Subscribe to feedThe Catholic Channel’s Good Move: Cross Signals
Susan forwarded a short announcement she received from the host of Cross Signals, Michael McNamara. The show is produced out of KBVM in Portland, OR.
The show came to my attention over a year ago. Michael sent me a few shows on CD and I thought they were great. He has interesting guests, has an easy and fun interview style, and the show is just well produced. The target audience is young adults (ie. unmarrieds). There is nothing else like it on Catholic radio. In case you cannot tell, I think the show is great. I pitched the show to our local Catholic Station but they were not interested in even listening to it. It may have been since it was not produced by EWTN, but that is pure conjecture.
The fact that The Catholic Channel has picked up this show is very good news. First, it appears they have abandoned the notion of an all live call-in talk format where “the callers are the stars”. Cross Signals, while a bit difficult to catagorize, has more of a magazine format. Interviews, news, music, and even some sketch comedy.
Second, it may be that as the deadline for broadcast approaches (it must be in the next couple of days, the Sirius website does not yet list them on their channel guide) the folks at the Catholic Channel have realized that building a brand new 12 or 24 hours of programming is a daunting task and probably was impossible given the time contraints. (I don’t know if they are going to use a 2×12hr format where the 12 hrs of programming is repeated or not). The press release announcing the Catholic Channel was issued by the Archdiocese of New York on May 10, 2006 and the announcement about Cross Signals being added to the line-up reached me on September 21st. This means that there has been a total of about four and a half months between announcing and launching. This pressure has resulted in at least this one good call. Pressure can accomplish a lot.
The last reason this is good news, whoever is doing the programming has good taste (simply because their taste coincides with mine 
I do not have access to Sirius Satellite Radio to know how it is being promoted, though I did hear from blog reader and Sirius listener that they were disappointed that in a promo running on Sirius at the time Catholicism was spoken of as a “lifestyle”.
If there are any Sirius Satellite Radio listeners out there, please drop us a line when the Channel goes live. I’m hoping the Catholic Channel is offered on Sirius’ new internet streaming service. If it is, I’ll plop down the $12.95 for a month and give the Channel a good listen. Donations, of course, will be gladly accepted!
September 27th, 2006 at 11:10 am
Press releases all stated that the site would start Sept 26. I tuned in but they were playing classical music all day. It seems that there was not enough time to put this together. The Archdiocese of New York doesn’t even have a website for the program. The priest who is in charge mentioned going to some training sessions on his blog a few weeks ago but this week’s entry has no mention of the station. One would think that there would be lots of entries. Most of the announced programming seems to have been put together earlier this month. A lot of the programming looks good and interesting. I hope they can get their act together.
I purchased Sirius for a long trip and have found that I really enjoy it. The EWTN radio network also has a lot of good programs. I find the programs more engaging then a lot of the EWTN TV offerings. Seems like it is hard for EWTN TV to bring in new blood and offer more dynamic programming. Maybe it has funding constraints. We need to keep Catholic Radio and TV going and existing entities need to find ways to make more room for younger generations and not rely only on a few tried and true from the same generation.