My radio career began with seven years of playing top-40 hits. I grew up idolizing radio disc jockeys and once I accepted the fact that I would never be able to hit a curveball, being on the radio was the only thing I wanted to do with my life. I got the chance straight out of high school but as I aged through my 20s I got tired of contests designed for fourteen-year-olds. Playing “Mandy” and “Midnight at the Oasis” every hour and fifteen minutes started eating my brain. Most of all, though, I wasn’t doing what I wanted. I got into radio to be a star, not just to read promo liners:
(Over 12-second music intro:)
“Super-Q wants to jet you off to Hawaii! Listen for the sound of monkeys playing in the palm trees and be the first to call 555-WHBQ!”
(Hit the vocal: “YOU’RE HAVIN’ MY BABY. What a lovely way of saying how much you love me….”)
I just made that up. I’ve still got it.
Music radio was changing and I was growing up. I wanted to entertain and inform an audience by saying interesting things. As I tried to figure out how to go about it, I got dragged into a newsroom and was soon given an early evening talk show. (I don’t remember the details of that transition. Still seems weird.)
The next thing I knew I was taking over the number one morning show in Sacramento and goofing with the news a bit. My excellent partners, Bob Nathan and later, Amy Lewis, and I achieved 20 years of the highest ratings in Sacramento history. The record still stands 30 years later.
All we did was talk like real people. No hype, no pretense. We didn’t act smarter than our listeners. If a story was questionable, we questioned it. If it sounded dumb or we didn’t care about it, we said that.
The truth is, I never cared about the news.
Through 44 years of successful morning news shows in major markets, right up until the day I retired two months ago, I never really gave a rip about news and still don’t.
I never wanted to be a journalist and have never been a news junkie. Don’t get me wrong, I respect people who are and couldn’t have succeeded without them. I do care about the world but I have a decidedly laissez-faire approach to life. If a situation is none of my business or if there’s a problem I can’t solve, I’m not going to get worked up about it. It’s like the old joke about why you should never try to teach a pig to sing: It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
I know. Some of you are outraged, right? Listen to me, here, I’ve been saying this to my bosses and coworkers forever: I’m a radio guy, that’s all. I’m a nice person, a good friend, and a loving family man but I am not a journalist. Frankly, the word kind of annoys me the way some people use it to claim their exalted intellect, concern, and nobility more than, say, a disc jockey.
When I got into news, all I cared about was doing my job on the air as well as possible. It didn’t matter to me if I was playing records, taking phone calls, or reading newscasts. I was hired to attract and hold the attention of an audience. To do that, I had to be informative, interesting, and entertaining. Reading news is easy. Having people enjoy it is not.
What about credibility? Good question.
If you didn’t see something happen, you’re only repeating someone else’s account. By the time you’ve rewritten a piece of wire copy or a local newspaper item, it has been through a dozen rounds of the telephone game. No telling how many details or implications are precisely true. And that’s fine, just don’t pretend you’re some kind of authority. You’re just a town crier. Nothing wrong with that but you’re not looking for a cancer cure, either.
So, be honest about that. Be real.
Just be you.
Now, I’m talking about how to be a radio news presenter/host. The business of gathering, writing, and reporting news does indeed require effort and a degree of expertise that isn’t always acknowledged. You chose that pursuit and we all thank you. But, once you sit down at a hot mic, don’t be a dick about it, okay?
Reading and talking about the news isn’t brain surgery but it does require talent and hard-earned skill. I worked at it, and you know what? I did pretty well. I gave my employers and listeners what they wanted and I did it proudly. The only thing I couldn’t do was be pompous. When I got that first morning news show I decided to tell the news, not preach it.
This wasn’t an original idea. I’m no radio historian but in my world, entertaining news started with Ken Minyard and Bob Arthur at KABC in Los Angeles in the early 70s. They didn’t have a huge staff of reporters and writers as did crosstown all-news rival KNX, which delivered news – and still does – with unbiased authority. Ken and Bob’s resources were a teletype machine and the L.A. newspapers. They didn’t just read the news, they talked about it. They gave you the information and then examined it. The duo exchanged views and wondered aloud about what was not said in the official reports.
They talked about the news as if they were at Waffle House with a few friends.
They laughed a lot, and so did we all.
The Ken and Bob Company was Los Angeles’ #1-rated radio show for almost 20 years.
In the 1970s and ’80s, San Francisco’s KGO Morning News with Jim Dunbar and Ted Wygant was the radio version of iconic local newspaper columnist Herb Caen, whose Pulitzer Prize award described him as the “voice and conscience” of San Francisco. Dunbar and Wygant made you feel special for waking up each morning in Caen’s famous “Baghdad-by-the-Bay”.
And, understand this: Dunbar and Wygant were fun and lovable but never at the expense of being trusted and believable. That’s the crazy thing about the “image” issue some have with News Radio: the credibility nonsense.
One morning I had one of the most respected local radio reporters in the country sitting in the studio with me waiting to go on the air. This guy was a local reporter with nationwide acclaim. He was an actual journalist.
As we waited for the commercial break to end he said to me, “If I was News Director here, I’d never allow you to do commercial endorsements.” It came out of left field. We hadn’t been talking about anything, we were just waiting for the recorded spots to end. As we waited I asked him, “You don’t think the audience is smart enough to know the difference between a news story and a commercial?” He brushed it off as a matter of credibility.
This man was a superstar reporter. He knew his job as well as anyone I’ve ever met. But he didn’t understand mine.
Despite what you may infer from social media, people aren’t stupid. They understand the difference between news and commercials and between fact and opinion. They like people who respect them and approach them with some modesty.
While we’re all trying to figure out how to save our industry from evil corporations and bankers maybe it’s time we focus on ourselves:
– Nobody cares about your academic degree except your parents. I respect and admire you for having one, but don’t wave it around with your condescending attitude.
– As smart as you may be you’ll be a little smarter tomorrow. Nobody cares about that, either, though you should.
– The serious pronoun problem in American radio today has nothing to do with gender, it is the one-letter pronoun, “I”. Stop already.
-Above all, remember that you have a gift. You are a communicator. Be proud of that, be passionate, be honest, and have fun.
Never, ever, crack that mic with anything less than gratitude and humility.
