Tag: radio
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Just where do kids hear new music these days?
My sons have only a vague notion of what music is popular today. It’s because their avenues to hear it are few. Once in a while they’ll stumble across a song on YouTube. They have iPods and iTunes accounts, but they use them only to download and play games. MTV doesn’t play videos anymore. Top 40 radio is long…
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Four hours reduced to nine minutes
My buddy and former radio co-worker John has been going through the tapes he recorded of his shows, making videos of them with photos from the stations he worked and posting them on Facebook. It inspired me to do one of my own. The aircheck in this video is from Sunday, June 24, 1994. I…
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How surviving the weekly beatings turned me into a real pro
I suppose it’s only in a market as small as Terre Haute that a guy can be hired off the street to work on the radio, but that’s what happened to me. It’s not that I hadn’t been on the air before – I had been a disk jockey all through college on the campus radio…
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Seeing Ted Williams succeed
I don’t know how anybody could have not seen this video by now, but just in case you missed it, please have a look. As a former radio disk jockey, I love to hear Ted Williams talk. He has amazing “pipes,” as they say in the biz. But it’s not just his golden voice that makes…
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The Electric Breakfast
In my work life, the things I do are measured by return on investment. I suppose the same can be said about my personal life, although sometimes the return is in personal satisfaction. Such was the case when I was a student at Rose-Hulman, where I was the morning show host on the campus radio…
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In a heck of a spot
When I grew up on Rabbit Hill, not only could I never have imagined that I’d still be in touch with some of the kids I knew then, but I would never have guessed how they would turn out as adults. One neighborhood boy, my brother’s best friend since 1972, grew up to write copy.…
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The best rested guy in town
I’ve written before about how I’m not much of a sports fan. I don’t get sports, really. Last night, Super Bowl Sunday, I went to bed at 10 p.m. I’ll bet I was one of a handful of people sleeping here in Indianapolis given that the hometown team, the Colts, played. Unfortunately, it didn’t go…
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It’s a shame what’s happened to radio
I haven’t been on the air in almost 15 years, but people still ask me sometimes if I’d like to be a disk jockey again. Until a few years ago, I always wistfully answered yes. Not anymore. It’s not that I would be rusty as heck after all these years – and boy, would I…
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Playing by radio’s rules
I was once a part-time DJ at Terre Haute’s only rock radio station, the number two station in town. There I learned the two rules of radio – don’t date your listeners, and part-timers are in the lowest caste – in the most humiliating way.
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Pride of workmanship, part 1
Quality guru W. Edwards Deming, who helped transform Japan into an industrial powerhouse, claimed that workers who feel pride in the quality of their work are critical to a company’s success. Pride in my work is certainly critical to my satisfaction on the job, right along with being challenged and enjoying the environment. When I…