DAN O’DAY TALKS ABOUT RADIO

That’s what a blogging “expert” friend told me.

If he’s correct, then either you are:

Lost

or

Really, really lonely right now.

If you’re a real radio guy (that term applies to women and men equally), here’s something to entertain and, I hope, inspire you.

It won’t be here on Monday, though.

(Sorry, it’s gone now. Maybe next weekend there’ll be another surprise gift.)

There are some things they don’t prepare you for in radio school.

I traveled from Los Angeles to a tiny town in Virginia for my first radio job.

My first day on the air was a Saturday.

The jock before me split as soon as I cracked the mic, and I was alone in the building.

The first hour went pretty well. Didn’t “wow” any records, no noticeable dead air.

And then, from inside the studio, I began to hear a competing radio station.

I’m not talking about some annoying RF interference. I mean another radio station was blaring from a speaker in the on-air studio.

You see, in the U.S. we had something called the Emergency Broadcast System. Within each county, one station was designated the EBS station. In case of emergency, everyone was supposed to tune to that one station while the others suspended their regular programming.

Actually, it was kind of cool. We had a sealed envelope with the secret authorization password and everything. (Just like in FAIL-SAFE.) It was begun during the Cold War, and fortunately it never needed to be employed.

Our studio (and I guess all stations’ studios) was equipped with an EBS monitor. I was hearing our local EBS station through the monitor.

Four things you need to know about that EBS monitor:

1. It had no “off” switch.

2. It had no volume control.

3. It was hard-wired into the circuitry.

And most importantly:

4. It did not mute when I opened the studio microphone.

So for the rest of my show, every time I cracked the mic to read a live commercial, spot tag, PSA, news, etc….My audience heard a tinny version of the “big” station 15 miles away, through the EBS speaker and into my microphone.

A less than glorious start to my career.

As I write this, suddenly I’m visited by the long-buried memory of returning to my new apartment in that tiny town, filled with despair and thinking, “I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ll never be able to do this.”

But tomorrow was going to be another working day, so I tried to get some rest.

I can’t wait to see what Randy Michaels does with the Tribune Company’s broadcast properties.

Randy spoke twice at my PD Grad School. The second time was in 2003.

As the architect behind Clear Channel’s path to world dominance (only to be kicked out, leaving the company in the hands of people who, uh, had a different vision of what radio can do), Randy was challenged by an attendee:

“You’ve ruined local radio!”

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING AUDIO CONTAINS BAD LANGUAGE. (Really.)

Randy enlisted me to help with his response. I never even suspected he had lain a trap for me.

Program Directors:

Don’t hotline your jocks.

“Hotlining,” of course, consists of hearing the air personality make a mistake and immediately calling him on the phone during his airshift to scream at him.

Don’t do it.

It’s a sure-fire way to ruin the rest of the jock’s show.

It’s a power trip.

The embedded message in a hotline call is, “I can hotline YOU, but YOU can’t hotline ME. I’m the boss!”

Have you ever been hotlined?

What was your immediate response as soon as you saw that line flashing?

I know what it was. Whether uttered aloud or thought silently, your response consisted of two words:

“Oh, ….”

But…

You’re a dedicated program director. You work long and hard, trying to perfect your product and build your audience…and then some idiot disc jockey screws it all up by playing a record out of rotation or reading the wrong liner card.

You go nuts. How hard can it be to follow a music clock when the computer has done all the work for you?

You’re furious. You want to kill the guy.

You know what? It goes with territory. That’s part of the frustration of being a program director. That’s why you get the private office and the business cards and maybe even your own parking space.

As Super Chicken was fond of reminding Fred, “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.”

If you want to motivate your staff to its peak performance, you wait until after the jock has finished his air shift and after you’ve calmed down.

By that time, you might decide it really isn’t worth talking about.

If you decide it is worth discussing, you pick a time, place and manner which enable you to motivate the jock to perform better, rather than simply to let off steam and ruin the rest of his show.

P.S. If a consultant ever hotlines a jock, the consultant should be fired.