If you read the trades, you probably saw the recent announcement that KDKA radio in Pittsburgh is trying something new with overnights. They’ve turned it over to students from the University of Pittsburgh! What a great idea! I’m placing a bet that my friend, Dave Labrozzi, who recently announced his retirement from the station, had something to do with it.
The new show, Next Take, airs five mornings a week from 1 to 5 AM. I haven’t had a chance to hear it yet, because we retired folks tend to go to sleep early, but I want to give it a listen and hear what these students are coming up with for content.
In the past, talent came up through the ranks, usually by working in a very small market for low pay. The next move up was to a bigger market doing nights or overnights. Eventually, if you were good enough and had the drive and desire, you worked for a major station in a major market doing a daytime shift for real money and fame.
But is that possible today? Talk to anyone in the industry and ask about young people using broadcast radio, even if they can stream it. Do we compete well with Spotify, podcasts, and satellite? Can we still pull in solid audiences?
It seems that every day, the trades have an announcement of another veteran radio person ending up “on the beach”. I was shocked to see that my friend, Val Garris, was “out the door” at Cumulus. He had been there so long that it’s not Cumulus without him. The carnage isn’t restricted to commercial radio. Just the other day, one of the stalwarts of public radio, WAMU in Washington, ended their DCist project and informed 15 people that they would need to find other sources of employment.
If you were considering a career in media, either as a college student or a high school student just starting out, would you want to go into radio after reading about our industry? And if you did, where would you start? College radio is great (full disclosure: I spent ten years in college radio including two stints as a PD and one as a student general manager), but at some point, you’ll leave the bosom of the university and have to go to work. Where do you start?
Long ago when I was the student general manager of the carrier current system at Michigan State (this was prior to the advent of WDBM-FM, which was delayed for years due to having an analog channel 6 in Lansing), I approached the late Steve Meuché the general manager of WKAR radio and TV, MSU’s public broadcasting operation. WKAR-FM was a blowtorch, one of those “superpower” FMs that ran 125,000 watts at the time. Michigan is a pretty flat state, so the signal could just about reach most of the Detroit suburbs as well as Grand Rapids to the west. At the time, the station signed off at 1 AM each morning.
I pitched Steve on letting the students have the hours between 1 AM and sign on on Friday and Saturday nights. We’d program the alternative rock format that was on our student operation most of the time and it would give our kids the chance to be heard over the air (carrier current could only be heard on AM in the dorms and not very well, plus we had a cable FM link which not many people knew about).
Steve was a great guy, gave our demo tape a listen, but I think the rest of his staff was not excited about mixing ‘80s alternative in with the classical music that ran during much of WKAR-FM’s day in the ‘80s. Once again, I was a little ahead of the curve.
So, I’ve been there and done that but without success. Congratulations to the minds that came up with this idea, ran with it, and brought it to fruition. I hope it succeeds, not because the various syndicated overnight shows are not good, but because radio needs a “farm team” to build talent.
Perhaps if this shows some level of success, however KDKA chooses to measure it, other stations will do the same. Considering how much revenue we see from overnights (yes, I’m being snarky here), what do we have to lose?
Let’s meet again next week.
