DAN O’DAY TALKS ABOUT RADIO

Recently I shared with you a snippet of a video shot at RAB 2009 by Broadcast-Future!’s Peter Fuermetz, when he pointed a video camera at me and asked for my honest evaluation of where radio is and where it’s headed.

Peter was kind enough to provide me with the complete video. I’m sure it will make me even less popular with some radio people.

Today’s issue of Radio & Records is its last. Because R&R played an important role in my career, I thought I’d share a few of my personal highlights here.

I was a charter subscriber to R&R, from its very first issue (sent to me as a small market program director). At the time, Billboard had the big record chart, which I always found laughable because its weekly chart was an excellent guide to which records were most popular a month earlier. R&R was fresh, young…and published by radio people.

During its first year of publication, I came to Los Angeles on vacation. Not wanting to miss an issue, I went to R&R’s office — which at the time was in Hollywood. Hollywood Boulevard, I think.

I introduced myself to the receptionist and explained that I was a loyal subscriber who couldn’t bear to miss even one issue, and could I please have a copy?

“Yes, for five dollars,” she said. I paid the five bucks.

Two or three years after R&R began, I started publishing my comedy service, O’LINERS. Just for the heck of it, I sent a complimentary subscription to its managing editor, John Leader. John liked it and asked if he could use some of my lines to fill space as needed. Sounded good to me.

My First R&R Convention

I have only one clear memory of the first R&R convention I attended, in Los Angeles, sometime before 1980. Each format had its own breakout sessions, and I arrived several minutes early for one of them.

The format editor was standing in the doorway. I introduced myself, and during our brief conversation he continually looked around me in the hopes of spotting someone more important to talk to. Because he was an R&R format editor, he thought he was a big shot. I’ve never forgotten that experience, and I’ve always tried not to act that way to others.

About 10 years ago I received a package in the mail. Some guy hoping I would hire him. Or, as he said in his cover letter, “to join the O’LINERS organization.” No one else ever has suggested my operation is organized. I turned to my one employee and said, “So, which of us should we fire to make room for this guy?“

That guy was that former format editor who had been too important to be courteous to me.

Yes, I enjoyed it immensely.

Another, Fateful R&R Convention

In 1983 I attended the R&R convention in New Orleans. As I exited the taxi and made my way toward the hotel entrance, I spied John Leader.

“Hey, John!” I yelled. “When are you guys going to have a regular column just for jocks?”

“Why don’t you write it for us?” he retorted.

Once we’d both returned to L.A. (where by then I was living), John and I met in his office and worked out the arrangements. He gave the column the extraordinarily unimaginative name of “Air Personalities,” and for the next nine years I was a “regular contributing columnist” to (never an employee of) R&R.

An Aside: In my first conversation with R&R’s founder, Bob Wilson, I discovered I’d had an earlier connection to him. He told me he’d been Program Director of KDAY/Los Angeles. I told him that I was 19, I’d won a Polaroid Camera during KDAY’s “Christmas Wish” contest. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “We gave away hundreds of those things.”

I didn’t realize it at the time, and I’ve never before made this public. But I can’t see the harm now:

I didn’t realize that R&R didn’t pay any of its guest columnists, who happily submitted material in exchange for the industry exposure. And as a writer, I believed a writer should be paid for his work. So during that initial meeting with John I told him I wanted to be paid $100 per column, and I wanted two free classified ads per week (one for my comedy service and one for my Whole O Catalogue. And a free subscription. John said, “Fine.”

Almost immediately thereafter, John left R&R and my new contact there was Ken Barnes (now an entertainment report for USA Today). Ken was my editor. To me, he was the perfect editor: He pretty much ran my stuff exactly as I turned it in. Not because he was lazy but because, I believe, he was a good writer and he recognized that my writing didn’t require much hand holding.

The First Column (The Untold Story)

For my first column, I thought I’d do an interview with Don Imus. (This was back when Don was an entertaining disc jockey and not the topical talk show host he later became.) During his exile from New York to Cleveland several years earlier, we’d had a couple of cordial exchanges and he’d sent me a reel of tape so I could feature his program in my “Greatest Shows On Earth” series.

But now I couldn’t reach him. I called his WNBC producer and said I wanted to interview Imus for my first column. “Call us back after it’s been running a few months,” he sniffed.

“Screw you,” I thought.

Who else might be good for my first column? I’d never actually heard his work, but I’d seen a jock on a panel at a Gavin convention (another name from the past), he seemed interesting, and he’d just moved to New York from Washington, D.C.

It won’t be until someone tells him about this posting that Howard Stern learns he actually wasn’t my first choice for my first column and — much worse — that Imus was.

Because I’d never heard his show, it wasn’t a very good interview. But somewhere I still have the thank-you note that Howard sent me: “It’s about time someone did something just for us DJs.”

By this time, R&R had become THE publication for radio programmers. And for jocks — except for the “Opportunities” section, which many PDs ripped out of each issue to prevent their DJs from learning about better jobs elsewhere.

I’ve always found it impressive that not once during my nine years as a contributing columnist did anyone at R&R request or even suggest that I write about people who worked for their reporting stations (the stations whose reports helped comprise R&R’s weekly charts). I never even knew if the person I was writing about worked for a reporting station. I chose the topics, the interview subjects, everything. Never any censorship, no pressure to write about advertisers or industry big shots. Not ever.

That might possibly be because no one at R&R thought much about my little column. At least, they never seemed to notice.

But once when I dropped off my new column — yes, there was a time in the distant pre-email days when I would drive across town and hand in my latest piece — an R&R account executive took me aside. “You didn’t see this from me, but I think you should know,” he said, handing me a computer print-out.

R&R had conducted research to determine which parts of the paper were the most widely read. The most read section was “Street Talk” — the industry gossip page whose first editor had been Scott Shannon. Second most popular? The “Opportunities” section that PDs tried to hide from their jocks. And to the shock of almost everyone at R&R (according to that account exec), the third most read page was my “Air Personalities” column. I’ve never had a chance to brag about that, until now.

I like to think I would have achieved some industry success even if I’d never hooked up with R&R. (After all, about a million years ago I did win a couple of Billboard “Air Personality of the Year” awards, and I did have two successful radio comedy services.) But it was the tremendous R&R exposure that led directly to my conducting my first radio seminar.

After seeing my column every other week for the first 3 years, the PDs of one radio group decided I must be an “expert” and told their employer I was the guy they wanted to come talk to them about radio talent coaching. And the rest is…whatever it is.

When I was a young PD, I loved reading each week’s R&R. It was my link to the limitless radio community that existed outside my tiny market.

I was lucky that John Leader asked me to create that column and that Ken Barnes (and his successors) let me do whatever the heck I wanted with it. R&R was a class act, and I was proud to be associated with them.

On Wednesday I conducted the world premiere of my Twitter teleseminar: How To Use Twitter To Increase Your Radio Stations’ Ratings & Revenue.

I invited the participants to post their uncensored reviews. I suspect more will be added after registrants who couldn’t attend “live” have a chance to listen to the entire 2-hour recording. (A ton of info. Even came with a 29-page Study Guide.)