BlogTalk Radio’s Alan Levy featured at MediaBistro

Blog Talk Radio founder and entrepreneur Alan Levy has been featured in yet another profile, this time at Media Bistro. Last March, he was the cover story at the vaunted TALKERS Magazine, the talk radio industry “bible”. He subsequently joined us to talk about it on my radio program.

His brainchild — Blog Talk Radio –is a groundbreaking communications platform that’s carving a path for citizen journalists and broadcasters.

I’ve been with BTR since April 2007.  It was an easy transition for me from terrestrial radio to the Internet, as the shows I had been hosting on WDBO Orlando and WWBC Cocoa FL, were also streamed on the net, and we brought an audience of listeners with us to the new format, or “platform”.

HOT AIR‘s Ed Morrissey, who was then still writing at his own blog “Captain’s Quarters”, was hired to manage BTR’s conservative talk shows and host his own show. Shortly after I interviewed him on my drive time WWBC radio show about the move, he assisted me in establishing my own show at BTR.  (Ed has since left to go to HOT AIR where he writes commentary and hosts his daily online radio show.)

I like this format because it gives me all the flexibility I need to take the show wherever I am.  For example, we did a show almost every night I was on the road with the Tea Party Express III national tour.  With show producer Dave Logan helping out on the computer switchboard, I was able to call in and host the show as we traveled from Searchlight NV to Washington DC.

The entire feature on Alan Levy can be read here.  What follows is an excerpt:

What is on the horizon for you and for BlogTalkRadio?
We are really excited about the many cool features we will be rolling out in the next few months. For example, in the fall we launched a platform called Cinch, which is like an audio Twitter, but you can add photo and text to it. A Cinch can be created using our iPhone app or any mobile phone.

Later this month, we are rolling out a fully integrated transcription service. For a fee, our hosts will be able to record a show, have it transcribed and export the file to a PDF or into a blog post. Lastly, we are rolling out a high-fidelity digital service which will record the broadcasts in digital quality sound. Again, this feature will be a premium service.

We will also soon be offering an automated transcription service to our hosts. For a fee, hosts can elect to have their radio shows fully transcribed complete with timed stamping capabilities, exporting files to PDF, XML and other formats. The text-based transcripts will strengthen SEO efforts and provide our community with a tool to easily create text-based content.

What about for you personally?
I haven’t really focused on what’s next, but I am leaning toward teaching entrepreneurial studies at the graduate level. I feel that I can share some of my real life experiences with students as they head out into the “real world” and embark on their careers in a very difficult economic environment.

Internet trends come and go. Are you concerned at all about the future of podcasting or of it being displaced by the next new thing?
The pace of change and innovation is incredible. New applications come and go, and the public’s attention span is minute. As I said earlier, we are in the early stages of a self-publishing revolution. Also, every major brand and company has a Facebook and Twitter profile. Everyone is seeking ways to engage their audience in an interactive way, and a platform like BlogTalkRadio is one of most interactive on the Web today. The phone network is the backbone of our platform, and the use of mobile phones to both create and consume content is only getting bigger.

It seems like BlogTalkRadio would be a major disrupter to broadcast radio. Have any of the big dogs approached you about buying you out?
I can’t comment on whether or not we have been approached by large platforms, but no doubt we have developed a model which is worlds apart from terrestrial radio. The problem traditional talk radio platforms have is that they have very high content costs, production costs, labor costs, and compliance costs. At the same time, their audiences are declining spending much more time online and on their mobile phones.

The terrestrial radio companies have completely ignored social media and the behaviors of today’s audiences. There are 500 million people logging into Facebook each month, do you think it makes sense to ensure that radio content is integrated with this platform? I look forward to working with the terrestrial radio space in helping them figure this out.