They're putting another Target store in the empty shell that used to be an Orchard Supply Hardware store in the shopping center at the top of our hill. The shopping center has been there since the hill got developed back in the 1950s, but it's changed a lot, and the fate of the empty store has been the subject of much speculation and comment on Nextdoor, the website and app that enables people to post about local news and events and confirm that we are surrounded by some very odd and intolerant people.

When the news came down that Target was coming in, the Nextdoor crowd swiftly moved from posting celebratory notes of the "now I don't have to go to Torrance/San Pedro!" variety to nostalgia. That's expected, since it sometimes seems that the average age of Nextdoor commenters here is in the 80s, and soon enough there were posts remembering when that store was a Vons supermarket, when there was a Buffum's department store there, when there were local restaurants and stores instead of the chains now populating the center. And, predictably, that led to wish lists of what they'd like to see come back. A book store! A record store! A five-and-dime store! A toy store! A local hardware store!

There was a little stir caused at the radio convention in Dallas last week (the "Radio Show," named by someone who clearly doesn't quite grasp the value of SEO) when iHeartRadio CEO Bob Pittman proclaimed that "podcasting is our birthright," "our" referring to the radio ...

Sometimes, you have to tear it down and rebuild from scratch. Or at least build from the ground up. I thought about that in observing how radio is approaching expansion into podcasting and streaming, but it applies to the radio medium itself, too. As I've written way too ...

There are some things on which a business can't skimp. You might have noticed that when you read about one large broadcaster's woes with ransomware that made it very difficult for it to conduct business this week. It's 2019, and no company of any size should be conducting ...

Whatever happened to talk radio that addressed the things about which listeners really care? I'm asking that after thinking about this week's All Access News-Talk-Sports 10 Questions interview with Dan Weissmann, the creator and host of "An Arm and a Leg," a podcast ...

It's sort of a clichÈ in movies when the protagonist has to overcome a lack of encouragement from family and friends to triumph. Practically every biopic follows that pattern: told that they can't do something, they go ahead and ultimately do it to great success. We ...

Does the world need another column pontificating about radio's use of social media? Probably not. But there's one aspect that I don't think stations and individual hosts consider enough, and a friend's question about it earlier this week came at about the same time I was ...

I don't know what to think right now. I mean, okay, I just spent the week at Podcast Movement, and on the surface, not much has changed. There was a good crowd (although I think the nail polish convention that moved into the hotel as we wrapped things up has more ...

Things change. Used to be that talk radio, and radio in general, were a simple matter. There were ways to do the job right, and there were things that were just taken as gospel. You followed the formatics, you included all the elements, you met expectations. Simple. One ...

Thursday morning, the newspaper didn't get delivered. It was 2 pm by the time I realized it hadn't been delivered. I subscribe to the paper edition of the Los Angeles Times not because I want the actual physical paper, but because taking the hard copy was, when we first ...