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By Richard Hamilton, May 21, 2009 12:18 am

I have a confession to make (actually a few overlapping confessions). I occasionally stay up too late of nights. Way too late. And occasionally, I find myself up late enough to watch Last Call with Carson Daly on NBC. (I am among the growing population of those who don’t have cable, and at that time of night it’s Carson or infomercials. I really only miss cable during a few sporting events and when I get a hankering to watch Food Network, but that’s a subject for another post.) To be honest, I have never been particularly enamored with Carson Daly. My first introduction to him was during his underwhelming MTV days. A few years later, I stumbled upon Last Call. The music drew me back. Occasionally. The Roots. Amos Lee. Citizen Cope. The show was still fairly typical late night fare. Recently however, the show has changed it’s format. Now apparently this this change happened over a month ago, but I didn’t notice until last week (see repetition of the word “occasionally” in the opening sentences).

I love the new format! The biggest change is that Carson has left the studio and ventured out into LA.

I don’t know if this format change will help Last Call. The audience potential is still pretty low. Their web presence is pretty weak too, which makes no sense to me. It seems the web would be the perfect second space for a show like Last Call. In fact, a show like Last Call would potentially have much more web traffic than TV viewership. Nevertheless, this format shift is significant.

Here are a few takeaways:

A format change can be good stewardship. I’m sure they would never advertise it, but Last Call’s new format is considerably cheaper. There’s no studio to maintain. No house band to pay. No light bills. I’m sure they would say the change was driven by creativity, but the bottom line benefited. So much of the modern church experience is a production. And that can be expensive. But what if there were no expectations. Could all of the resources (time, money, space, people) be used in more beneficial (dare I say, “efficient”) ways? What shape might church take?

A format change can shape identity. What are you all about? It’s a hard sell for churches to convince people they care about children if all their resources go toward seniors. In the same way, if you claim to care about the world around you, but burn through all of your resources taking care of “your” people, you probably don’t care that much about the world around you. A fresh format gives you a chance to shape what you do around who you are.

A format change will not change everything. Last Call still comes on really late and falls way short on internet distribution. Likewise, revamping church is also not a cure all.

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By Richard Hamilton, December 17, 2008 9:45 am

I was greatly disappointed by the results of the November presidential election, but there seemed to be a couple of silver linings. Obama’s lack of experience and Washington outsider status was supposed to result in open-minded picks for his cabinet. This sort of outside of the box appealed to me even across party lines. If even a small part of changing the way business is done in Washington was realized, I believe that it wold be a change for a better. For a while, the president-elect appeared to be drifting to the center, which would be a much better place than the fringe of the left where he could be found in the US senate.

Illinois politics has been at the center of a firestorm lately with their governor, even though it has been traditionally more corrupt than most states. What strikes me is the cabinet selections; instead of a team of rivals, we are getting just a bunch of people from Illinois. First, the beady-eyed, shifty Rahm Emmanuel was appointed chief of staff. Then Barack appointed as secretary of education another guy from Chicago. And while it sounds from initial reports that he has done some good things, the media outlet I was listening to (NPR) kept talking about how he plays pick up basketball with the president elect. I don’t like it when any media outlet goes in the tank for one party: I refuse to listen to Hannity and hardly ever listen to Limbaugh for this very reason. The more I watch cabinet appointments, the more I see that “change you can believe in” is empty rhetoric that slightly misled me and completely duped many starry-eyed idealists. But what bothers me is that Obama’s background was not thoroughly examined by major media outlets, even though he came from the most corrupt political arena in the country, but they went sprinting to Alaska to check out what had been happening in Wasilla, Alaska with the dangerous Sarah Palin. What the American public needs is transparency, but as long a couple well-constructed, well-delivered sentences sweep people off their feet, our nation will not be stronger.