It is a long-running discussion among radio’s on-air hosts. Are you a disc jockey? Or an air personality? The latter are inclined to regard “disc jockey” as too old-school, but the other is often derided as pretentious. “Disc jockeys do weddings,” says programmer-turned-broadcast-instructor Len O’Kelly. “I’m fine with DJ, but my, oh my, that rubs some radio types the wrong way,” says Mike Wiethorn. New England radio veteran Robert Welch jokes that the difference is “$50 a week.”
That might be the case even more now. The “jock vs. personality” discussion returned to the fore last week during the radio panels at the NAB Show New York. On a panel of group programmers, iHeart’s Executive VP of Programming Thea Mitchem made clear that Breakfast Club co-host Angela Yee would be the latter when she launched her national midday show in January, not playing 12 in a row. “I’d rather take a risk on a raw talent that is unpolished, but has a lot of upside, than a seasoned jock,” added Audacy Executive VP/Head of Programming Jeff Sottolano.
The need for personality, as radio’s point of differentiation, was a theme throughout NAB radio sessions. It has been a regular theme of this column as well. A few weeks ago, this column bemoaned the rise of seemingly interchangeable content blocks, often making no attempt to sound live or in the moment. Last week, there was a discussion of how personalities could best use the breaks allotted to them that seemed to resonate for many readers. Mitchem, Sottolano, and their colleagues on the panel are correct that radio needs to add young talent, and that we’re far over quota already for the generic.
And here’s the good news:
If broadcasters are in search of air personalities, not jocks, many of them are already in their employ. Even now, the largest percentage of on-air hosts already regard themselves as personalities, not DJs. But that hasn’t been their brief. Air personalities were often squelched 15 years ago when PPM measurement took hold. Many are doing 12-in-a-row, waiting for the chance to be personalities again.
To be fair, some are probably perfectly happy being jocks. On my first PD job, I replaced the liner cards in the air studio with bullet points and conversation-starters. Soon, I heard one host stringing together the bullet points verbatim to sound like a liner card. There are a lot of hosts happily willing to spend one of their four breaks an hour on “coming up, music from When in Rome, Wild Cherry, and Cutting Crew” (because they will inevitably choose the artists from whom you play one song).
But not every air talent made that choice for themselves. They’re also limited by the logistics of today’s radio. Faced with multiple stations to voice-track, it’s easy for even the best air personalities to default to artist billboards or yesterday’s celebrity news. Angela Yee is likely going to be doing one show without the need to pretend that she’s in your market. It’s one more reason why clearly regional or national super-stations and shows would be better than compromised local ones.
Air personality vs. jock doesn’t have to be a generational distinction, or a zero-sum discussion. As with the discussion about traditional vs. contemporary country, where the real hits often contain some element of both, the jock/air personality distinction is best blurred. LiveLine host Mason Kelter’s entire mission is to claim a new generation of listeners for evening radio. He’s doing so in a template inspired by John Garabedian, who was already a 20+-year veteran when Open House Party debuted in the late ’80s. Similarly, the late Art Laboe had found a foothold among listeners many generations younger by the time almost all of us knew who he was.
On one hand, WCBS-FM New York afternoon host Bill Lee has been definingly a “jock’s jock” for most of his career. The creative writing and energy Lee brings to his show has made him a personality as well. Lee is one of the on-air hosts who has most successfully found a place on social media, and what people are coming to see him do is be a jock. That likely includes not just his peers but some younger listeners. Sometimes what those younger listeners want is entirely beyond a previous generation’s frame of reference, but sometimes it’s Postmodern Jukebox or “Running Up That Hill.”
At the programmers panel, the “jocks vs. personalities” discussion and the “12-in-a-row” discussion melded together as totems of “the old radio that we have to reinvent.” But they’re really two separate discussions. Air talent aren’t the ones responsible for “12-in-a-row” radio. If radio isn’t compelling now, that came from programmers — generally those who were group PDs and consultants a decade before our NAB panelists — and researchers who enthusiastically pushed PPM dogma, even as satellite radio and Pandora made inroads. As for 12-in-a-row, it goes back much further. The entire multi-generational history of music radio is stripping personality down to nothing, then recognizing the need to start over.
It’s also worth mentioning that by itself, “12-in-a-row” won’t save radio, but we’re still selling a lot of it. Continuous music isn’t considered a defensible franchise anymore, and yet the most successful stations continue to be Mainstream AC radio stations, many of them still doing well by offering “more music and better variety,” no matter how boilerplate that sounds to me. The best ones, like WLTW (Lite FM) New York, have hosts for whom personality is a matter of quality, not quantity. They are the reason that I continue to seek out Lite FM, even though I’m unlikely to ever stream a playlist of the same music. (It also says something that a WLTW segue like “Candle in the Wind ’87” into “That’s What I Want” is still a mix not easily replicated out-of-context.)
I’ve been derisive over the years about radio’s “original social network” claims. But as panelists at various sessions on Thursday morning talked about the need for talent that was promotion-minded, radio can legitimately claim a 50-year head start on TikTok for wacky stunts. Only the social media aspect is new, and as WCBS-FM New York morning host Scott Shannon noted when he received NAB’s Impact Award later that day, the value of our talent in other venues stems from what they do on the radio. That will increase when we again let them do more on the radio. Ryan Seacrest, recipient of the NAB Distinguished Service Award at the Marconis is the ultimate example of an empire that began with being a surprisingly good air talent at a prodigious age.
I went into NAB New York discouraged after a week of undeniable loss in radio—the abrupt departure of KGO San Francisco, the death of Art Laboe (and BDSradio’s Adam Foster, who helped bring you many Ross on Radio columns), and another round of major group cutbacks. In previous years, I hadn’t usually gone to the Marconi Awards. This year, there was something particularly therapeutic about being in a roomful of broadcasters. I left with the belief that radio still has the ability to choose sunrise or sunset. To take full advantage of our strengths, it will be appropriate to both reinvent and retrofit what we have.
