GreenStone Media

» see greenstonemedia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

American talk radio in 2006 was a male format in a way that had stopped being remarked upon. The hosts were men, the station owners were men, and the advertisers kept saying that women aged 25 to 54 were the demographic they most wanted and could not buy. GreenStone Media was built on the gap between those two sentences.

Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem had founded the Women's Media Center in 2004 with the writer Robin Morgan, and GreenStone was spun off from it as a for-profit radio network with programming made by women for women. Susan Ness, a former FCC commissioner, ran it as chief executive. The public launch was a party at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York on 12 September 2006, with the kind of guest list those three names produce.

Eleven months later it was done. The network told its affiliates it would stop operating effective 17 August 2007, with the announcement going out around 8 August. It had raised something near six million dollars; people inside it later said the plan needed twenty million. The first-year target of twenty-five affiliates had produced eleven, mostly in mid-size and smaller markets, with one FM signal in Greenville, South Carolina. Ness described the problem as a turbulent marketplace, which is the polite version.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the lineup ~

The schedule on the front page listed five shows. The Radio Ritas in the morning, The Lisa Birnbach Show, Rolonda with Rolonda Watts, Women Aloud, and The World According to Giles and Moriarty. The tagline across the top was "Talk the way women want," and underneath it the site offered online radio and podcasts for anyone whose local station had not picked up the feed, which in most of the country was everyone.

This is a format with no equivalent where I grew up. Turkish radio in 2006 was music and traffic reports, and the thing GreenStone was trying to break into, four hours a day of one person talking to a national audience about the news, did not exist here as a commercial product to be gendered in the first place. The failure described in American coverage as an industry problem reads from outside as a question about what a country does with its afternoons.

~ the site that did not notice ~

greenstonemedia.com was captured four days before the end, on 13 August 2007, and again on 6 October 2007, seven weeks after. The two pages are the same page. Same five shows listed, same invitation to be part of the conversation going on now, same Flash menu, same Google AdSense slot in the corner still earning fractions of a cent for a network that had stopped broadcasting. Nobody went in and wrote a goodbye, because the money ran out before the person whose job that was.

The domain belongs to a web design agency now, one that publishes posts about when to update your company logo. The only trace of the radio network left on it is in the Internet Archive, where a header image from 19 August 2007, two days after the network went dark, still renders the wordmark in olive and green with a little loop drawn through the O.

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