RadioBanter - View Single Post - QUESTION ABOUT SIGN-ON/OFF ANNOUNCEMENTS

August 31st 04, 06:56 PM

On 30 Aug 2004 19:50:52 GMT, (Mark Roberts)
wrote:

Mark Howell had written:
| On 27 Aug 2004 01:44:50 GMT, (Mark Roberts)
| wrote:
|
| Music stations also didn't hate news in those days.
|
| Actually, they did, but by government edict, they had to do it.

Then why did (at least some of them) promote it so much?

It certain added to the feeling that if you didn't tune in, you
would miss something. That's been missing from most radio stations
for a long time.

Well, as I say, the better stations decided that if they must do news,
they might as well make the best of it. I worked in that kind of
operation, as well as a few where the 24/7 news coverage was nothing
more than running the network hourlies or jocks reading wire copy.
The latter operations were the majority. In the pre-deregulation
'70's a number of music stations figured out that they could game the
system by running huge amounts of mostly rip'n' read, pre-recorded
news in the overnight shift, thus clearing most of it out of the
daytime hours where it was considered by PD's to be a tune-out factor.
I worked in one of those, too. I remember one night in my wild youth,
taping a 30 minute newscast that ran at 3 AM while quite obviously
drunk. Nobody ever noticed.

Mark Howell