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Radio Will Eat Itself
By Aaron Smith
If you crunch the numbers, it makes sense.
You could pick 3-5 people to run your radio station. It will cost you somewhere around $35-50 thousand dollars for just one year of work from these jokers. These individuals can create a good living for you with positive response from people who'll listen to your station for them as much as for the content of your format. They can make you sound better than the competition. But with a slip of a lip, you could get in trouble. Plus there will be plenty of sick days, fragile egos, hangovers, and arrests. And you can rest assured they'll be hitting you up for a raise repeatedly (or should that be incessantly?) until they get fed up with your empty promises and quit with no notice! Or you get tired of their immaturity and decide to fire the overgrown rugrats!
Then there's the box that a slick salesman on the phone told you about that could replace them!
Maybe it was the Phantom. It more likely was an Arrakis Digilink. Either way for around $6,000 you can buy this remarkable device that can run your radio station 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365.25 days a year! Just pick your satellite network (if you don't have the receiver already, don’t worry! They'll make a barter deal with you!), load the thing with spots and liners, and get your engineer to wire up the bad boy to read the closures, and you're set! Think of all the money you'll save! Just keep a good steady current coming to it and until lightning takes it out, or a disk dies, or you change formats, or until that radio monolith with more money than Alan Greenspan buys this turkey from you, you'll never have to worry about a temperamental air personality telling you what you can do with your job ever again! Automation means never having to wait and see if a jock will show up for his shift!
But are you pondering what I'm pondering? If the only real people in radio are at some satellite hub for a jillion stations, who's going to take their place when they're gone?
In days of old, young lions like Larry King, Chuck Owens, Howard Sterns, Don Imus, etc., etc., started in small radio stations. They, and others like them, bode their time sweeping floors, dubbing carts and pumping jocks for all the radio knowledge they could get, as they waited for their big break: "hey kid, so & so's sick/quit/whatever: can you run a board?" And so a radio career, the odyssey that can last for decades begins! After that first job, there's another station that hires them. Then it's onward and upward to bigger markets, more wattage, and higher ratings! Perhaps the road will lead to the big cities like New York, Chicago, Miami, or even LA! Now everybody knows your name! And if it's not in playing music, then it's in talk radio, or sportscasting. From there, you could even wind up on TV! Oh it's happened boys and girls! It's happened many times as a matter of fact!
But back to the question: how's the odyssey to begin if there's no jobs in small market radio? I heard Larry King himself advise a caller who wanted to get in radio to go to Texas (where there were more small radio stations than people) and get a job there. But what if RoboJock has got the gig? Where are these budding jocks going to cut their teeth, and develop their voices? Robo don't get sick: there'll be no filling in! Robo's morning show won't need any Sidekicks or Danger Boys/Girls. And forget about the remote from Krooked Kelly's Used Cars, because Robo can't do remotes (he's stuck in the rack, silly!). From the "user end" it's what I call "radio untouched by human hands".
Where will the new talent come from without real people in small market radio?
Will they come from College Radio? You can get good radio people from college. But are you getting a person who actually took some thought in getting a radio show together, and has an interest in a radio career? Or are you instead getting a person who just thought it would be cool to get on the radio and play Smashing Pumpkins all the time (FORMAT? We don’t need no stinkin' format!). Can they relate to a broad audience, or can he just kill a good two minutes talking about what happened in a D&D game last Friday? Will your audience think they're funny, or will they have to know everything about Babylon 5 to get their jokes? Can they tell the weather, or do they just read it like it comes over the wire? Good questions to ask!
You could also pose the same questions to graduates of broadcasting school. Of course a good broadcasting school will give students experience with various equipment and technique. But, will that Broadcast school grad make your listeners slit their wrists because they can't see him/her at the Krooked Kellys' remote, or will they slit their wrists to escape him? You'll get a great board operator/production whiz from broadcasting school and perhaps a halfway decent fixer-upper bundled with them! For that matter college turns out good board operators too. But to win, you need someone who's got the personality that clicks with the audience. Personality is what separates the "board ops" from the host of the show. And there's still no substitute to a track record with a real live show as far as "clicking" is concerned! After all, you can't teach personality: you have to develop it.
Then again there are the "outsiders". You know, the people who have no background in radio but are still becoming radio superstars. You know them well by now: G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, Dr. Laura, and Dave Ramsey with his Money Game . While talk radio is still going strong, folks like these will always have a chance of making it big in radio. It's almost as if the less of a radio pro you are, the better chance you have of being big!
So there's my rant about "radio untouched by human hands". The numbers may crunch, but is that crunching sound just radio eating itself?
What do you think? Tell me!
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