KXLT’s new “better” brighter jockless format
Don Day | December 26, 2007
KXLT/107.9 Lite FM returned to regular programming today – cutting (most of) the Christmas music in favor of its regular mainstream AC lineup early this morning. The station is still mixing in a few holiday cuts per hour today – in case folks just didn’t get enough in the last month.
There’s something missing of course: on-air talent. The station lite-ened its payroll by cutting Melissa Dawn and Greg Williamson the day before Thanksgiving. Now, the format has picked up song tags – with each song ID’ed at the end by a neutral female voice. Kevin & Claire still hold down the morning fort.
Who needs jocks anymore? With automation performing the job function of a DJ – and now song tags taking care of the personality (that’s a joke) – what’s left for a human being to do?
The station rolled out new liners that attempt to back up their no-personality format: “We think sometimes the best company is just some really good songs.”
So they’ve stripped away the only thing that differentiates them from a hard drive full of MP3s or Internet radio – and that’s a positive?
Remember when Peak Broadcasting launched, execs planned to turn KSAS/103.3 Kiss FM into a Bob FM format station – but Tester Broadcasting outmaneuvered them and got on the air first with KSRV/96.1 Bob FM.
Now, the company has basically launched a “Bob FM” station for women. Variety hits aimed at females with no jocks.
Coincidentally, I smoke 4 packs a day. Does anyone have a good solution for quitting? Because I’ve tried going cold turkey and also the gum, and for some reason I just can’t quit radio.
When one looks into the mirror and sees what an empty and vast chasm one’s brain has become listening to radio, one soon finds other activities worthy of filling the space with more fruitful intellectual pursuits. However, one must also realize radio is not the only culprit. Television is also guilty of the same crime. However, cable and satellite TV does offer some reprieve if one has the ability and willingness to search for it.
Buster, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I smoke cigarettes, not pot.
Well, most of the time anyway.
Instead of smoking cigarettes, listening to bad radio, and watching bad TV to fill your time, not to mention your cerebral chasm, one might want to pursue more fruitful intellectual pursuits. For instance, you may want to figure out a way to save Boise radio before it becomes extinct.
On the other hand…one might want to get over one’s self.
Happy New Year to all!!!! May all the infighting in the radio world be resolved so we can get back to having quality radio again.
Let me suggest a slightly different approach on Stripe’s comments. I would be the first one to say that I don’t always agree with Don’s editorial perspective, but I don’t believe it is a waste of time to read this “gossip” column at work, as you perceive it to be. Staying up on what happens in the market and the region is smart. Let me ask you, do you have access restricted to All Access or Radio and Records? Aren’t they doing the same thing, but on a larger level? I read those in addition to “TV Spy’s Shoptalk” and RAB’s newsletter every day at work, because I believe it is important to be abreast of the latest happenings. I don’t think it is wrong to stay on top of the biz’. In fact, I think it is quite a healthy forum to help build a cohesive biz’.
I agree. You don’t want to ignore or hide from whats going on in the outside world in this business. Peak should be especially aware of this. Remember Bob FM?
I don’t think Cat, Brenda or Debi sound like they smoke.
I listen to local radio on a sporadic basis. I have operated stations throughout the Northwest in years past. The arguments presented as to live or automated tickle me. The ONE point everyone keeps missing is this….Talent has brought this on themselves. I never ever want to go back and get involved in an industry that is akin to herding cats.
Never again would I ever go back to fishing dead drunk “local talents” heads out of toilets. Dealing with “high” persons going through some sort of psychosis or whatever the term might be. Pompous “talent” explaining how they can not do this or that because it may be beneath them. Yet they will make utter fools of themselves on the air by mispronouncing a local town, or area name.
Stop all ready…Paul J. Snyder’s call of Boise State 30 seconds behind the play is not TALENT. But in the incestuous world of Boise radio you all stand around and pat each other on the butt calling something good that is really……AWFUL.
Roger w. Morgan, lets not pool all of the “talent” shall we? Theres a few problem cases on every creative team. Hopefully, you’re not above it all and judging us to be beneath you, are you? I wouldn’t want to lump you into some category.
Dang. I never get patted on the butt. I’m missing out.
I would not pool all of the “talent.” Nor am I saying that everyone is beneath me. What I am saying is this….Unless/until the “local talent” gets real about their work ethic, the move to automation will continue.
Roger, you write “Unless/until the “local talent” gets real about their work ethic, the move to automation will continue.” Does that mean a de-facto support of automation?Not all talent pukes their head into the watercloset, and if anything some of the talent now has to do MORE than before. You have to in order to survive, and if that means some sales, copywriting, web work, news, engineering, it’s called survival of the fittest. My biggest concern is that of “Generation Y” or the Millenials. Many have a bad “entitlement” attitude and the others have no real place to hone skills in order to get hired, other than through maybe podcasting. It frightens me that some of the newbies have never bulked a cart, spliced a tape, or for that matter run a live show. Those with minimal experience know how to voice-track, but couldn’t run a live show if they were paid to do it. It is a rough problem, but who knows what the future will hold. What is sure though is that WE ALL HAVE TO ESPOUSE being REAL broadcasters with personality. And besides, what the hell is the difference between automation and an IPOD on shuffle? The IPOD is $20,000 cheaper and has NO commercials and “pleasures” its listener with instant gratification. Go figure!
It really has to do with corporate investment strategy. If a station like WABC (Citadel) earns an average of 5 million dollars a month and that equals roughly what the entire Boise cluster (KBOI, KTIK, KIZN, etc) earns in a year, where are you going invest your resources.
Few stations want to invest directly in the market any more. Its perceived to be too expensive to maintain a staff of 10 or 15 on-air personalities (per station) plus the support staff in todays market (prevailing mentality). Automation and voice tracking do a much better job in that way of thinking/investing.
Since I am primarily a listener, now, I don’t have to agree with this kind of thinking. Whether I have the right or not, I can make my feelings known that the owners/managers of the local stations can do a LOT better by investing in the market. Corporate budgets and automation be damned. Entertain and inform me and keep me interested in tuning in.
Just as a point of full disclosure, I was in the business when we had to write, produce, tape, edit (with scotch tape and a razor blade), insert live continuity and god knows what else. At one station I even had three air names: One for my mid-day show, one for the afternoon news and one for “special reports”. Thanks to some creative miking and editing by a very talented engineer I sounded different enough in all those segments that no one caught on.
As automation took over more and more of the industry the fun of all those jobs (and much of the challenge) went away, since news was, according to the market researchers, “boring and unnecessary”.
elchup…..says: What is sure though is that WE ALL HAVE TO ESPOUSE being REAL broadcasters with personality. And besides, what the hell is the difference between automation and an IPOD on shuffle?
There would be no difference!! However back to my original point. The damage has been done. The bad apples have destroyed personality and LOCAL Radio. Television is next. Simply listen to the “Reporters.” Count in one report how many times the word NOW is used…they cannot even use proper English. Oh and here is the kicker. The “local” reporters telling me how they care about “boyzee.” Another couple of examples, “we go now to Koona, or the accident happened in Niceah. It really endears one to even waste time listening or supporting the local media.
I remember the days when KYME had talent that was exciting. When KFXD compelled you to listen with their talent lineup. So then, to conclude….want to change the landscape?….get involved with THIS community. Not the B.S. save the whales or the desert rat organizations!! Get involved with the things that make this community valuable to those of us who live here. Become part of it…DOWN TO YOUR CORE. Quit the crap about flirting with 14 year old girls on the air. Quit the garbage about showing your buddies how knowledgeable you are about drugs. ENTERTAIN FOR GOSH SAKES. It is easy to go to the bottom of the gutter….it is hard to entertain by being involved.
As far as being incestuous…think back on how many stations in this valley some of you have worked. IF YOU CANNOT ENTERTAIN AT ONE STATION…YOU CAN’T ENTERTAIN AT THE DOZEN OTHERS YOU HAVE WORKED AT. For gosh sakes, at some point in time you have to stop changing the pins on a dirty diaper.
I’m not sure who “Roger W. Morgan” is who wrote the message above, but it isn’t me. You can learn more about the real Roger W. Morgan at http://www.paradise935fm.com
Well said, Roger! I get the point and have to say I agree. After being a TV reporter/producer, I must tell you that the consultants are the ones who coerce the reporters to talk like that, using a billion references to “now,” or “happening now.” I always had a pet peeve while in the industry of reviewing scripts where reporters always used the present tense of EVERYTHING, even if an event had transpired in the PAST. You watch TV news now and the buzzword of the week is “break it down.” I heard it 12 times in an hour on CNN’s election coverage the other night. Straying a little from topic, it seems like the political consultants have also contrived their own 2008 cliche; that being “change!” If I hear it one more time, I think my stomach will turn!
Edward R. Murrow had a sense that, in time, news would be packaged and disguised as a form of entertainment once networks and local stations discovered it could be a profit center.
My son-in-law is an anchor on channel 7 in Boston. He insists that he is a newsman. I call him an “infotainer”. We don’t talk much.
So Roger, who in this market is good?
Honestly, the only one that I have really listened for any length of time is Big Jack. I think he is good. Without knowing anything up close and personal…it seems to me that he is by gosh and by darn going to stay in Boise. If that assumption is correct, then he has been willing to pay the price.
I personally get very annoyed at Jon Duane…because he mumbles more in the last few years than I remembered in the past. (of course my hearing isn’t getting bad.) However, Jon and Chris entertain, when they are not on some do gooder crusade, and exemplify being part of this community “down to their core.”
It is my opinion that if some station owner would get deadly serious about being part of this community…if they would invest the money and cut lose all the damn “consultants”….and turn Jack and people like him lose….they would have a winner. May take more than two books….but it would be solid business.
Of course my thoughts have only addressed the programing side of the business. I could go on and on and on about the sales side. Dealing with egomaniac’s who run agencies. In and effort to pump up their all ready bloated damn ego’s they hire some big breasted, blond…who’s only real thought is who she is going to sleep with tonight….to be the “media buyer.” The Salesperson goes in to make a presentation, and they are met with….”like we have like totally spent all of the budget.” But hell all the Ego driven maniac has to do is buy their client a couple of drinks every once in a while and “we are good to go.”
I will stop now…..and quit this blabbering.
Sounds like someone is bitter and resentful. A little bit?
This is probably the longest set of blog entries ever on this site, but since Roger mentioned agencies, let me ask: Are agency buys becoming fewer and fewer these days? I am seeing a lot less agency business than in the past. It may have something to do with the national business climate of consolidation, or perhaps more competition? Any thoughts?
It’s actually not… the most ever commented story had 116 comments. This is about the 8th most popular thread.
The Consultant’s Creed:
“if you aren’t part of the soulution, there’s big bucks in prolonging the problem”.
If anyone knows about prolonging the probelm it’s “knows don’s dad.”
Took him for ever to fire me! :/
If the advice of consultants is so good, why isn’t every station in the number one slot? Some consultants are better than others or management takes some of their suggestions with a really, really big grain of salt and does it their way anyway. Take your pick.
I realize the last post of mine sounded very bitter. Quite frankly I did not mean it to sound that way. I loved Radio, and almost lost the most important asset a man can have….his family, because of it. I worked more hours than my wife could understand. So forgive me if I sounded bitter….I guess just realistic. To tell you how much I loved the business…not knowing how to get into Radio…I went to a station, not in this community, and told them I would work for free if they would train me. They did, and I did.
I didn’t actually fire Don’s dad…he finally quit coming to work :)
I wish I had a witty comment or deep insight to go along with the dialogue this thread has turned into. (Sorry Mr. Morgan, I just realized I didn’t use proper English by ending a sentence with a preposition. Bad Tommy!) I just miss Melissa and Greg. If anyone knows anyone looking for talent, there are a couple of the finest examples I’ve worked with in 20 years. No egomaniacal tendencies and a fairly good grasp of the English language. Although, there was that time Melissa had trouble with the “Stunt Kite Competition.” Ken, I believe you can sympathize. ;-)
Many many years ago (it must have been a previous life time or something) I wrote an essay on the impact automation would have on the work place, particularly the workers themselves. The point I made back then was automation could free us from the repetative tasks, and free us to be more creative. To survive in the automated world, people would need to improve their skills. Businesses would need fewer people, but the people would need to be better trained and offer something the automation could not. I think if businesses had recognized the truth in this, and paid the talented people to expand their talent, rather than just cutting the number of employees without rewarding the talent that remained, a balance might have been created where we would still see people capable of entertaining still doing just that. Instead, we have pushed anyone with talent into other fields, leaving button-pushing voice-trackers that pretend to entertain. The bland, boring radio we have today is the end result.
Now, before I get crucified — there do exist some good people in radio, that can still entertain, and love to do it, and those have an audience. But, soon these folks will move on by choice or age, with no one to fill their shoes, because we have no platform to train and nurture new talent — the stockholders are too stingy to allow an investment in talent. They expect it to walk thru the door, be willing to work for not much more than minimum wage, and then wonder why the number of listeners still falls off. Until the bean counters put aside a few beans to fertilize the the future of the business, it will continue to die.
By the way, it isn’t just radio that has suffered from this mentality. Many skills will soon be lost forever in many other fields if we don’t wake up and smell the burning computer real soon. We are fast becoming a bunch of zombies deriving our pleasure from computer-generated images and sounds, and will rapidly lose our very ability to survive should the computerized world we have come to depend on for everything ever has a fatal glitch.
Jon & Chris do-gooders? And there is a problem with this? They support a lot of causes which is probably a good thing. They go out of there way to support alot of great causes like the Boise Rescue Mission, Salvation Army, etc. and they never ask for anything in return. That is what makes them special. You can’t get any more “local” than that.
RDS’s comments reminded me of a movie shown in my Mass Media & Society course several years ago. In addition to attending class, we were also required to attend a certain number of evening sessions in which professorially selected movies were played. We were asked to critically analyze the message the movie studios and/or stars were relaying to our about society via film.
The movie, “Modern Times”, “…is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his famous Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin’s view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization.” (Wikipedia under Modern Times)
I won’t provide any great social commentary here. I’ll let you see the movie and make judgments and commentaries as necessary. I just think it interesting we are having the same discussion regarding radio and television in this forum.
Just for perspective — I wrote my original essay on automation in 1964. Does anything really ever change?
RDS,
History tells us how Charlie Chaplin was viewed for his commentary on industrial modernization in the late 1930’s. For whom or what did you pen your essay and how was it viewed by your professors and/or audience?
It was either for an English or a Current Events class when I was a senior in High School. I got an A- on the piece. Knowing what I know now, it does not have the depth it could have, but as time has gone on, it’s points remain as valid or even more so as we have continued down the automated road. This was the time when many smaller stations were moving toward fully automated programming to free them from the problems so often cited of having a full-time live staff. I made the decesion I had to learn to use automation as a tool to make me more effecient and sound better, or I, too, would not have a job. I had to embrace it as a friend, not an enemy. Coming from the era I do, I am very comfortable using automation to assist me by handing me my spots and music, but I still like to be “live” otherwise, not voice-tracked. Having said that, I pretty much moved out from behind the mic several years ago, and went fully into the engineering aspect of radio instead. I never pretended to be great on the air, but I think I was at least fun to listen to. If you go to the air-check portion of my website, all of stuff from KBMY was done with the help of automation. It was a mixture of live and live assist, I guess you would say. Some stuff from tape (automation), some from records, and access to the the spots via the automation. It was still up to the “jock” to build the show, however. Yes, you could push the button and walk away for awhile, but we kept the “live” aspect going otherwise.
Hey, RDS, how about posting it? Sure it might have been written in ‘64, but it would be interesting to read. Post it! I’d be curious to read it.
I agree. I think it would be interesting to read a paper written by a forward thinking high school student who foresaw the industrialization and automation of broadcasting almost a half decade ago. Please post it or make it available on your website.
I read it just a couple weeks ago, and put it back in the file cabinet. Now I can’t seem to find it. I’ll try to track it down this weekend, and either post it here or on my site. I’ll let you know when it’s out there. I hope I didn’t send it to storage !
Rocky, you should’ve foreseen that someone would want to read it!
New comment on an old topic .. I promised if I found the article I was talking about I would post it. I did finally find it, and you can read it here: http://www.engineer-exchange.com/images/stories/rockyDocs/automation.pdf
It is posted on my website, but not yet “published” there. It will be soon, but you can still link to it from here now. This is a 2mb pdf, and may take a minute or two to load if you click on it.
A couple facts — I stated I wrote it in 1964 while a senior in High School. It was actually Jan 1966, and I was a freshman in college at the time. Sorry about that.. memories do fade over that many years. It is presented in its entirity — complete with comments from the person who graded it. I find the information about radio on page 5 of particular interest today….
Another interesting post-script to all this .. I was reading in a Handbook to Broadcasting published in 1941 that the radio “actors” were fearful of losing jobs and contracts to “transcriptions”. The transcription meant they only had to do a show once, and it could be replayed later on the network in the western time zones. And, it meant smaller stations didn’t need as many “live” actors, because they could get quality “transcribed” programs to fill the air time. And so, the evolution of job elimination continues….The machines are still taking over………
RDS: Very insightful essay that is nearly as valid today as when it was written! I liked the passages: “One should avoid becoming highly specialized in areas that are destined for automation,” and “We should work with the machine and not against it.” (Paraphrased of course!) Did you ever dream that computers would arrive at their current saturation point? Fascinating job. Thanks for posting it.
“Did you ever dream that computers would arrive at their current saturation point? ”
At the time I wrote it, probably not. That realization came a few years later as computers grew from being “hard wired” for specific tasks to be able to be “programmed”. The key to this was effective memory, something that only in the last decade or so has become a practical reality, allowing computers to do more and store more information than could have been imagined 42 years ago. The average watch today has a more sofisiticated computer and more memory than the computer aboard the first moon lander. I think for me the realization of the potential was when you could actually store audio on a hard drive, and play it back in real time. So again, as stated in my essay, I tend to think in the area I am most familiar — broadcasting.