Radio communication has come a long way since World War I, when the tactic of sending infantry forward shielded by an artillery barrage was confounded by the inability of the advancing infantry to tell the distant cannoneers exactly where they were.
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But apps keep coming and bragging rights are never long settled. HearHere Radio, a Chicago-based start-up, will grant Radio.com its Bears game; but let’s say you’re back home in Hinsdale, it’s Monday morning, and you’re facing the long drive to work in the Loop. Let’s also say HearHere’s Rivet News Radio app works the way it’s supposed to. It’s divided greater Chicago (from the Loop 40 miles out in all directions) into five zones and, thanks to GIS, it knows you’re starting out in the zone it calls “west suburbs.” It gives you the state of the expressways through your zone but spares you all the others, and when your car passes into the “Chicago” zone, its traffic report changes accordingly. Rivet is leading you—in sort of the way field radios let the artillery lead the ground troops pushing west through France.
As I write, the date isn’t certain yet, but HearHere wants the Rivet app available at the iTunes Store in early December. Apps for other devices will follow.
So Rivet slices and dices: the region’s traffic into zones; its own programming into categories (government and politics, business, sports, entertainment, technology and science, lifestyle) that you can program your smartphone or Internet-enabled dashboard to receive or ignore. Most of these stories will be generated by the Rivet newsroom; some will be curated (with NPR stories in the mix). When a story comes along you don’t care about, you can fast-forward through it. Or you can rewind to hear it again. And you won’t have to wait for Rivet to cycle through to traffic: if you wish, when you turn on Rivet it’ll be the first thing you hear. The journalists in the Rivet newsroom “will be free of the tyranny of the clock,” says Meyerson. “Any story can be as long as it is interesting, with the understanding that listeners who become impatient can fast-forward to the next item.”
This, of course, is what Meyerson calls the tyranny of the clock, afflicting news producers and listeners alike. I reminded Gleason of the ability the Rivet audience will have to fast-forward and rewind to the news it wants.
