fifth idea. It is simple, clean, and easy to implement. It involves income taxes. Here is how I expressed the idea in a letter to The LA Times:

[Improving] the tax system begins with a new law that would require all U.S. representatives and senators to prepare and file their own 1040s. The theory is that if they, their staff members, and all GS-15s and up were prohibited from passing this annual agony to a lawyer, a CPA, or tax preparation service; the U.S. tax system would instantly be simplified and clearly understood by everyone.

In the process, it would get better, be subject to less cheating, and make the economy more rational by denying use of tax forms, tax deductions, and tax credits as an off-budget means of social information, economic promotion, and fiscal support.

Nothing has happened since I first wrote that letter, but if you think this would be a good idea, why not ask every candidate for Federal Office to sign a pledge to do his or her own tax filings as a condition of earning your vote? How long would it be before the basic tax system were simplified to the point that all of us could do our own forms?