THEY SAY YOU BETTER LISTEN TO THE VOICE OF REASON

Cleveland media analyst John Gorman’s Gorman Media Blog is one of the top-rated radio-oriented blogs in the county. Last week, the blog was declared the top-rated radio site in Google page ranks by Blogrank, a web-traffic monitoring service run by e-commerce consultants Invesp.com.

Google ranks the Gorman blog above popular sites like the Infinite Dial and Radio Today. It also ranked at no. 5 on Invesp’s Ultimate Rank, which uses 20 factors to determine popularity, including RSS membership and incoming links. It placed at no. 4 in incoming links and no. 3 in Delicious Bookmarks. Web indexer Technorati ranked it no. 7, and Alexa ranked in no. 9.

“I didn’t expect it,” says Gorman, who was the WMMS program director in the station’s ’70s-’80s glory days. “I never marketed this blog. Initially, it was to reach a few decision makers and primarily radio-industry people. It ended up taking a life of its own. It's [also] calling attention to the problems of an industry I’ve been in for over four decades — nearly my entire life. [Radio] has to be reinvented, remade and remodeled.”

Gorman launched the blog in April 2007. On it, he takes aim at industry issues and documents commercial radio’s ongoing decline. Some posts address insider topics like behind-the-scenes political machinations that affect Internet radio. Others look at general-reader subjects like NFL radio and Radio Shack’s rebranding efforts.

“What I am most pleased about, actually, is that it is reaching people and it’s getting response,” says Gorman. “If you go back and look at what I’ve written over the past few years, most of what I predicted has come true. Unfortunately, a lot of it has been bad for the industry.” — D.X. Ferris