The first word came in a New Year's Eve tweet, well within the service's 140-character limit: "Need ur help w/ a secret radio experiment, Jan 7th at 4PM. There will be NO mention of this on the radio, more to come."
That was followed Monday by, "Thursday, Twitter secretly takes over LAKE FM. You call it from 4-5pm. Pass along to ur people & make a request."
Lake FM's Twitter account has nearly 600 followers, and the messages to some of them -- which were then retweeted to other Twitter users not following the station -- is a simple, interesting and free way to test social networking as one method to bring listeners to the station.
The experiment, dubbed a "twakeover" or a "lakeover," comes during Mathew Blades' 3 to 7 p.m. show.
"We're not saying anything about it on the air, and we don't intend to," says Blades of the experiment.
"What is success for this?" he asks. "We don't know."
On TV: Jason Alexander is a new spokesmodel for Jenny Craig, joining Valerie Bertinelli and Sara Rue in pushing the weight loss plan.
- "Attack of the Show" airs live from the Consumer Electronics Expo at 6 tonight on G4, available on satellite and digital cable. I wouldn't expect hosts Kevin Perira and Alison Haislip to have any definitive answers on Apple's new tablet.
- DirecTV says it's planning a 3D channel later this year, joining ESPN and Discovery, which have already announced plans for 3D programming.
- In another exclusive for EW.com's Michael Ausiello, ABC has apparently ordered two more episodes of Courteney Cox's "Cougar Town," bringing the first season to 24 episodes.
- Larry King has snared Richard Heene, who hatched the phoney-baloney story that his son was floating over Colorado in a "flying saucer"-shaped balloon, for an interview at 8 p.m. Friday on CNN.
The Stormageddon report: With the first real snow of the new decade coming today, Channel 4 has called retired "Road Warrior" Lisa Manna back into service this afternoon and Friday morning to report on what TV expects to be a traffic mess.
Caitlin Morrall is on vacation, and Emily Vitrano filled in this morning during wall-to-wall coverage.
If the snow continues to fall as predicted, with the "lake enhancement" the weathercasters are all calling for, the drive home this afternoon could be an actual mess.
Today's snow is as good an excuse as any to go into the archives for this video report I did a couple years back.
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
