Jock Breaks Vs. Content Blocks

I was listening, for the first time in a while, to a major, successful syndicated morning show. Often, I try to handle all the listening I need to do by taping radio stations. This time, I was hearing the show in real time. Except that it quickly became clear that I wasn’t listening in real time. It might have been the assembly of the show on that station, which felt loose. It might have been a lack of time-sensitive material. It was a weekday morning, but the overall feel was like listening to a weekend “best of” show.

I’ve long written about those breaks in other dayparts that sound canned — carelessly inserted voice-tracks that sometimes stop the music for no reason; “topical” breaks ripped from yesterday’s headlines, or worse, yesterday’s celebrity Twitter. But recently, I feel like I’m hearing that more, even from those air talents who are working locally (whether at home or in-studio) on the station that is their primary employer. Together, it all adds up to a less vital, less real-time feel throughout the day.

The result is fewer “jock breaks” and more “content blocks” that don’t feel tethered to the radio station around them. A decade ago, the content-driven hosts and shows that did this deliberately, John Tesh in particular, were the exceptions. But that show is built around its non-music content. It’s different when you’re hearing the third on-air personality in 18 hours read to you about the debut of the Chicken Big Mac. It all contributes to the “choppier” radio pacing (or lack thereof) that Dick Taylor took issue with recently.

Over the years, the “jock break” has become easily ridiculed as a relic of a time when “hitting the post” mattered. Industry leaders have long derided the notion that somebody might “get paid to sit around and read the paper” in between four breaks an hour, especially if the entirety of that break was “lite rock, less talk.”  Some owners and managers were sincere in that belief. Some were trying to justify the budget tightening they could not avoid anyway. It was a reasonable-sounding concern, but the effect was that we’ve devalued the need to say something impactful in the exact moment.

I asked Facebook friends if any of them were still doing a radio show in real time on a daily basis. I heard from 20 who were, and another 10 or so who were mostly live (e.g., all but the first or last hour of a shift or tracking some breaks but only a few minutes ahead). Several of the hosts in real time were from the Beasley New Jersey or Delaware Valley stations, such as WDHA Morristown’s Terrie Carr, who noted that it included her station’s night shift as well. 

I heard from Mason Kelter, whose syndicated nightly LiveLine was launched specifically to address those CHR stations that could no longer do nights in real time. Also from veteran programmer/management consultant Jay Meyers about Classic Hits WSBH (Beach 98.5) Melbourne, Fla., which is “fully live” from mornings through 7 p.m. and has been consistently successful for the last 15 years. But those are exceptions for a reason. When KNDE College Station, Texas, PD Robbie Mack wrote that “all four hours are live,” another PD friend responded that he “can’t imagine having the time do that.”

Veteran programmer/station owner Rick Peters says that his stations are “all tracked day of.” But he also notes that everything is in-house, so his stations were able to respond to the death of Queen Elizabeth II a day earlier. That led Dave Van Dyke to comment that Peters’ stations were the exceptions. “Monitoring seven voice-tracked stations yesterday, it took 55 minutes for the story to appear on the first station after it broke.” (Another commenter noted that if jocks were really trying to sound live, they’d stop posting pictures of log screens that say “insert voice track.”)

This is not an anti-voice-tracking rant. It’s a brief for radio making better use of all our resources, whatever they are; for continuing to value immediacy in radio; for continuing to see each jock break as an opportunity to have an impact with the listener and demonstrate the value of radio. It is encouragement for radio to set itself apart from Spotify, which began offering content blocks two years ago with the launch of The Get Up morning show built around the user’s playlist. That show apparently ended without fanfare in the spring.

For those hosts who are local and in real-time, it’s a plea to make sure that listeners can tell, and to sound some way in the moment — even if it’s just in the way you respond to the music, or in looking for content that was not everywhere else yesterday, or doing more with your topical breaks than “see the whole story on my Facebook page.” In today’s radio, it’s clear that nobody is sitting around waiting to read a liner card. Many personalities are doing the second show on social media now expected of them, something which can either make the on-air show sound more vital or less.

For those breaks not done in real time, there is still the opportunity to be more local, more personal, more vital, less generic. All of those things make for better live and local communication as well. 

This spring, I suggested that one remedy for those stations that can only afford one local shift might be more regional networking, allowing six such stations to become one super-station with more consistently local hosting. I still think that offers broadcasters a better way of dealing with today’s realities. I’ve also suggested a smaller number of local stations with more of a commitment to being truly local, and letting the national radio that exists to sound bigger-than-life, not “fake local.”

Just as broadcasters were able to sound convincing when they made the case against real time, we already have decades of proof that audiences are perfectly happy with some radio that is neither live nor local. As with voice-tracking, the broadcasters most fervently reminding us of that may be doing so from sincerity or expediency. I can’t promise that a jock break that is more personal, more urgent, not a mere content block, will be radio’s silver bullet. I can tell you that the listeners who chose us among their many options will be getting more of what they came to radio for.