Forumosa.com on ICRT!

We’ve been invited to join Rick Monday for one morning on ICRT’s Morning Call show. A few of your favorite Forumosa moderators will be visiting ICRT’s studios and will chew the fat with Rick.

This is a great opportunity for our website to ask ICRT what they’ve been doing and what, if anything, can be changed.

Please suggest some questions and issues that we could ask ICRT when we do go on air – tentatively slated for Monday, 22 Sept (watch this space, becuase we need to confirm that date)

I don’t think that Rick Monday is the person to be asked about the operations of the station. I don’t think he is in a postion to know and even so, I doubt he would do anything but be vague and toe the line.
My assumption is that Rick will want the Forumosa guys (how come no one asked me?) to explain things about Forumosa, not have the Forumosa guys (how come no one asked me?) grilll the DJ.
When did Forumosa start? Funding? Members? Banning policy? etc.

But if they were to allow you to interview the interviewer, I’d ask:

  1. Many posts on Forumosa say that the songs that you play are awful. Who decides what is played and why? Why don’t you play some Chinese songs?

  2. Is the segment “Comedy for Laughing” supposed to be funny?

  3. How do you conduct your market research? Several of the DJs have come under intense criticism from Forumosa posters as being annoying and overly talkative. How do you respond?

  4. A number of posters have complained that some media outlets in Taiwan are hobbled by the poor management of its Taiwanese owners. Do you think that ICRT would be better off without having locals pull the strings and turning over all programming and management to foreigners?

  5. Do you feel that dumbing down the English by the DJs and news team endears listeners?

[quote=“tmwc”]And do you think this is smart?

I don’t talk about forumosa with my students because I don’t want them all turning up here to practise their English.[/quote]

But if there were suddenly ten times as many people posting, think of all the ad revenues that would bring. I’m sure the moderators will enjoy a bit of extra work, too.

hi folks,

I am sorry about the confusion. Last Saturday, I contacted Rick Monday and suggested that we push the appearance by one week to Monday, 29 September. Historically, more people tend to log onto Forumosa from Monday to Wednesday. I suggested the delay becuase this thread only started in the middle of last week and I was hoping for a bit more feedback (ie questions) before taking it to the airwaves.

Rick also seemed to like the idea of doing it on the 29th, too, to give a bitmore time to build some buzz (please watch out for web banners to his show on Forumosa :slight_smile:)

So, in short, Monday 29 Sept from 8:00 am to 11:00 am is a pretty firm date for the Forumosa moderators to hang out in the ICRT studios with Rick Monday and Bill Thiessen.

Cheers,
g.

Which moderators are going to be on the air? Is Cranky Laowai going to be there freaking out about Hanyu Pinyin? How about Hartzell? Or ironlady – she’d be perfect, could provide some tips about learning English. Who? Who who who?

Exactly. Rick made it clear that he needs to play music, run commercials, have the news/traffic/weather reports, plus field his usual slew of call-ins (China post, The Community Services Center, Club report, Taichung, etc.) that make up his morning slot.

So if you’re planning to tune in while we’re on, you’re going to need to keep your CD/radio player on at work for the whole 3 hours (which would be music Rick’s ears, I would think :slight_smile:)

At first look, this all sounds really busy and the moderators won’t have much time to actually speak on air. But we can expect there to typically be 3 minutes of air time between all the hubbub to say our thing, talk, ask/answer questions. We should be ‘on’ about 3 or 4 times an hour.

I visited the studio earlier this month to see how things work. I can see how 3 minutes is actually a lot of time to say things. We’ll have two moderators on at a time, to speak their minds. In the meantime, there’s a large collection of CDs that form the back wall of the broadcast booth, plus a couple fo seats. Comfortable enough to hangout with the DJ and chew the fat while the music is playing.

What is not so clear is what will exactly be discussed (hence this discussion thread). I agree that it seems a little strange for Forumosa to go on air and interview ICRT. This is why I’ve also been collecting questions that ICRT can ask us.

The idea behind all this is that both Forumosa and Morning Call will hopefully benefit from the experience (ie, more listeners, visitors). Forumosa will get more exposure to English-speakers who have not yet heard of us (hmm, how many people are there in a Subway store at 8:00 am?), and ICRT can get an earful soem of the more outspoken members of the “international community”

The suggestion about helping increase ad revenues for Forumosa is a bit off-base, IMO. I mean, right now we charge a whopping NT$ 0 for ads here, so if we do increase “advertisors”, we will be making approximately NT$ 0 – which looks to me about the same as before.

The goal of increasing visitors to Forumosa is really driven by the notion that the more people who are aware of this website will mean more ideas/resources for all of us who are here (plus the soapbox of Forumosa’s regulars gets that much higher :slight_smile:)

Forumosa is still a non-commercial gig, and will continue to be as far as I am concerned (in short, nothing has change with this)

Questions to ask Rick Monday when on the air:
“What does this button do ?”
“What sort of name is that ? Did you parents mix up the ‘Date’ and ‘Surname’ boxes on your birth certificate ?”
“Is it true you have a criminal record for screwing a goose ?”
“Can I have your autograph, Mr. Stewart ?”
“Where is the toilet ?”
“You have the perfect face for Radio”
“Can you smell burning ?”

[quote=“Big Fluffy Matthew”]Questions to ask Rick Monday when on the air:
“What does this button do ?”
“Is it true you have a criminal record for screwing a goose ?”
“can I have your autograph, Mr. Stewart ?”
“Where is the toilet ?”[/quote]

Here are some more:

“Where are you pants?”
“How many batteries does that thing take?”
“Do you always drink diet tab when you’re on the air?”
“Can you make those cool hip hop scratching sounds with some of the records?”

Suggest on air that people new to Forumosa should lurk around for a while to get a feel for how the dissussions flow here before jumping in on the deep end. Also, to head off the problem of redundant questions please strongly request that newbies wanting to ask a question first run a search to see if it hasn’t already been asked and answered because it probably has.

Good luck to all the moderators at ICRT this morning … give 'em hell! :wink:

Well done to the three moderators who did the ICRT show this morning. I think you gave a fairly decent explanation of what forumusa is. But it would have been much better if DJ Rick Monday had actually used forumosa some so he could have asked better questions and joked around a bit more.

Too bad there wasn’t an opportunity to interview the DJs about ICRT policies.

On a 1-10 scale, I rate your performance as follows:

Ironlady 10
Maoman 7
Alien 5

What happened to Muffin? A no show?

Ironlady was really quite outstanding in presenting intelligent, logical, clear answers to the questions. She did very well in that little exchange with an obviously peeved Jeff Locker as well.

So Gus, did it go like you hoped? The number of users should shoot up a bit. More work to the mods though to keep things in line.

What happened? What did she say? I want details!!! :smiley:

I only caught small parts of the show. But Ironlady was outstanding. Wow! She gave such intelligent, well-reasoned, and clearly-stated answers. Good show, Ironlady.

Maoman also did a good job. Unfortunately, I missed the segments with Alien.

I also agree that the host seemed underinformed about Forumosa. Also, the “comedy” segment about what men over thirty shouldn’t do was lame. In fact, I think I had seen this same list in an e-mail a few weeks ago.

All in all, I am proud of the great job done by the Forumosa mods.

First, very good job by Alien, Ironlady and Maoman.

Second

I came up lame on Sunday evening after a weekend of softball.
I knew I wouldn’t be moving well today when I had to be helped up off the floor of Tower Records last night.

The good news, I could have only hurt the efforts of the other three.
As my mom says, “(The deity of your choice) works in mysterious ways.”

We have 15 more members today - more than usual, and at least one of them is the direct result of the ICRT broadcast. Welcome, lofty! :smiley:

Well done Alien, Maoman, and Ironlady.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get up early enough to catch Alien. When I first tuned in I thought Maoman was the DJ; Dude, nice smooth radio voice.
Why was Jeff Locker in the studio?

Ahhh I can’t believe I missed it. We don’t have a radio here at work…
Did someone happened to record the whole show?? (which i doubt :blush: )

I had an early photo shoot with some local gals trying out for the premier issue of Taiwan Hustler so I caught some of the show on ICRT today.
I was somewhat offended but not surprised that Rick Monday admitted to having never even logged on to see what Forumosa was about. If I were his boss, I’d be all over him for his unprofessionalism and disrespect for the guests. As a journalist, I can’t even imagine what would motivate someone to ask people from some organization to come on the show and then do zero homework in preparation. Absolutely outrageous. He asked about how you register about three separate times, as if this must involve some sort of complicated filling out of forms and higher brain function.
As for the moderators, I thought they all deported themselves well. Maoman and Ironlady were well spoken and seemed like old hands at selling the Forumosa product; Alien, as usual, shot from the hip and quite frankly, was more interesting to listen to since she was not soft-selling the site (not that this is wrong; in the situation the other two did very well and professionally, but Forumosa is supposed to be about opinions and attitudes and Alien had that feeling). I sensed that Alien thought that Rick Monday was a knucklehead after he admitted that he had never even looked at the site before, and I thought, “Damn straight!”
I didn’t realize that Muffin was supposed to be there and didn’t understand his excuse (got hurt playing softball and had to be picked up off the floor of Tower Records?), but I bet he was crestfallen given that the man has had embossed name cards made with “Muffin” on them proclaiming he is (horns please!) A MODERATOR! File that in the “get a life” category, I guess.
All in all pretty good, but I didn’t hear anything controversial, so please someone post a transcript of the Jeff thing. (Jeff is our radio god. Bow down before the Jeff deity!)

I haven’t got a transcript, but basically what happened was that Jeff-u came into the studio and took a mike (without so much as a by-your-leave, mind you) and started in about how Forumosa was pretty much populated by people whining and complaining about Taiwan, and how that was bad for or unfair to Taiwanese. I’m probably not quoting what he said on the air exactly as there was QUITE a lot of off-mike exchange going on (well, as Jeff-u has the enormously irritating habit of interrupting, more of the off-mike exchange was coming from him than from us, as we were listening to wait for an appropriate moment to comment, having been in most cases cut off in our previous turn.) (Sorry, Jeff-u, I can see that you are basically a nice guy, but please take my word and work on this one point, and I think you will see much more effect from what you try to tell people.)

I just commented that while Jeff-u had brought up some valid points, Forumosa is not aimed at a Chinese audience, and even if Chinese use the site (which is not discouraged in any way!) people have to realize that in Western culture, expressing negative feelings is acceptable behavior. Plus, Forumosa functions by helping people find solutions to problems after they have vented their frustrations.

My problem with all this was that a) I did not feel it appropriate that a DJ who had nothing to do with the interview should suddenly insert himself into it, particularly at the end of the segment when there was little time for Forumosa to respond; b) I feel that it was very disrespectful of us as guests at the station to “grill” us in this way – the object was IMHO to present both Forumosa and ICRT in a positive light, to attract people to use the resources of both as they might find desirable; and c) IMHO the choice of topic was motivated basically by “Jeff-u”'s own experiences in having been discussed recently, i.e., he was not merely asking questions as would have been appropriate, but making his own, rather lengthy exposition of what he felt to be the facts on the site. Rick Monday is a very gracious person, very enjoyable and pleasant to chat with, and I imagine that he did not take control of the situation probably for reasons of courtesy – but had it been my show, I might well have done so, in a polite but firm manner.

Interestingly there was considerable discussion off-mike about how Jeff-u did NOT like the comments about him on the site (mostly because he feels that people did not read his books before giving their opinions). IMHO he seems to have a desire to have it both ways – wants to be a public figure/media star and also have his “privacy” (i.e., people aren’t supposed to comment about him on public fora), which ain’t gonna happen. I tried to comfort him by suggesting that similar things had undoubtedly happened to Elvis, but he didn’t seem to appreciate the concept.

The root of the “Forumosa should not criticize Taiwan/Taiwanese customs” thing with Jeff-u seems to be that he believes himself (indeed, he stated himself to be) the only Westerner sufficiently prominent in Taiwan to be able to and to have the duty to serve as a bridge between the cultures. Now, since I have never seen the Hand of God descending to confer this mantle upon him (although, as this is the first time I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Jeff-u, I may have missed this event in the past) I tend to doubt this. :laughing: It’s true that he has exposure, but I do not feel that Forumosa, for example, should be constrained in its content because Jeff-u feels that he has an unfair burden placed on him to “explain” why Westerners would post that they do not like being stared at, or whatever. I suggested that he check out a number of Chinese-language sites, where bitching and whining about astonishingly similar subjects may be found. It may be that Jeff-u does not know enough foreigners who speak Chinese or who have considerable time in Taiwan to realize that there are others equally or not more qualified to “bridge” the cultures. Exposure he may have, but DJ, prophet, elected official, fortune teller and commentator are separate occupational categories last time I looked. I think Jeff-u can do a lot of good and is undoubtedly spreading good, correct information (safe sex, etc.) but may want to consider toning it down a bit on the mission part.

Just my NT$0.66, Jeff-u will probably have an entirely contradictory version, as is his privilege. Really, only the transcript (if such a thing exists) will clear up this particular question.

What Ironlady said is pretty much what I heard. But I heard the word ‘Insult’ somewhere …
I guess someone like Jeffu who speaks perfect Chinese and Taiwanese and everyone adores finds little to complain about… and he can’t understand why some of us would find things here less than perfect.
Maybe he feels more loyal to his Taiwanese audience because they pay his salary, or he considers himself more Taiwanese.
What I found more interesting is the DJ explaining why ICRT doesn’t cater for the foreign community. Basically because we’re not counted in the ratings, and money.