Radio and Blogging

 It was twenty years ago this month that I left my last radio job, after 24 years in the business. I thought for sure that I would miss it, because I was once so enthusiastic about the sheer fun of it, but I was wrong. Over those years, deregulation and corporate takeovers changed the industry so much that I went from gleefully working overtime to carefully craft a show all the way to supervising four computer-controlled radio stations and punching a clock because I had to support a family. But I learned a lot during those years. I was mostly a disc jockey, but I also worked in news, copy writing, ad production, promotions, and programming. Radio programming strangely influenced my blogging habits.

Bloggers come in many types. Some enthusiastically post about their area of expertise. Others are writers at heart and live to type out their thoughts or interests. Some pass along fun or interesting things they've found on the internet when they find them. And some are desperate to create content on a schedule to make a living. Yes, many bloggers fit into more than one category. I started blogging to make friends at a time when I was desperately lonely. My personal blog became my hobby, and it led to a career of writing for other blogs, but I kept this one out of habit, for fun, and to keep friends coming back. And it's an easy way to express my limited creativity. 


For the first few years, I posted only once a day, on a single subject, but those posts were crafted to present a variety of elements- links, jokes, pictures, comics, and videos. Then my boss at Neatorama advised me it would be easier and more productive (and way more flexible) to put up short posts several times a day and I've done that ever since. But there is a sort of method to the madness.  

See, in free entertainment like radio or broadcast TV, the product is not the entertainment, but the audience, which is sold to advertisers. The bigger the audience, the more they can charge for advertising. On the programming side, our job was to produce the biggest audience possible. Therefore a radio show should give the listener what they want, which they say is "variety," but they also want to hear their favorite song.

Programming radio involved a ton of rules, which may be very different today. Each hour is crafted to deliver the right number of current hits, brand new songs, classic oldies, the weather forecast, and the obligatory ads. We made broadcast clocks to keep this straight for each hour, which were round because everyone understood analog clocks back then. These clocks varied by the type of station format and the time of day, but they were mostly consistent in theory. For example, we might play four top hits every hour, so if you have a category of Top 20 songs, you'd hear the same one every five hours, except we would have 21 on the list so they didn't show up at the same minute in a different hour. We might have three oldies an hour, which wasn't repetitive at all if you had a library of 2,000 oldies, and that category could be split into power oldies and obscure oldies if that worked. The ad slots would be formatted so that they didn't come too often or were too long (if we could manage that). We also had some goofy formatting tricks to goose the ratings -or at least we hoped. 

The disc jockey once had some leverage within these formatting rules, like selecting the oldies you wanted as long as they hadn't been played in two weeks or whatever. We could also change the order of songs a bit to improve flow, as long as the system held up. We dropped songs to make the time work or talk more. I was once involved in designing clocks and a music rotation system for a new station, and it was quite involved. We didn't have internet yet, but we used a computer for databases and some math help. Still there were late night arguments about what oldies or recurrent songs deserved to be played and how often.

Some of you have already figured out how this loose regimen has influenced my blogging. It wasn't conscious at the time, but I started scheduling this blog like a radio clock, except for a day at a time instead of an hour. I knew if I didn't have a consistent schedule, I'd have twenty posts up in one evening, and then nothing for the next two days. I keep a code for each post on a large calendar and fill them out as I schedule a post in the categories of videos, links, pictures, social media sharing, etc etc. You are used to the 6AM cat (or other animal). If I have ten cat pictures, I can schedule them for the next ten days in a row. The 3AM video is always a rerun from quite a few years ago. Pictures are often scheduled way ahead, while the videos are often last minute decisions.  

Still, this blog is a hobby and I don't depend on it for a living. I don't care about SEO or competing for clicks. If I miss a slot or throw in something extra, I don't care because I know I've got plenty of other slots covered. Most folks only visit a blog once a day at most. Sure it's silly to be so regimented, but in some areas of life, regimentation makes things easier, like always brushing your teeth before bed or watering plants on the weekend. It doesn't make any difference in the long run, but I thought I'd let you know how it's done.