Ben Manilla interviews the Founder of News Blimps, Rich Barna.

Where did the idea of News Blimps come from?

As Program Director of WHCN FM in Hartford, and before that working at WBCN in Boston, I realized that the news at the hour or half hour would cause our audience to evaporate somewhat.  They just didn't want to hear news. They wanted to hear music.  They'd wander down the dial to whatever station wasn't doing news. That then turned into an arms race of stations moving their news slots earlier and earlier, so they could get it out of the way and capture the audience that was available on the hour when they were migrating away from other stations. I said, "This was a lose - lose, dumb way of doing things. Why don't we just make the news more fun, make it more listenable, make it better?"

Another consideration was that daily news, or in the case of today's cable networks, minute by minute news, is essentially about the latest developments. It's not about  real issues in depth.  So if we could step back a bit and find a perspective somewhere between news, and what was then called public affairs, which was in depth discussion of issues, we could both entertain the audience, but also, educate them a little.

That was the motivation. The method, and the whole News Blimp formula came from two places. First was WBCN and the progressive rock radio format at that time, which was based on devising beautiful sound collages. The on air sound flowed from music to speech, to comedy, to whatever you had. It was a semi-meaningful collage which was fun to do, but didn't really convey information in a solid way.

The other half of the process came from my wife's scientific work. Eileen has a PhD in Psychology.  One of the principles I picked up from hanging out with her and her colleagues, was the concept of habituation.  To explain: if I snap my fingers... the first time I do it, you say, "Whoa, what's that?" but then if I keep snapping, it fades into the background. That's the effect you get from someone talking. It's interesting when you first hear them, but then it goes on and on and your brain habituates – you lose interest. The News Blimps would put a new bit of audio stimulus in front of the audience every 2 seconds or 20 seconds. Mixing it up to prevent them from habituating to the content so they would keep listening. That was the basic idea. Trying to not lose your audience when the news came on.

What about the idea that the FCC had requirements for news and public affairs?

Radio stations got their license to use a segment of the airways, which was a scarce resource owned by the public. So what do you do in return, other than use it responsibly? One of the requirements actually specified was that stations broadcast a percentage of news or percentage of public affairs and public service programming. The radio industry took that very seriously. Although they might hide the public affairs at 3:00 AM, or do their public service on Sunday morning at 5:00 AM. Then you got back to: “how do you not lose your audience, listening to a music station when the news comes on?” That's why the News Blimp concept was so powerful. "Let's not just hold our nose and do the news, let's try to make it as great as we possibly can." And that’s what we did

Who thought of calling it a blimp?

I probably have to blame my co-founder partner, Mitch Kapor.  The idea of a traffic helicopter was as easy to understand as a News Blimp.

So it wasn't a traffic helicopter, it was a News Blimp?

Yeah. It was stupid, or funnier, hip, or whatever you want to call it. I think it was a reasonable concept and reasonable name for what we were doing.

Tell me about Mitch.

I met Mitch when I took over as Program Director of WHCN.  Similar to the WBCN model, they had hired their staff from the local college radio stations. Mitch had graduated from Yale and was working as both a disc jockey and the News Director at WHCN.  Early on I realized this guy was extremely articulate. Exceptionally smart.  When he would type a news story on a typewriter, which was the way things were written back then, it would come out perfect the first draft. There was no white out, or erasing, or second draft necessary. His mind was incredibly clear. Together, when we came up with the idea of the News Blimp and tried it out a little bit on WHCN, we started getting inquiries from other stations asking, "Hey, we heard this funny news thing you do, can we get it?" That gave us the idea that we could start a business that could grow from one station to many more.

Do you think Mitch and you had a clear concept of the future here?  That this could actually grow into something?

Oh, absolutely. We maxed out our credit cards, and in my case, used my unemployment insurance to fund it. Just like any startup business these days.  But this was back pre-startups, so we didn't have the idea of using other people's money.  We used our own.

Tell me about that.  Tell me about making the decision to start a business.

Given the great audience reaction to the Blimps and the inquiries from other stations, we thought, "Hey, great time to start this new business!”   WHCN received excellent ratings in late 1971.  It grew to #1 in our target 18-24 year old demographic.  So I had accomplished what I was hired to do there.  We had also completed the beta prototyping of the Blimps and through trial and error refined a workable format. We had purchased a studio full of equipment, and we were ready to go!

Do you have any idea what the date would have been, when was this?

January of 1972.  I remember vividly because that's when I was I married the lovely Eileen.  My wife married an unemployed entrepreneur.

When did Mitch exit?

Very shortly after it began, maybe only three or four months.  We were doing quite well.  We had built studios in the above ground basement of my house in Storrs where Eileen was getting her PhD and we had this spacious basement.  I think we had maybe just one studio, but it had three or four Revox (reel to reel tape) machines.  I'd made carpeted stands for them.  It was all very homemade, because it was done with very little money.  Mitch had always been interested in transcendental meditation, very seriously, such that twice a day, everything had to stop.  Everything had to be totally silent for 20 minutes while Mitch meditated.  Then a few months after we started, he said, "Hey, I really want to do the meditation thing seriously.  I'm going to go to India to study with the Maharishi”.  That was the head of the transcendental meditation movement, and he said, "I just don't want to do this anymore. I'll see you," and off he went.

Have you stayed in touch with him?

The rest of the story is fun.  When Mitch came back from India he stayed with us in Storrs, did his laundry, got cleaned up a bit and then left, and we did lose track of him for a little while.  At few years later I was going to Harvard Business School --  walking across the campus, and coming the other way was Mitch.  I said, "Hey, Mitch, how are you doing?"  He said, "Well, I am in a new field now. I'm writing computer code, and I have a few ideas."  He took me to his apartment off Harvard Square, which had a mattress and a very early, pre-Apple, pre-PC, computer.

I found him again the next year, it was another, "Hey Mitch, how you doing?" He said, "Oh, you won't believe it," he says, "I wrote a great program.  Someone bought it from me.  I'm a millionaire." "Really, that's wonderful!"  His program was part of  VisiCalc -- the first computer spreadsheet.  He said, "I have some other new ideas," and so stupid me, I didn't say, "Hey, you want to be partners again?"  His new idea was Lotus 1-2-3 -- the first spreadsheet for PCs.  Lotus was the fastest growing company in America at one point, and he sold it successfully.  He was one of the founders of the News Blimps and Progressive Radio Network, but it was his clarity of thinking and his brilliance, obviously, that enabled him to invent the new language of spreadsheets that the business world uses today.

What took you from Storrs to The Bronx?

I was born in The Bronx, so it was a round trip.  My father had gotten ill and suggested that I help him while he had an operation scheduled, so I said, "Hey, I'll take that one better. I'll move the radio operation to New York."  Eileen was done with her degree. My Dad had a big factory building and we could fit Progressive Network into a tiny corner of it.  I could manage both businesses at once.  My father, then unfortunately, passed away soon thereafter.  So there we were in The Bronx.

What did he think of your having the studio there?

I imagine he was amused at best, but obviously it was part of getting me to help with the management of the lighting company we were running, and it was hidden, and it was a tiny bit of the square footage.

For someone who was never there, how big was the factory and how small was the studio, and then where was the studio within the factory?

We were in the South Bronx during the worst years of the South Bronx, because the lighting company had been started in the South Bronx years earlier and moved from bigger to bigger quarters as the company had grown.  The building was a block square Con Ed substation that had been taken out of service and changed into a manufacturing building.  The actual factory was about 30,000 square feet, and the studio was, by necessity, totally hidden within it. It was 30 feet by 20 feet, so 600 square feet, and had no windows behind a wall.

On the weekends, the premises were regularly burglarized because of the high crime rates in the South Bronx.  So we piled up stacks of corrugated boxes in front of the studio door, so it just looked like a stack of boxes against a wall. No one would ever guess that behind those boxes, there were thousands of dollars of recording equipment, thousands of records, and all the stuff that we needed for our operation.

You said at the height, there were probably 400 affiliate radio stations. Ultimately, when did you pull the plug on the Blimp?

Well, let me describe the growth and how we got to 400 stations.

We decided that we could use the same news story for different radio formats, because at a certain point we maxed out on the number of rock or progressive rock stations that were willing to buy The Blimp. There just weren't stations that were able to afford the program in markets smaller than #100.

What do you mean by progressive rock?  What does that mean…  Progressive rock station?

Progressive Rock was playing album cuts, instead of top 40 pop rock.  It was a freer format where you could play hundreds, if not thousands of songs, be it folk rock, jazz rock, or even outside of rock into jazz, folk, and blues.  Progressive Rock varied by how tight the programming restrictions were, and over time they got tighter and tighter.  So starting from WBCN in Boston or KSAN in San Francisco, which had record libraries with thousands of choices for the disc jockeys.  Over time, the pressures of corporate profitability resulted in fewer and fewer songs being allowed on the air in efforts to maximize ratings.

We found  we could use the same story, the same actuality (interview), the same announcing, and just put different music in it, so we could appeal in a single market to a country station, to an urban / black station, to a Top 40 station, and to a progressive rock station.  If we got really lucky we could get four stations in one market, which is the way we got to several hundred stations rather than just the small number of progressive rock stations that we started with.

Wow. That was smart.

We would get a country station programmer asking us, "Gee, that's really cool.  Can I get the Blimps, but could you use country music?"  After enough of those requests we realized the market was speaking.

But you had to find somebody who knows country music...

We brought in at that point, producers who had different musical specialties.  The thing to explain is that pre-internet, the Blimp producer had to have an encyclopedic knowledge of song lyrics. So if you said, "I need a song about walking to school, or I need a song about voting in an election," your brain had to come up with several songs containing relevant lyrics.   You could ask the other people in the office.  But you couldn't put a query in Google and get 30 songs about walking to school.  That was the genius required of the producers.  Then, of course, by musical specialty.

So you grew to several hundred stations by multi-formatting what you were doing already.  How did it peak?

What happened was the requirements for news and public affairs programming were removed in the 90’s because of the Clinton Administration’s deregulation of the broadcast industry.  The effect was that the stations no longer were required to do news, so they were not that excited about buying outside news services like The Blimp.  We migrated at that point, or pivoted, using today's words, into straight comedy.  We developed new shows on audio and music.  But the main one was straight comedy, which was very successful.  That was fun, but as to how it all ended? It was a personal decision.  The lighting company was growing and growing, and I chose to concentrate on the lighting company.  We sold the Progressive Radio Network to a local New York buyer.  They continued operating it for a few years.

There was no internet.  No 24 hour news cycle.  How did you find the stories for The News Blimps?

We had subscriptions to a wide variety of newspapers and magazines. We would clip out stories that we thought were interesting to develop into Blimps.  Because we had a weekly service, our thinking had to be very similar to Time or Newsweek Magazine. We had to do stories that wouldn't get superseded by the events between the time that we produced them and the time that they were aired, which could be four, five, even seven days later. Having selected those stories, we then called, on the phone, the people involved with them, including dignitaries, celebrities, whoever it may be, and interviewed them to get their voices to use in the production.

The current concept of fake news might lead one to ask, "How accurate is journalism?"  Among all the major national newspapers and magazines we found that the most accurate was the Christian Science Monitor. We would call the people cited in every news story and sometimes they would say, "I never said that. Where did you get that?"  Our first person interviews would often uncover inaccuracies. The National Enquirer, of course, would be at a 50% accuracy level.  But some major national news sources were not always 100%.  We always contacted the source of the story directly.