A curious e-mail hit my inbox this weekend announcing the resurrection of RadioDiscussions.com. Once a mainstay of online discussion about U.S. broadcasting, the site suddenly disappeared in December when its owner, Streamline Media, pulled the plug. Streamline had just purchased RadioDiscussions seven months before declaring it unprofitable.
The new manager is Charles Bosworth (aka "Charlie Profit"), a Canadian radio professional who’s branched out into new media marketing. Bosworth is also the administrator of Your Midwest Media, a message board focused on the central United States.
In the re-introductory e-mail, Bosworth says he has "made some significant improvements in the hardware and software to better handle the load" and the disastrous redesign implemented by Streamline is gone, so the site is cleanly navigable and readable.
On another online forum, Bosworth explained that while he isn’t privy to everything that went down, Streamline’s founder, Eric Rhoads, "feels regret for having taken [RadioDiscussions] down and is hopeful the community will forgive the misstep." Yet Rhoads and his crew say it’s business as usual, save for some planned "premium features" which may or may not help monetize the site, and they’re still hot to pimp its audience metrics to advertisers.
The most precious commodity any online community has is trust: without it, there is no community. Rhoads et al. have squandered that trust; perhaps the best bet is for Streamline to devise an exit strategy, for it will inevitably tire of providing something more akin to a public service than a business proposition.
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