Preface

As a student, teacher, writer, and, especially, practitioner of radio from 1960 to the present, I’ve read many books on modern radio programming. Many have seemed interesting and well written, but to date every book I’ve read has presented techniques of programming radio stations that amount to “how I do it.” Many of the points made are useful and will work when applied, but generally they must be applied as the author dictates in order to work.

My purpose in writing this book is to present the principles by which modern radio programming is constructed. Although I do give examples to clarify points, generally speaking I’m dealing with underlying principles only, and I encourage you to find your own unique approach using these principles. For programmers who are not yet confident enough in their skills to program contrary to the way that everybody else is doing it, these principles will help you understand why the stations you are copying do succeed. It will also help you grasp which of their techniques might not be useful for you to use and which may be relevant to your own market situation.

Radio’s role in our culture is unique, and unless the fundamentals of what make it so are explored and understood, we cannot succeed with it in the future. This, then, is the first radio programming handbook I’m aware of that actually deals with radio programming tactics—a complete guide to the strategies underlying the creation of the magic that allows radio to be the most powerful medium of communication ever invented.

Two factors combine to create radio’s power. The first is that radio can be “consumed” while the listener is doing something else. All other forms of mass communication require the consumer’s focused attention before communication can occur. Radio has evolved into a personal companion—a soundtrack accompaniment to our lives—as a result of this unique characteristic.

The second trait of radio that contributes to its power is that the technology by which it reaches the listener is uniquely invisible. When we read, we absorb the author’s thoughts, but we are still aware that we are scanning symbols on a page. When we watch television or a movie, we can get lost in a good story or follow a well-articulated thought, but we are never unaware that we are watching a reproduction on a screen. In each case, the means of communication itself forms a subtle barrier between us and the author or participants. When we listen to radio, however, the original voice, the music as it was created, reaches us through transparent technology. We do not hear the “sound” of the loudspeaker other than as pure sound. This allows us to respond in a more fundamentally personal way to what we hear than is possible with any other form of communication, in all of which the medium itself always becomes part of the message.

Further amplifying radio’s power is something called the “transactional analysis principle.” I once read a best-selling book about this called Born to Win. To summarize the essence of it for our discussion, I can distill it to this: People respond to us as we present ourselves to them. People react to us in the same way we act toward them. This is true in any context, but in radio this principle is uniquely effective because when others see us, part of the way we present ourselves to them includes such irrelevancies as what we look like, what we’ve chosen to wear, an unnoticed food stain on our sleeve, and the complexities of body language. In radio, all of these are absent, and all that’s left of us is our voice. Through training, practice, and attitude, we are able to control fully the way our voice touches listeners. In radio, the rapport between us and our listeners can be complete—and intense.

A number of years ago, in a TV Guide article, a university professor said that two-thirds of all spoken communication is nonverbal. At first, I rejected this idea because it seemed to suggest that television is much more effective at communicating than radio, which I knew to be untrue. (Actually, the reverse is the case.) However, after a little thought, I realized what the man really meant, and I had to agree with him. His point was that 70 percent of all communication is other than simply the words spoken, and that is true. The way we say them, the attitude we project, is what really communicates what the words are saying. Because of the transparency of the medium, radio can communicate in this way far better than all other media.

When we speak on the radio, we are speaking intimately to just one person. If we want that person to relate to us, to care who he or she is listening to, to pay attention to what we say, and to act on it, we must drop our own personal defenses and relate to our listener as we would to a close friend. Personality, in radio, consists of no more than this, and over the years, I have come to understand that everybody is capable of being a personality. The tough part for many people is realizing that—whatever their own “secret demons”—they are nonetheless just like everyone else, and they are likable people. Therefore, we must let the listener experience us as we really are.

The human being, a live person, is the essence of radio, and this will be as true in the future as it is today and has always been. Television is evolving in interesting ways as the computer comes closer to merging with it. As the television audience fragments, it becomes harder for local stations to make money in the expensive business of TV. Direct broadcast satellite and cable-delivered systems create more and more nationwide cable networks to respond to the need for low-cost-per-viewer programming.

For radio, though, the essence remains the relatable (local) person on the air, and this requires no extraordinary costs. As TV becomes more and more “wired in,” radio—the truly wireless, portable companion—has, if anything, an even brighter future than its remarkable past.

Radio must play to its strengths to realize this future. In the years to come, there will be more and more direct-from-satellite and cable- delivered radio services, and there will be more audio services consisting of music without voice. Radio, in the sense addressed in this book, will survive and prosper only by retaining its permanent advantages. It must avoid, as much as possible, full automation and satellite-delivered programming, both of which tend to lower this lucrative kind of localized radio to the glossy impersonality of TV and other media.

After all, what’s the real difference to the listener between a satellite-delivered format coming from a local station and the same format coming straight from a direct-broadcast satellite? Mostly, just local commercials and perhaps a little wire-service news. That’s not a very meaningful difference. The satellite format providers are well positioned to cut the local stations that relay their programs right out of the loop when the time seems right.

Thus there are two elements that radio stations must retain if they are to survive and prosper—and these are the elements that listeners value most in radio anyway: localism and human contact. We’ll talk more about these as we travel together through this book.

Acknowledgments

I’d like to acknowledge some of the people who have been mentors to me at critical moments in my radio career and thus have had a definite impact on this book:

Special thanks to programmer and consultant Paul Drew for his insightful and critical reading of the initial manuscript.