I know these guys on the oldies stations could slip on “Inna Godda DaVida” and prolly go home for dinner, but still, other than the mandatory Station Identification and Weather, just what exactly is there to do as a radio announcer? Sounds like a cush job ta me…
organise the next segment?
Pick their noses.
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Get music ready for the whole hour. Unless your station is running off a hard drive system or a syndicated feed, your music is still on carts or CDs. You can check the program log for the next hour and pull all your music ahead of time so you’re never stuck with dead air.
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Pull commercials for the next several stop sets. See above. When I was working a sports-talk station, I always came in and pulled spots for the hour ahead of time, so I wasn’t suddenly stuck running across the room to grab a cart.
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Record network feeds. You might have a commercial feed coming over the satellite, or a syndicated program, that will air at a later time/date. You have to record it on reel/cart/hard drive. Or you might have to tape a network feed of news sound bites for the news director, dub them off onto carts and label them with content, length, incues and outcues.
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Dub commercials from reels onto cart or some other playback system for air.
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Fill out program/fulfillment logs for the traffic department, to verify that a program and its associated commercials ran.
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Do transmitter readings.
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Answer phone calls.
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Tell your annoying PD or GM to shut the hell up and get out of the studio because you’re going on in 5 seconds.
My father became a radio DJ in the 50’s in an attempt to combat severe stuttering. He was very popular with the listeners, but not the advertisers, because he played a great many hour-long sets while he sat in his chair gasping for breath, trying to get enough control to read the spots.
pldennison tells it like it is. Like many things it sounds cushy on the surface, but there’s a great deal more behind the scenes.
For one thing, your air shift is shorter than your work day because there will always be production duties assigned—recording spots, PSAs, promos and the like. At small stations, jocks often have additional responsibilites. Some do sales for a couple of accounts. Most have remote broadcasts from car dealers to supermarket openings, often on weekends when they should be with their family. Some end up with news responsibilites, which usually means covering a boring city council or school board meeting for 3-4 hours to get 15 seconds of news.
Plus there are meetings (usually mandatory, and set for an inconvenient time).
And if you’re doing your job right, you’re also spending time working on cross-promotions and bits with your fellow jocks, some of which can get quite involved.
It isn’t quite the hassle it used to be, what with computers and precision editing equipment, but there was also a fair amount of concentration required to run a tight board with no dead air, backtime the music to go into network newscasts and other scheduled features dead on AND to be clever and entertaining so that you wouldn’t be another personality-challenged time & temp robot.
And as for production, it used to take forever to get some of the effects we were after, editing with a razor blade and all.
On the positive side, you get positve egoboost (which was wonderful as a teenager and still welcome 30+ years later) and generally get to find out about stuff earlier than other folks. Oh, and jocks usually have huge record collections.
In college I had a radio show from 6-10 am three times a week. Getting up at five minutes before six wasn’t so much a problem as was the intrusion into my normal morning routine which normally meant taking a dump. (Yes, I’ve read the wonderful post about defecating in GD). When I felt that old urge coming on I’d queue up a nice long 7-8 minute song of which there were only two on my ‘authorized’ playlist and set that record a-spinning (this was back in the days of vinyl). The radio station was on the third floor and the nearest toilet was on the first floor. So I’d quickly waddle down three flights of stairs, do my business and run back up three flights before that song ran out. As near as I can remember I never suffered the dreaded dead-air and never dirtied my britches. Who says being a DJ requires no special skills?
Oh yeah, don’t forget smoke breaks. You’d be absolutely amazed at the number of DJs that smoke. I’d estimate 70-80% in this building alone. Strange that I’ve never seen them need to use the cough button for extended periods of time.
And as pldennison said, but I’ll elaborate: answering phones. Most DJs don’t have producers and so they’re there answering all the phone calls from listeners. This includes requests, “be the 101st caller!” and just people who have nothing better to do than call up the station and chat. If it’s a song request they not only have to find the song through the drawers (if it’s not digitally in the system), but often times have to cut the tape to play the person asking for the request on the air.
Oh yes, and the people call back 15 minutes later saying “I haven’t heard my song yet. When’s it gonna be on?”
I dated several DJs when I lived in Baltimore during the '70s . . . I would tell you what we did in the booth while the music was playing, but I’d hate to see your prim, ladylike image of me shattered . . .
I worked as a DJ at a station WITH the automated computer systems mentioned earlier. And I can tell you it was the most boring job I ever had.
Having learned the trade in high school and college in the '80s, I was used to manually running a board, sometimes even in 6 second delay for call-in shows (doing THAT manually was a trip, let me assure you).
So I found myself with very little to do at this modern station. Everything that went over the air was run off a computer hard drive. I never touched a cart or CD. I felt more like a computer technician than a DJ.
There was some busy work in the way of promotions and taping stuff, but mostly I just read books in between my announcements. I didn’t keep the job for long.
More and more shows, especially outside of the peak morning and evening periods, are prerecorded, and the DJs don’t wait around while the music plays. Instead, they sit in a studio and record their part of the program ahead of time on computers. The computers then handle the playing of the songs, merging this with the prerecorded announcements.
I have not seen a commercial radio station that used carts in at least six years. I don’t know if any do anymore. Probably some college stations without the commercial funding do, but commercial stations I have seen are either totally hard-disk based, replaced all their carts with minidiscs or did something a bit more unconventional like used CDs or (strangely) DATs instead of carts.
One thing none of you mentioned which DJs also do (in less automated situations) is fill out endless music logs so that the station and the record companies will know how often a song is played and when. It’s a pain in the ass.
What are these “carts” that everybody’s referring to?
Do you recall 8-tracks? This is the recordable version. Nice, durable and cheap, mostly.
Basically, carts are homemade audio cassettes with a loop that takes it back to be the beginning of the tape each time. The are of a specfic length to correspond to the length of ads sold by the sales staff.
They are placed into their own cassette players which will begin when the DJ hits their play button.
I worked my way through high school and college on AM top 40 radio as “TV on the Radio”. As someone said earlier, it can be an incredibly boring job. Drive time isn’t bad but did any of you exjocks every pull the midnight to six shift?
So Eve you were a “DJ dolly?”
I had a best friend 20-odd years ago who used to do the midnight to 5 am weekend shift on a Scottish radio station. His girlfriend would frequently drop by while he was working for a “conjugal visit.” Robbie would put on an LP (back in the day) & they would scrump like weasels until the LP was over.
Sounds like a cush job ta me…
–Actually it’s a disappearing job. As more radio frequencies are being purchased by a few large companies the stations are automating, many by satellite.
A friend of mine says Clear Channel Communications has plans for 25 jocks to handle drive shifts at 25 stations apiece. This math still leaves 'em with 200 other stations not in the equation, but the future seems pretty clear.
The local DJ is headed in the same direction as buggy-whip makers and paddlewheel pilots.
It isn’t a cushy job for the most part.
I was at a radio station a few years ago that still used carts, vinyl, and had a very old board to work on.
Keeping the logs was a pain in the ass, not to mention recording the feed from Pacifica on reel to reel.
Rarely is the job cushy, even when you are at a big station with producers and production assistants helping you out.
It’s POSSIBLE that, during late night shifys when few people (including the station executives) are lisetening, a DJ COULD get away with slacking off during business hours.
However, if a DJ is working the morning or afternoon drive times, the most important hours from a business standpoint, the DJ has a LOT to do.
A few years ago, I got to see a local morning show team doing a live broadcast from a blood bank, where they were trying to drum up donations. I have to say, I was impressed by just how busy, how detail-oriented, how professional they were, all while FAKING being relaxed, laid-back, casual and folksy! The clock is all-important during the morning rush hours, and they have a LOT to do in a very short amount of time. As goofy as the DJs may have sounded to the audience (truth is, a lot of their schtick was mighty lame!), they had to work very hard to DO that schtick, while playing all the commericials, news broadcasts, etc., at the proper time.
So, there’s a LOT more to pulling off a radio show during drive time than you’d think, just listening at home. Sure, it’s a lot easier than digging ditches, and the pay and perks CAN be great- but your morning DJ is not sitting around twiddling his thumbs while a song plays.
Cassette is not the best word to describe carts. They’re closer in nature to 8-tracks, but not exactly the same thing.
Like 8-tracks, they feature an endless loop of 1/4-inch tape wound into a protective plastic housing. The tape is pulled from the center spool, passed by the play head of the cart machine, and wound back onto the loop. An inaudible tone is imposed when they’re recorded that, when sensed, stops or “cues up” the tape at that point, so the beginning of the commercial or promo announcement is always right there when the play button is pressed.
I worked the longest regular on-air shift of anyone I’ve ever known in the radio biz – 11:30 pm to 6:00 am six days a week – at a country station in 1974. I did get to track an album and take a bit of a break between 3:30 and 4:00 am, but otherwise, I was on the whole time.
As others have said, with phone calls and all, I never got bored. You should hear what some people want to talk about at that time of night, actually!