Tag Archives: Radio

A career in radio prepares you for (new career goes here)

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Missouri’s new governor will be sworn in tomorrow and, as part of the transition, about 150 people working at state jobs under the previous administration were terminated. This happens with every four or eight years.

A few days before the state ax fell, I had a routine meeting with the chief public information officer for one of the state departments. Like many in that line of work, he had –I believe– started in radio or spent a number of years in broadcasting. The years of consolidation in that industry had left this person weary from new owners, pay cuts, job elimination… and happy to have a more stable job in state government. Two days later the person is, once again, looking for a job.

It’s only a rumor but I’ve heard many of these communications positions will be filled by attorneys under the new administration. Our new governor was formerly attorney general, but I’m not sure why one would want/need a lawyer in these positions. As I said, that’s just rumor.

All of which reminded me of the dozen years I spent working in local radio. They were more fun than I can describe. Whatever skills I acquired during that time (talking on the radio (??); writing commercials; covering a news story (sort of) seem so… irrelevant now. Okay, it’s a quarter of a century later, so why should this surprise me?

If I had stayed in radio, what would I be doing now? Programming a “cluster” of stations? Managing? (unlikely) And what would those years have prepared me to do?

I have no idea why so many radio people go into public relations or become PIO’s for some association or state agency. I always suspected they were hired for their communications skills. Comfortable in an on-air interview; familiar with writing news releases (?); good voice?

Still a useful skill set. But what else do you need to know how to do in 2009? Blogging? Podcasting? YouTube? Social media? Couldn’t hurt.

I hope everyone that lost their jobs last week finds new ones. And better ones. Free advice every morning from 6:30 a.m. – 8:00 a.m. at the Jefferson City Coffee Zone.

Taking the “paper” out of “newspaper”

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“The American Society of Newspaper Editors is planning to remove “paper” from its name and expand its membership to include editors of online-only news Web sites and journalism educators.” — CyberJournalist.net.

I’ve scratched my head on this one –as it pertains to radio– in numerous posts. What is radio? Gotta have a tower and transmitter? An FCC license? Is an Internet station with 100,000 listeners not “radio,” while a small-town AM station with 10,000 listeners is “radio?”

Please take out your Blue Books and write a 500 page essay on: Defining Radio in the 21st Century. Begin.

“You can’t create larger audiences by trying to create larger audiences”

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The following excerpts are from an interview Mark Ramsey (Hear 2.0) did with Tom Asacker, a marketing and branding adviser and author (A Little Less Conversation: Connecting with Customers in a Noisy World).

One of the larger challenges facing radio?

“It seems that we’ve got a catch-22 on our hands, right?  We need to get out on the street and keep selling in order to keep revenue coming in, so nobody wants to slow down in order to change the way they’re doing things, to really rethink it, because that might take away from sales time.  I mean we’re putting out fires, and nobody wants to step back and say, “Wait a minute.  Is there a better way of doing this?”

“It’s a difficult thing with an industry that’s been around this long, with people that are well entrenched in relationships up and down the chain.  It’s tough to get people to change — to just say, “Put on the brakes, and let’s rethink radio.”  But I think that that’s what needs to be done:  Let’s rethink radio.  Just like Steve Jobs said, “Let me rethink the MP3 player.”  He didn’t say, “Well, we can do the MP3 player and slap this thing on it”; he said, “Stop, and let’s rethink the MP3 player.”

That’s a tough thing to do.  It takes guts.”

Yes, it does. And he offers this rather brilliant (IMO) insight on creating audiences:

“You can’t create larger audiences by trying to create larger audiences. You can only create larger audiences by trying to get deeper with smaller audiences.

Think about how to get deeper and make more relevant, valuable connections with individuals in a culture or a subculture.

Don’t think about audience size.  Think about the depth of the relationship and how important it is and how valuable it is.  The more you do that, the bigger the audience gets.”

That’s probably true of friends as well. Best way to have a lot is to be a good one. You can listen to the entire interview at Hear 2.0.

Media 101

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My recent visit to Central Methodist University included a tour of the campus which wound up in the studios of what was –I believe– the student radio station. I’m not sure when or why the station went off the air but the plan is to bring it back as an internet station.

 

During the few minutes I chatted with a couple of instructors and students about the project, I got the impression the approach will be… traditional, for lack of a better term. By that I mean, they’ll have a control room and studios with the usual assortment of recording and mixing hardware. Instead of pumping it all out to a transmitter and tower… they’ll stream it.

As for programming, they plan to do what we used to call “block programming.” An interview program followed by a news program followed by… Music licensing issues prevent them from programming music.

The way college radio stations have always been programmed. I don’t doubt the students can learn some useful skills and gain some valuable experience doing this but I’m not sure it will prepare them for the future that is already here.

So what would I do if they put me in charge of the program for a semester?

I’d start by dropping the term “radio” and go with “media.” Not “new media,” just media.

I’d assemble production teams made up of a producer and host (and co-host?). These teams would be responsible for one 25 minute program a week. Can be any topic (more on that in a moment)

A Senior Producer and Managing Editor would coordinate these teams (using Basescamp or some similar online collaboration tool) and insure quality standards and deadlines were being met.

All or most of these programs would be produced as live feeds and podcasts. Instead of a “college radio station” (Internet or otherwise), you’d have a portal site (I hate that term) that featured each of the individual programs with a link to that programs blog (where the hosts and producer interact with listener/viewers). Show notes, comments, etc.

The central feature of the portal page would be a video section. It could be a live stream of one of the shows being recorded or some live event on campus. Or just a live webcam from the student center.

Equipment. Each team would have a laptop, a digital camera (video capable) and a small webcam. All shows would be produced on location. No reason to schlep back to a studio jammed with expensive equipment.

I wouldn’t limit this project to just students. I’d open it up to the community as well, but with students producing.

Once these podcasts are up, it’s an easy matter to track which ones produce a following. If nobody downloads, you fix the podcast or replace it. But you aren’t limited to the 24 hours of a real-time station. You can have as many programs as you have people to produce and watch/listen.

So what are the students learning here?

  • How to write, edit and tell a story
  • How to shoot and edit video and share it with the world
  • How to build an online community or tribe
  • How to produce a live webcast
  • How to take and edit photos
  • How about a course in Smart Phone Reporting?

…and so on and so forth. I’m not an educator so there could be lots of things wrong with this approach. I’m pretty sure it would cost a lot less than a more traditional approach while involving many more students (in and out of the communications program). If you have suggestions on this mythical program, please include them in the comments. Or, if you see flaws, post those as well.

PS: I think this might be a powerful recruitment tool, as well.

UPDATE/12.08.08: On a recent edition of NPR’s Morning Edition, Steve Inskeep interviewed journalist Sreenath Sreenivasan who, within an hour of the attacks in Mubai, began hosting a web radio call-in show with other Indian journalists, relaying what they knew. Sreenivasan used a service called Blog TalkRadio:

“BlogTalkRadio is the social radio network that allows users to connect quickly and directly with their audience. Using an ordinary telephone and computer hosts can create free, live, call-in talk shows with unlimited participants that are automatically archived and made available as podcasts. No software download is required. Listeners can subscribe to shows via RSS into iTunes and other feed readers.”

Seth Godin on radio’s future

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Mark Ramsey has posted audio (and partial transcript) of an interview with marketing maven Seth Godin, on the future of radio. This is an update to an earlier interview. These three nuggets sloshed out of my pan:

“So if you’re an advertiser and you have a choice between reaching a ton of people who couldn’t care less, and so you have to talk really fast, yell, and make obscene promises on the radio to get them to show up at your dealership, or reach a smaller group of people about something that they’re very interested in a very connected way, in the long run advertisers are going to come back to the smaller, more tightly knit group.”

“Everything radio has done has been about leveraging a rare piece of spectrum, and the thing we have to acknowledge is that spectrum isn’t rare anymore. So the one asset you built your whole organization on is going away really fast and instead of putting your head in the sand and complaining about that, take advantage of the momentum so that when it does finally disappear, you have something else.”

“Consider the FCC’s ruling recently about the white space spectrum. What white space spectrum is going to mean is that in five years every car sold is going to have an infinite number of radio stations on it. Not 100 or 1,000 but more radio stations than you could listen to in your lifetime, and if that’s true, tell me again why you’re going to win?”

As I ponder these points, I’m listening to the very eclectic music mix on the Coffee Zone iPod. On the way to work, I’ll be live streaming Pandora from the iPhone.

Dan Shelley reveals “secrets” of talk radio

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Back in my radio days I co-hosted a daily, hour long talk show. It was mostly the kind of silliness you find on morning shows but we (Tom Colvin did the show with me) had a good time. And we were never angry.

Most of the talk show stars with which I’m familiar are a) pissed off and b) really, really conservative. Before I stopped listening (many years ago), I often wondered why they were so angry.

My old pal Dan Shelley offers something of a behind-the-scenes look at talk radio as practiced at WTMJ in Milwaukee, where he was news director and program director before taking a job in New York.

“To begin with, talk show hosts such as Charlie Sykes – one of the best in the business – are popular and powerful because they appeal to a segment of the population that feels disenfranchised and even victimized by the media. These people believe the media are predominantly staffed by and consistently reflect the views of social liberals. This view is by now so long-held and deep-rooted, it has evolved into part of virtually every conservative’s DNA.”

“To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners.

“This enemy can be a politician – either a Democratic officeholder or, in rare cases where no Democrat is convenient to blame, it can be a “RINO” (a “Republican In Name Only,” who is deemed not conservative enough). It can be the cold, cruel government bureaucracy. More often than not, however, the enemy is the “mainstream media” – local or national, print or broadcast.”

“Forget any notion, however, that radio talk shows are supposed to be fair, evenhanded discussions featuring a diversity of opinions. The Fairness Doctrine, which required this, was repealed 20 years ago. So talk shows can be, and are, all about the host’s opinions, analyses and general worldview. Programmers learned long ago that benign conversations led by hosts who present all sides of an issue don’t attract large audiences.”

While reading Dan’s article I found myself thinking of talk radio hosts as “professional” wrestlers who get really mad once in the ring. They forget it’s not real and they are entertainers, not athletes or warriors. Of course that wouldn’t work in the WWF. Somebody would get hurt.

If anyone knows of a soft-spoken, optimistic, not-mad-at-anybody, conservative talk show host, gimme a shout. I’d love to hear what that sounds like. And if there are any WTMJ listeners out there, I’d love to know Charlie Sykes’ on-air response –if any– to Dan’s article.

Radio station streaming live video from Palin event

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Hit99fmvideoSarah Palin is holding a rally in Springfield, Missouri, and radio station Hit 99 FM is streaming video live from the event. They could have made it easier to find but deserve props for the effort. I’m having trouble getting audio but perhaps that will change when the event gets underway.

Interesting that this is a music formatted station, not a news/talk’er. David Brazeal is there and might interview someone from the station. We’ll post it here if he does.

PS: This is what we lovingly refer to as “a face for radio.”

9/29/20: Birth of commercial radio

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Thanks to the folks at Wired for reminding us today is the anniversary of the birth of commercial radio.

“In 1922, 30 radio stations were in operation in the United States, and 100,000 consumer radios were sold. Just a year later, 556 stations were on the air and half-a-million receivers were sold. Radio was on its way, and the commercial broadcast model would reign essentially unchallenged for eight decades until the advent of satellite radio and podcasts.”

My dad was a radio guy and so was I for a number of years. I am really glad I didn’t miss it.

If the boat is leaking, learn how to swim

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Had a chat with an acquaintance who now lives and works in another part of the country. He’s a long-time radio news guy and he called to get my advice on how his newsroom can better take advantage of “new media” (which ain’t that new anymore). As he talked about his newsroom and the company he works for (a good one), it became clear there was no clear direction for making the transition from Old Media to New Media. And unlikely to be one. So what can he do?

First, what he cannot do. He probably cannot change (or provide) the larger online strategy his company needs. But he can begin learning the skills he needs to survive. In no particular order:

  • Start blogging (any topic)  This includes reading other blogs
  • Start using an RSS news reader
  • Set up a twitter page (get a grasp of social networking)
  • Get a smart phone and learn how to use it (see above)
  • Keep a small digital (still/video) camera on his person at all times
  • Get a YouTube and flickr account and start using them. (any subject)
  • Begin the process of creating your brand

To an old radio dog, all of this sounds like a lot more work than it really is. But here’s the question I posed to my friend: If your current job went away overnight, what would you do? Try to get a job at another radio station? A newspaper? TV station?

What kind of skills to you think they’re looking for these days? Will it be enough to give them a cassette tape of your best work? Maybe a list of the RTNDA awards you’ve won?

The skills he learned in J-school are important. His many years of “radio” experience are valuable. But it’s a new game, that demands new skills. You got ’em or you don’t.

KBOA 830

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In an earlier post I wondered about some recent move affecting the radio station I worked at many years ago. Our friend Jeff pointed us to a post on a radio message board:   

"Eagle Bluff Enterprises has received FCC permission to move KOTC from Kennett, Missouri to Memphis, Tennessee.  KOTC (830 AM) signed on in July 1947 as KBOA.  KOTC went silent on 6-1-08.  The justification for the STA was "The station has been temporarily turned off pending format changes and equipment repairs".  After the move, KOTC will diplex its 10 KW signal from a tower shared with WHBQ, 560 AM, in Memphis."

When I worked at KBOA the frequency (a daytime clear channel) was 830. When consolidation hit there was a series of call letter/frequency shuffles I was never interested enough to try to sort out.

I think they moved the KBOA calls to a frequency (105.5) licensed to Piggott, Arkansas, but operating in Kennett, MO. The 830 freq was assigned some newer, local (Kennett) calls (KOTC).

The KBOA I knew and loved died long ago. And it was nice to read some kind words about KBOA830.com. Thanks to all.