About Live …. And Vital

Over the years, the concept of “live” has been just as enthusiastically attacked as “local,” and often for the same reason. It costs money. The necessity of doing radio in real time became an easy target of ridicule early on. “So let me get this straight. You’re saying I need to pay somebody to sit in the studio and read the newspaper for four hours so they can open the mic a few times an hour to say, ‘More music, better variety?’”

Just like any successful national content or news story of interest becomes ammo in the war against local, so does any hot TV show or podcast streamed on demand. As with local, undermining “live” was often an inside job, and sometimes with good intent. We produced our local morning shows to sound national and let imaging handle the call letters. We expanded weekend shows such as John Tesh’s that weren’t trying to sound local or in real time to every daypart.

Even “live” doesn’t always sound “alive.” Often, it feels like we are encouraging our live personalities to sound canned; trying to match them to our syndicated or voice-tracked “content islands,” rather than vice-versa. It is possible to hear those personalities delivering a perfectly written 60-second TED Talk, often in a tone and cadence influenced by podcasting or NPR. Even “good” breaks sound like they are violating a basic radio rule by talking at, not to, the listener. 

“Live” is a grey area now. When I asked Facebook friends if they were still doing a shift in real time, I heard from two dozen stations that were live from at least 6 a.m.-6 p.m., and maybe three dozen that had at least a shift or two local. In between were the PDs who did, say, three hours live and two hours voice-tracked, or the breaks cut a few minutes ahead of airtime. Boost Radio’s Mike Couchman’s hosts sometimes choose a live weekend shift so they can have a weekday off.

Those program directors who are trying to balance their shift and other demands know, of course, that nobody has had their feet up in the studio for a long time. If it’s easier for management to process, opening the mic in real time 4-6 times an hour could be positioned as something talent does between creating video and social media content. Often, that’s how the job is being positioned to talent anyway these days.

I began this recent series of articles with the intent of unhooking “live” and “local.” Those broadcasters who are unable to do one or the other are often happy to discredit both. Sometimes the two things are necessarily linked. When disaster strikes after 7 p.m., you need “local,” but if Prince or the Queen dies after 7 p.m., people just want to hear the news in real time from and commiserate with somebody.

In a week when the Radioinsight headlines are “layoffs continue,” it’s important to point out that this article is not a brief for better-living-through-voicetracking. As the Facebook responses made clear, jock breaks are coming to the listener in a lot of ways. Most could sound better and more vital. (I don’t think listeners are particularly registering our sweepers about being live or local, but they probably do notice when we announce that portions of our stations are pre-recorded.) When stations are able to be live in real time, they could do a better job of taking advantage of it. 

One of the best things syndication could offer is vitality, which makes it more dismaying to hear once-real-time national shows, particularly in mornings, that are no longer delivering that. This column is not a neutral observer on Liveline, whose host Mason Kelter is also an ROR columnist, but the nightly show is delivered in real time, often replaces local voice tracks or repurposed morning shows, and uses national scale to put hundreds of callers on the air when stations might be struggling for calls locally.

That said, not asking for calls is usually a self-fulfilling prophecy. Townsquare’s Sam Gagliardi reports constant phones and texts for WPST Trenton, N.J., afternoon host Matt Ryan. Also, we give a lot of on-air real estate to the talkback feature in our station apps. Even SiriusXM has now e-mailed me soliciting comments for Yacht Rock Radio’s “Yacht Line.” I’m not hearing a proportionate amount of actual audio. If we can get listeners back on air, it reinforces radio’s “shared experience” value and reminds the people who chose radio that they are not alone.

It’s a small thing, but stations would sound more vital if jock breaks were reconnected to the business of the radio station. The most obvious one is backselling and frontselling music, something that we should be doing anyway, because it’s something that listeners like to talk about. It seems ridiculous in the app age to suggest that jocks should do timechecks or weather again, but they are no longer crutches. They are now proof of life.

Last week, Adult R&B WKXI Jackson, Miss., readded veteran middayer Lady Vee. On Wednesday, I heard her come out of Urban Mystic’s “A Good Day,” which ends with “we’re gonna have a good time” with “sounds like a game plan to me.” The break was about the upcoming Jackson Black Rodeo. Then there was a shout-out to everybody in town for the holiday for a family reunion, including hers. I don’t know when the break was actually cut, but it was both local and in the moment.

So, is my best advice for revitalizing radio really to start hitting the post more often? That one is easily mocked, too. In the same briefs against live or local, there is usually a warning about overly romanticizing classic radio, something I will gladly stop doing when we replace it with something better. I’m all for the exercise about “how would you invent radio from the ground up now?” I’m confident that the answer is not “have a random voice talking about what Khloe Kardashian did 36 hours ago.”

It also can’t be denied that the stations that have most galvanized broadcasters over the last year are those recapturing the sound of classic radio — WGTZ (Z93) Dayton, Ohio, and now WKRP (The Oasis) Cincinnati. In the latter case, it is Randy Michaels, an early advocate of voice-tracking, who is also now helping re-create the era of full-service AC. 

I’ve spent a lot of time listening to unscoped airchecks of older radio. Some stations, including ones I revere, do turn out to be surprisingly time-and-temp- or liner-heavy. Even in that minority of cases, there is a level of enthusiasm that is not evident now (and would be harder in today’s environment to pull off, even if you wanted to). One advantage of trying to make radio more in-real-time is that if it increases listener interaction, it makes it easier for the audience that we know still chooses radio to give us the energy back.