John McDermott @mcdradio

I was driving around this morning and had punched enough buttons that I decided to revisit my old stomping grounds of WOR.

Todd and Joe Bartlett (I think Len is off) were having an interesting conversation about Chris Christie and then it was time for the traffic report.

I immediately punched out, since I had well gotten my services on both the 8s and 1s from New York City’s two excellent news stations (I am a WCBS-AM P1).

That got me thinking.

Is anyone coming to WOR for services in 2015?  Wouldn’t they be better off dropping all of it and just letting Todd and Len do personable talk without these x minute holes of services that sound piped in and not part of the show?

Yeah there will be 6 days a year where you’ll want the news guy around, and I am not saying to fire my friend Joe Bartlett, but maybe we don’t need a seven minute hole at the top of the hour.  The sales department might be used to it, but I don’t know if the listener needs it in this market and in the era of smartphones.

Do we need full blown weather, except on snowstorm days and hurricane watches, or can we just have Len tell us 82, chance of t-storms this afternoon and keep rolling.

Do we need traffic from WOR at all?

Talk radio needs to evolve.  I worked with John R Gambling back in the days of a meteorologist, a helicopter and full blown school closings.  That was 1994.  Not sure we need to run that format heading into 2016.

Thoughts?

As I mentioned in the previous post, never judge Day One too harshly, and I personally have not put much ears on Beats One yet (just two partial songs), but I am fascinated by all the talk about it.

In the link below, the author brings up an interesting conundrum:

He plugged an upcoming show from St. Vincent, saying that it would be on “tonight” and in a few hours. It might be on for someone “tonight” and yesterday it was truly a few hours away. But this morning the replay of St. Vincent was actually just one hour away.

Source: If Beats 1 is live global radio, why is it broadcasting replays already? | The Verge

So yeah, as I mentioned in that last post, that stuff drives me nuts.  However, I can tell you that having done national radio for over a decade, the time zone thing becomes quite annoying.  For years Mad Dog Russo started his shows with “Good afternoon everybody….” except his satellite show starts at 11am Pacific, so he had changed it to “Good Day Everybody” which never ever ever sounded cool nor “right” to my ears.  (No idea what he does these days.)

I struggled with when to schedule shows.  It made sense for me to put Jim Breuer in afternoon drive on Raw Dog, but that was East Coast.  What about the Pacifics, don’t they deserve a PM show.  Should we just replay the thing?  But then you have 6 hours in a row of the same thing?  So I can only imagine the challenge of trying to perfectly slot everything worldwide (or at least London to LA) without having some of your stars buried at 4am Pacific time.  Not easy without replays or a second feed (Beats Two, let’s do it!)

…

While I’m on the Apple kick, has anyone heard who the curators of the other stations are?  I am not saying they are bad or unworthy, but with other services I will see announcements that Company X hired away someone who is experienced at a format, and I haven’t seen any such releases about the other Apple curated stations.  Again, just curious and not rock throwing.

Good morning.  I am not here to say Beats is good nor bad.  I have personally punched in twice, heard songs I didn’t like and punched out.  I’m about to head out with my dogs and attempt to give it a curiosity listen.

I am reading lots of reviews and this one caught my eye…

James Cridland tries to listen to Apple Music’s new global radio station, and is not impressed

Source: Beats 1 – botched, lazy and uninspiring

Now what caught my eye about it was the below, because I am a production snob:

I’m not a radio programmer, but I found it curious that the first promo we heard was for Julie Adenuga promoting “her next show”. Given that she hadn’t been on the radio station, it should have been a promo made specially telling people to join her for “her first show”.

I hate that kind of stuff.  The writer is correct.  There is no next show if you haven’t done one yet.  I used to drive production directors and board-ops and producers crazy with my insistence that promos have today/tomorrow/day of week tags. Nothing sounds worse than to hear a promo tag for “Wednesday at 2” when today is Wednesday.

Actually there is something worse, and this is in general and has nothing to do with Apple: the promo for “we talk about what you want to talk about / the hottest topics / we take YOUR calls.”  Great.

My experience has been that in the age of computers and PDs running many multiple stations that the attention to detail has slipped.

Anyway, boo on the production director or the promo scheduler.

That being said, Day One is hard.  Bugs crop up, and the Day Seven product is always a more polished version of the vision.  Will be interesting to watch.

I mentioned yesterday in my piece about Maron that I would tell the President Clinton story.

So it’s sometime in the 1990’s, probably 1993-94 or so since I was still running boards.  I was running “local” for WOR-AM which meant doing the inserts on the New York broadcast of the national Gene Burns show which was originating from the room next to me.

Gene had scored an interview with President Clinton like from the White House.  Awesome.

So Gene did a short intro and they/we took the first break early leaving a nice run of time for The President.

But the President was running late.  I began wondering what would happen when the hard network break at 3:30 came along.

Now that’s a tough decision.  If you blow off the break you can throw off the automation systems across the country.  On the other hand….

Gene sits down and starts talking to the president.  For maybe a minute.  I’m sitting at “local” wondering what’s going to happen and….

….

….

….I hear the roll up music into the break.  They took the damn break!

What you heard on the air was the President being faded down mid-sentence and then a cut to a Larry King commercial for, if memory serves, Ginsana.  OMFG.

Fortunately Gene kept his professionalism and kept doing the interview, which was being recorded down the line, and didn’t tell the President we had cut away.

I keep thinking about this.  Presumably the need for the hard break was so that some stations could go to news.  I wondered what that news would be.  Would it be “today the President said….”

Anyway, the punk 20-something staff, including me, made so much fun of this over the upcoming weeks.  Somewhere there is a collection of “Great Moments in WOR” where we made things like

“Today….I consider myself….the (music fades up) Hi this is Larry King for Ginsana.”

“That’s one small step for….(music fades up) Hi this is Larry King for Ginseng.”

I dunno.  I would have kept the President on live and taken angry calls from the PD in Elmira and blown the Larry King Ginsana revenue.  Maybe that’s why I am writing this from my backyard.  Ha.

This morning I was able to catch up on the WTF episode with guest President Obama and was totally impressed.  I don’t even know where to start so I will just brain-dump a bunch of random things in no particular order.

– nice look for the President.  He came across as cool and presidential, thoughtful but not a robot.  Very nice look.

– what a great “get” for Maron.  Twenty years ago I was involved with the studio end of a White House broadcast with President Clinton (a great story I will post tomorrow) and it was super stuffy and formal.  Part of that was the difference between the great Gene Burns and the differently great Marc Maron, but the bigger difference was the setting – the White House vs. a garage.  (Gene was terrific and I so enjoyed his company, a story for another day.)

– this was a great example of what talk radio can be.  We’ve had thirty years of “the next Howard Stern” and fifteen to twenty of the outrageous derivatives.  We’ve had twenty five years of Son Of Bob Grant’s Act.  There hasn’t been too much originality out there outside of the occasional fresh voice in sports talk.  (This is a wide sweeping statement, but in broad terms the Conservative Talker in City A is running the same lineup as the one in City B and has been since 2001).

– I like that Maron is able to nail entertaining conversation without going shock-jock nor screaming match (you argue this, I will argue the opposite and we’ll take calls).  This was just a nice conversation.

– I like that Maron is able to do conversation without slipping in to that weird NPR Style where it sounds like pretentious people holding a radio show in the library of a church.  Why does so much NPR have to sound like the SNL Sketch that made fun of it?  And why is that sound creeping into so much podcasting (some of it is that the big podcasts are produced by actual NPR and many by ex-NPRers).  There’s plenty of room for all sounds but props to Maron for finding the middle ground between stuffy and screaming.

– straying further as I dump random thoughts: everyone please stop positioning yourself as either “the next Howard Stern” or “the Howard Stern of X.”  Howard is a once in a generation talent.  You’re not the next Howard and don’t try to be.  Be the first YOU.

I can’t tell you the amount of demos I got back at the satellite company that were two guys (sometimes with the female sidekick) who were the next Howard and they told you so.  Only they were EVEN MORE OUTRAGEOUS!!!!!! which usually meant saying swear words and talking about sex.  Or having the comedian who makes baby-raper jokes to show how edgy the show is.  Please stop.

So, is there really no way for Talk Radio to get out of the 2001 lineup and do something fresh?  There are so many good podcasts out there.  One of the big radio companies can’t find a way to convert that talent?  We can’t grab some podcaster and try him or her out in afternoons in Cincinnati for a year and see if we have something?  New York City can’t afford more local shows?  Nobody can go for 47 minutes without breaking, and if they do they have to “play catchup” and bomb the listener with 11 minutes of commercials in a row?

I know, I know – network ad dollars and PPM rule the day.  The system just seems so broken, and with so many talkers getting absurdly low numbers I can’t help but wonder why spoken word is being ceded to a guy in his garage talking with POTUS.

Great job Marc.

But there is still that struggling station somewhere on FM for whom mood-service would be a better, more distinctive choice than being the third CHR.

Source: Envision Insider » Blog Archive » Not In The Mood For Formats?

One reason—six in ten podcasters say they’ve listened to Internet radio in the car by connecting a cellphone to a car audio system, compared to just over one-third of the total population.

Source: Online Radio Is Podcasts’ Trojan Horse. – Insideradio.com: News

Really interesting read on royalties.

I teach a college class on radio and love diving into the royalties discussion with the students and watching when their eyes have that a-ha moment.  “The Great Streaming War” (as I call it in class) continues.  We live in interesting exciting times in audio.

On Spotify, not all songs are created equal; sometimes not even the same song is created equal—at least when it comes to how its creators are compensated.

Source: How the Cash Flows in Spotify Streams – WSJ