If You Want It Done Right, You Gotta Do It Yourself

Hey, Program Director! Your station's Internet stream sounds terrible. Go fix it.

What? No, I don't have to hear it myself. I just know. Practically ALL Internet streams from radio stations have the same problems. The stream drops out. The sound's distorted. As soon as you go into a stop set, it's the same 3 or 4 PSAs over and over. It's very off-putting. Go put something else in there. I'll wait.

NOW what? Oh, you don't have time? It's low priority? You have so many other things to do? Nobody's listening? It doesn't matter to the ratings?

We need to talk. We need to talk about more than just the PSAs on your Internet stream.

The Internet stream thing was the topic of a panel on which I found myself at the Conclave and RAIN Summit Midwest in Minneapolis last week, and I can dispose of this one in a few words: If you're a Program Director, the Internet stream is your responsibility. If you're not lucky enough to have a staffer whose job it is to be, effectively, the Program Director of the stream -- and even if you DO have someone to do that -- the stream is your product. It's going out under your call letters, under your name. When you fill those commercial breaks with grating, repetitive, poorly-produced PSAs that don't even match the programming, or when you just throw in promos that keep repeating, or when there's ANYTHING that can drive listeners to that stream away, you're losing customers.

Maybe you don't care because most of the streams mostly don't show up in the ratings yet, but they will, soon enough, and you don't want to, in effect, train your listeners to bail out on you the moment the commercials show up. I know, you can't stream the on-air commercials because of the union. I know, you're overworked. I know, I know, I know. No matter. Go get more material. Produce Net-only news briefs. Find good features from your news network provider. Play a hit song. Ask listeners to produce commentary you can run in those breaks. Do your own commentary. I'LL do a commentary. ANYTHING but what you're throwing into the automation right now. In a PPM world, you can't give listeners -- even the ones listening on the Internet -- a reason to go someplace else. So don't.

But that's just part of it. While I was filibustering on the panel, I thought about all the excuses PDs and talent and everyone else in the business cite as reasons why they can't make things better, and after babbling for a while I came around to this, which is, for better or worse, a philosophy for working in any business in 2010:

Yeah, you're overworked, Yeah, it's unfair. Yeah, you have to get in early, work late, and do a thousand and one things at once. But that's what the job entails right now. The industry's cut back on staff and everyone's tripling and quadrupling up on jobs, and it quite clearly sucks, but that isn't changing anytime soon. Management doesn't value the stream enough to hire dedicated workers to oversee it, but that isn't changing anytime soon, either. They aren't hiring a lot of help, and, anyway, a lot of it really requires your attention in particular. So... you gotta do it. You gotta fix what's broken. Whether it's the stream or the website or whatever, you can complain about how hard it is or you can fix it. There's not gonna be a cavalry to help you, AAA isn't coming to change that flat tire, Congress isn't going to add hours to your day. You're going to have to do it yourself.

It's your job. It's your station. It's your reputation. If it's going out over your frequency or your stream or with your call letters attached, you have to make it right. Bad content will reflect on you. Fix it. If that seems unreasonable, it's not going to change, and while you can go work in another industry, you'll probably find out that it's the same no matter what the end product is: You have to do more with less. So you might as well do it in this business that you love (and which doesn't require a lot of manual labor), and you might as well get started now by getting creative with what goes into the commercial breaks on that stream. Then you can work on the show content, the marketing, the imaging, the engineering, and the plumbing. The good thing is that if you know what you're doing, it's not hard, it's just a lot of work. But you can do that. You might want to set the alarm a little earlier, though.

And that's the Tough Love portion of our program.

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After that rant, how can you find time to prepare a show? I can help with that. Just go to All Access News-Talk-Sports, where the Talk Topics column will offer you hundreds of items about which you can talk at length on the Marconi wireless apparatus, with examples this week including a hockey-centric 911 call, the easy way to take notes in class, a 110-proof, $762-per-bottle beer that's packaged in a real dead animal, a bunch of stories about kids who really need parental supervision they're clearly lacking, an unusual political slogan, rude airplane passengers, a police horse-and-buggy chase, a couple that's greener than you, Monkey Gone Wild!, road rage incidents involving a nail gun and a milkshake, and much more, including all the "real news" you need --oil spill, economy, books about farts -- and jokes and commentary and stuff. This week, you'll also find "10 Questions With..." veteran Portland talk host Rick Emerson, who'll give you insight into his move to a part-subscription online radio model, and the rest of All Access with radio and music industry news first, fastest, and best, plus columns, ratings, job listings (yes! There ARE jobs out there, somewhere), and all the resources you need, all free.

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Oh, about the conference last week: Thanks to the folks at the Conclave and the RAIN Summit Midwest, the legendary John Gehron for making the critical mistake of asking me to be on the panel, my fellow panelists Tom Land, Joel Denver, and Jerry Boulding for being tolerant of my outbursts, Chris Murphy for the Twins game and Minnesota hospitality, and all the folks I got to see and talk to and hang with over the course of the event. Sometimes, I make fun of the conferences and conventions I attend, but with all the things happening in the industry right now, it was good to see so many dedicated people coming together to learn and network and move radio forward. Plus, I got to see Target Field and live through a "straight-line wind warning." Can't beat that.

Perry Michael Simon
Editor
All Access News-Talk-Sports
psimon@allaccess.com
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