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Chris Ebbott Named New KRTH PD



Program directors have not picked the music for many decades in most formats. They are the curators of the song lists that the listeners have selected via music testing.

What PDs do is extensive. Daily music logs, generally involving hours a week of editing and fine tuning, are just the start. Airchecking and guiding the talent takes considerable time, as do things like scheduling for vacations, weekend talent or voice tracking and such. Writing liners and sweepers and promos, plus getting those not delivered live is a regular chore. Working on sales based promotions with management, developing station promotions and other such tasks are also part of the job. Time sheets, HR and contracts are another part of the duties. Meetings online with other similar format stations in a company are often done to share experiences. Meetings with the manager and the group PD over operations, budgets, legal matters and such are also part of the job. Plus there are all kinds of reports for HR, EEO compliance and such to maintain. And the biggest new part of the job is new media integration, ranging from the station site two tweets and Facebook presence. And then add in ratings and research analysis and it's a pretty extensive job

I knew PDs have a heavy duty job. What is the salary range for a big market FM music station these days? Is it 80-100? 100-120? 120-140? I have no idea. Whatever it is I wonder if these people have any time for themselves; sounds like you'd have to work from 5 am - midnight to get all that done .....
 
I can almost hear the entire audience changing stations as it begins to play.

Maybe not in 1974, but in 2014, with your playlist now full of Huey Lewis, Whitney Houston and Madonna ... yeah, nobody would be listening, even the oldies geeks because they probably tuned out when "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" or "The Power of Love" came on.
 
Actually in 1985...

That's nearly a third of a century ago.

As a frame of reference, that was when an IBM PC-XT had 640 k of memory, an 8086 processor and it came with a 10 mb hard drive and it cost $5,000.

Another world. Positively ancient.
 
Ancient indeed. I remember having a TRS-80 Model 1 in the early eighties. Memory was on floppy disks with around 86,000 bytes apiece. I invested $1500 in an external hard drive that had a then mindblowing capacity I thought would last me forever - 5 megabytes!.

That is where some of us candidates for the geriatric ward are when it comes to disc jockeys as well. I remember how KMPC's Ira Cook programmed his show - always a Hawaiian tune or two and frequently a song you "didn't expect to hear" to surprise his listeners. He also hosted the "Lucky Lager Dance Time" program in Los Angeles on KFAC and later KMPC. Andy and Virginia Mansfield over on KFI had an oldies program in the morning as well - "Turn Back rhe Clock" - mostly featuring songs from Mansfield's personal collection.

These to me were real DJ's - picking much of their own music and entertaining an audience. Both had programs on he Armed Forces Radio Network. Ancient? Yes - over a half century go. DJ's today seldom have such discretion, everything now is ratings and demographic focused, but some of us still remember.
 
Art, I'm sure you remember the old KGRB, which was at 900 AM from 1960 to 1995. It was owned by Gloria and Robert Burdette. The DJs played good ol'-fashioned 78-rpm phonograph records from the 1930s and '40s. It's possible that the old ecords were eventually transferred to tape but I don't know for certain. I listened to KGRB in the 1990s. I remember they had Bob Stone, Bob Mayfield, Lyman Jay and former KRLA/KIIS dj Tom Murphy. They could play whatever they wanted from the station's huge music library. The station is now Spanish-language KALI.
 
Art, I'm sure you remember the old KGRB, which was at 900 AM from 1960 to 1995. It was owned by Gloria and Robert Burdette. The DJs played good ol'-fashioned 78-rpm phonograph records from the 1930s and '40s. It's possible that the old ecords were eventually transferred to tape but I don't know for certain. I listened to KGRB in the 1990s. I remember they had Bob Stone, Bob Mayfield, Lyman Jay and former KRLA/KIIS dj Tom Murphy. They could play whatever they wanted from the station's huge music library. The station is now Spanish-language KALI.

Yes, I believe KGRB had an FM sister station KBOB as well. Unless I'm mistaken George Dvorak was there for a time after leaving KFI.

KALI has unique memories for me. I built a crystal set as a Boy Scout merit badge project in Arcadia - it brought in just two stations: KFI and KALI, the latter in Spanish from transmitting towers which still stand south of Broadway in San Gabriel. The station had a different frequency then. I don't know who, if anyone, is using the towers now.
 
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