What's in a name?

I woke up this morning to my wife's alarm clock that was set to a radio station that I have not listened to ever in our market. I didn't think it was a station that she would listen to either, but it was one that she could pick up on the alarm clock radio. I noticed that the person doing morning drive sounded a lot like the overnight talent of my day in radio. Actually, that would still be inaccurate since back in my day, we were expected to work the phones and get listeners on the air at a minimum of 4 times an hour, and it had better be something better than a song request!

We were required to walk up the intros on the songs and it was MANDATORY that we had done some sort of prep with things to talk about on the air. This included current events and interesting stories that we would extrapolate from local papers and national trash tabs for hours every week sitting in the bullpen with the papers, a clip board and a razor blade to cut the stories out with. Then there was re-writing the stories to make them more relevant to our show and to give them a personal touch.

There were several contests every hour that usually required a razor, 3 miles of that blue splicing tape and splice block to edit the marbles out of the listener's mouth and to cut out the wrong station name that the listener barked out when you asked them what station made them a winner. You had 3 1/2 minutes to make all of this happen before you had to get them on the air because you had better run that winner immediately following the song that you did the contest solicitation into, and it had better be right! You had to back time it up to the vocals before going live to air with it and you had better not step on the vocals! meanwhile, you had to load a CD into the other player and get the next song ready to go. There were no computers to do your job for you. Additionally, you had to eek out the time to take transmitter readings 3 times per shift. Gawd help you if you needed to go take a dump... You have 3 minutes and 12 seconds to "Git 'R Dunn". Having a smoke? Yeah... we managed to have 4 minutes to hot box one or two per shift after carefully calculating how much time it took the elevator to get you down to the lobby and back up again. If you were industrious, you might grab your music log and do a mix of 2 songs with a jingle in between and cart it up in the production room before your airshift to give yourself an extra 3 minutes to suck down a smoke. You had better hope that the cart machine didn't decide to eat your cart while you were outside!

There were no mp3s or computers to do your job for you. I remember the first station I worked at that I had to lock the doors and leave unmanned after my shift. I TOTALLY felt like I was doing something as bad as driving off without paying for my gas! I felt like I had to walk out to my car, watching over my shoulder to see if the PD or GM saw me leaving.

There was no Internet to scour for information or bits and if your morning show was lucky to get some sort of comedy service or prep sheet, you never saw it because it was theirs only! Hands off!

So to say that this particular morning person sounded like an overnight talent in my day would be a stab to the great CHR overnighters of the 80s. No, this person clearly was reading some form of pre-packaged show prep service verbatim on the air. The person obviously couldn't even be bothered to proof read it ahead of time because they stumbled through it. That person didn't have any problems with their name, however... They said it at LEAST once per break... sometimes TWICE!

It is a sad day when people are willing to buy satellite radio receivers and then pay a monthly subscription fee to listen to the "radio". For decades, we have offered it up for free, but now they are saying "No Thanks. I would rather pay for something else". iPods and mp3 players connected to the car stereo system are really not doing ANYTHING more than what our radio automation computers are doing... except for the lack of running voice tracks.

What do YOU think about the "State Of Radio" in the year 2010?