Ken's a good guy and I love his radio station, but most of the problems he outlines seem to be of his own making. It doesn't take that much IT competency to do basic things like maintaining backups and keeping track of when certificates expire. 

There's so much more flexibility that digital offers. Real-life story: this past May, I drove up to Belleville to watch my Amerks wipe out the B-Sens in the first round of the AHL playoffs on a Friday night. Saturday morning, I was enjoying a leisurely drive through Trenton and Cobourg when the phone rang from WDKX back home in Rochester. 

A syndicated show we run on weekends hadn't recorded properly. Could I fix it?

In an analog environment, I'd have been a five-hour drive away from a fix. In the real world of 2022, I parked the car, opened up my laptop, connected it to the hotspot on my phone, logged in remotely to my satellite receiver and my automation system, reprogrammed it to grab the show again, confirmed it was working, and 15 minutes later I was on my way again with everything fixed. 

I could have done that from Cobourg or Copenhagen. 

And as it happens, on this same trip I also fed an Amerks story back to WXXI with much better audio fidelity than it would have had over a phone line in the analog era. In the digital world, I was able to grab a soundbite from the Amerks coach off Zoom, edit the whole piece in about 15 minutes from my hotel room in Belleville, and feed the audio and the copy for the story into the newsroom computer system at midnight all by myself. Back in the analog era, my first job at WBZ was the now-obsolete "tape op," doing the completely mechanical work of bulking carts and taking feeds in from the field and our various networks for seven straight hours every morning. I loved the job but have no nostalgia for its disappearance.