Dismissed

I am not sure how to begin this blog entry. It has been a while since I blogged, not because there hasn't been anything to say, those that live here would confirm that, but it has been a matter of trying to get a handle on all of the things that have taken place.

I have blogged at length about my radio career and how much I enjoy the business, and that hasn't changed but this past week has show just how much of a cruel mistress radio can really be. As easy as it is to just turn the thing on in the home or the car and expect moise of one form or another to come out, behind the scenes there are far more things that take place. It is equal parts technical, people and numbers and this past week, numbers reared their ugly head.

On the numbers front, radio is driven by the 2 R's, ratings and revenue. An ideal shows scores high in both numbers, it has adequate listenership and generates considerable revenue for its station. Not so ideal but workable is to score well in one of the two numbers, if you have high ratings, then there are listeners out there, but for whatever reason converting those numbers into dollars is problematic whether that be an ineffective sales staff or targeting an audience that is unwilling or unable to part with their dinero. If you have high revenue but not high ratings, you have what is best called a loyal listener base, those that listen to your show tend to spend their dollars on your specific advertisers, but it leaves very little margin for error.

The worst is when you have low ratings and low revenue and surviving that dubious pairing is at best problematic, at worst, impossible. It is that sad convergence that reared its ugly head Monday at the radio station. Let me be the first to say, the station I work at has never been one of the powerhouses of the market. It tends to fall somewhere in the #17-#20 range in the market, depending on the ratings book. Mind you this is a far cry from when I first started there 11 years ago when the numbers were so small that management was happy if they showed up in the book. I don't attribute any modest climb to my employment, only making a simple statement of fact. Still, it makes for little margin of error to lay out significant amounts of cash on a signal whose audience isn't the largest. Those places where money is spent need to be able to turn the station an adequate amount of cash in order to continue. I am lucky in that working with Lynn, we tend to have the highest ratings of any show on the station (we tend to do double or better the station's overall rating, which is measured from 6A-6P) though again this isn't me taking credit, just stating a fact. Lynn has a decent number of loyal listeners and as well, a significant number of loyal advertisers. It is not uncommon for Lynn to be doing 8 or more live reads (commercials read during the show by the host as opposed to pretaped spots) in a three hour show as well as a decent number of advertisers that want their spots to run in her show.

Doug, who I mention probably more often than Lynn due to my apperances on his show, doesn't pull the same numbers, in either ratings or revenue. That being said, I will be one of the people who could say that I enjoyed his show. When I first got into radio, back in August of 1996 as an intern, I would often come to the station in the mid day/evening slot. Mind you, in those days we were a sports talk station, and air shifts consisted of just doing sports updates 3 times an hour. My job, as being an intern I was not on the air, even doing those updates, was to do production work, cutting commercial spots from network feeds, doing interviews and cutting them for sound and research for our high school football pregame show we did on Fridays. When I would climb into the car to go to work, I, like many people would click on the radio. My commute usually consisted f listening to Doug on the way to work, even though at the time he was working for a different station. In December of that year, I was actually hired as an employee of the station, and again I was stuck with evening shifts, allowing me the opportunity to listen to Doug while on my way to work. Doug's show would air then from 3P-6P and usually my shifts at the station would start at 7P and run until 1A when I would take the station off of the air (we didn't go to 24 hour programming until we switched format to talk). Funny thing was, when we switched to talk, Doug's station switched to sports talk, blowing out all of their local talent, save for Doug's show, which moved to the 5A-10A slot. Meanwhile we went all talk and 24 hour programming, meaning a lot of my shifts ended up being overnight shifts listening to Art Bell. The saving grace of that shift was when I got done, I could leave the station and listen to Doug do his morning show. As we tried to identify ourselves as more of a talk station, we would hire Lynn (who coincidentally, had worked at Doug's station prior to them switching formats) in an effort to get our station a "name" and give our station a local perspective as well as the national shows we were carrying at the time. Eventually, Doug's station let him go as well, finishing of their switch to all sports and our station picked him up, giving us a second local host. We eventually would add Jerry Bowyer, giving us three local hosts and that was when I would get my first break, going from part time to full time status. But here it is, little old me, now not only a fan of Doug's, but through some unpredictable set of circumstances, working at the very same radio station as Doug. I would work with Jerry for about 5 years before he asked to first be switched to the afternoons, having 7 kids at home and a number of other commitments outside the station, Jerry wanted to be able to sleep later than 4am, which is the usual time to climb out of bed to host a 7am show. When the switch was made, Doug became the morning host and for the first time in my radio career I was now working directly with a guy who I had listened to regularly on the air. There is a ego rush that goes with that that is very hard to describe, being able to actually sit directly across the glass from someone in the business that you idolized. What was even better was that Doug liked the work I was doing for him, asking regularly for input into the show. It was in many ways a dream come true. Doug and I would only be together for a year or so, Jerry would leave the station to take a gig at a Christian talk station on the FM dial, and once again our lineup would be shuffled, with Doug moving to afternoons and Lynn being shifted to mornings with me. Probably one of the most flattering things that ever happened to me occurred then, when both Lynn and Doug wanted me as their producer, Lynn asked the program director to keep me in mornings for her show, Doug asked to have me moved to afternoons to continue working with him. Here are two people, both names in the market with a combined 50+ years in broadcasting and they both want you. Rather than make me pick, the program director made the call, saying that I would work mornings with Lynn and Greg would do Doug's show in the afternoon. To be honest, I am glad he made the call because I am not sure I could have, nor would I have wanted to.

Anyway, while Doug's show was shifted to the afternoon, Doug always did a couple of things that kept me involved in his program. One was the holiday shows, where he would invite all of his former producers to sit in with him. Since I had produced his show, I qualified for that duty, and it served a purpose in that on holidays, getting calls into a show can be problematic at best, this allowed him the ability of talking to people that he knew without relying on listeners to call in to move the show along. The second and more impressive on me, was the Friday shows, the Doug and the Group efforts. These would occur most Fridays and involve Doug and three of his friends and we would all sit in and to the blathering that comes requisite with doing radio. The fact Doug put me on that list, as a friend, as opposed to the holiday shows, meant more to me than I can possibly describe on this page. I have put some of those shows on this page from tie to time, because working with Doug has always been a pleasure of mine. he was the touchstone in reminding me that what we do, while we can be informative, should at first be fun, that those of us with jobs in radio are blessed in a way, we get paid not to do any form of manual labor, but instead to talk. Who wouldn't want to have fun doing that? How much fun is it to come to work and just be miserable all of the time? With Doug, having fun was never a problem.

I will tell a story (I would say a quick story but I know how I ramble on) and it is one that some of you have read before, but it goes to show the fun Doug and I had working together. One of the things about the show was that we never talked about what we would talk about prior to the show, everything was very much spontaneous and off the cuff. Doug and I might spend some time together prior to a broadcast having a cigarette or two, but never did we talk about what would be talked about on the air. The only talking we did in that regard was just before going on the air, Doug and I each had a TV in our respective booths and prior to show time (and sometimes during commercial breaks) we would talk about stuff on TV, usually involving the wardrobes of the local TV news people that were finishing up their morning newscasts at 7A, just before we would go on the air. We would talk about the relative hotness of Trisha Pittman, or how Krista Villareal's clothes once again resemble Doug's curtains. Anyway, as we are sitting down to get ready for the show, Doug pulls my attention to a TV preacher who is on doing the whole "healing" thing, which involves a person who suffers some unknown malady and the preachers doing some form of "Praise Jesus" and the whole do you accept your savior routine, followed by smacking them on the head and them falling down, only to stand up immediately afterward and claim they were cured. One such lady, a very heavy set black woman with large breasts came up to the preacher and she proceeded to talk about all of the pain that she is suffering from. Al the while we are getting closer and closer to show time, literally less than 2 minutes before air time. The preacher starts his routine, a combination of sermon from sermongenerator.com and hand gestures resembling something out of a Bruce Lee film. All of a sudden, he does the smack to her forehead claiming that the woman is healed. She does the requisite tumbling to the altar with aplomb and proceeded to get up and start jumping up and down claiming that she is in fact healed. The thing about this particular woman is that, since she was heavy set, her bouncing up and down lead to parts of her anatomy going in directions that they normally wouldn't, including her breasts, which were going all sort of willy nilly, and if she would have been wearing tassels, it would have made Sikorsky proud. That being said, the clock is clicking down to show time, and I just happen to say in Doug's ear "You know, while God was in the neighborhood, he might have went about fixing her bra". We laughed for like the first 20 minutes of the show, the audience completely not in on the joke, we tried to explain it, but it was something that had to be witnessed to be believed. It was that type of just complete inanity that we approached most of our broadcasts, just go in and have fun for three hours.

By now, you have to be wondering where this long diatribe is going. If I may continue, Doug's contract with the station is due to end on December 31st, and while those of us don't have to go through this progress, those that do have contracts then have to sit down with management where they go over the 2R's and the sides haggle out some sort of agreement regarding a new contract, or they part their separate ways. Doug's meeting with management was on Monday, and according to the paper (I refuse to speculate what went on behind closed doors) no new contract from the station was forthcoming from management for Doug. This could be for a number of reasons, not high enough ratings, and inability to sell the show, the show becoming stale (many of Doug's stories were some of the same stories he has used fr the last odd number of years) or it could have been stubbornness from Doug's side of the table in negotiating, I don't know, I just know that when no contract was forthcoming, Doug opted to make Monday his last day.

This trickles down however, because a subsequent email from management suggested that they would no longer run any radio station for more revenue than they could bring in. I get the business side of the equation, but it also sends the shockwaves through the station of who else will get the ax. After all, Greg and I are both full time producers and with only one radio show now as opposed to two, either one of us could get the ax as well as some sort of cost cutting measure and management has been particularly quiet in regards to whether or not anyone else will be let go. To our program directors credit, he is trying to keep both of us, arguing that there is more than enough work for both Greg and myself to do, which he is probably correct in making that assessment. Lynn has said that she would put in a good word for me if needed, but I don't want to put her in that position. Heck, there was even slight buzz amongst some of the employees that I should replace Doug as a show host. While I appreciate the sentiment and have no doubt that I could host a show if asked, I am not sure that even if offered it would be a position I wanted, knowing that it would come with built in resentment of those people that were and are fans of Doug and would then blame whoever took over that spot for his release from the station. Not that I think management is even thinking in that regard, this was more just some sales people talking amongst themselves during our First Friday thing we do every month. I doubt management is thinking anything beyond what type of sattelite programming can we get for the least amount of money and let the issue rest there.

Amazing that I haven't spoken of anything fantasy, asshat or change meter related, but that hasn't been on my mind the last few days, the only thing has been whether or not I will show up for work and have a job at the end of the day. For those looking for the other things I do with this page, I am sure they will be back in due time, they just aren't my primary concern these days.