Kent said:
I can tell you the Clear Channel stations in my area are manned 24/7, and I was told by someone in the building that it was corporate policy to have their stations attended at all times. I also know that all of the Clear Channel clusters within 200 miles of me are attended 24/7 unless things have changed recently. If the person informed me incorrectly, then I stand corrected.
To answer your question, no, I never have worked for Clear Channel. I can't say it's something I'm too upset about, though I actually have some friends who have worked and still work for the company. Some of them hated their time there, and, believe it or not, others really enjoyed working there and felt like the company took pretty good care of them.
I have worked for some of the other large broadcasting companies, like Cumulus and Cox. The Cumulus stations I worked at were manned 24/7 as well, though I know of a few clusters in the company that weren't. The Cox stations are not and haven't been for quite some time.
I've worked for all of the companies you named at one time or another. The Cox cluster I worked in was manned 24/7. I worked for Clear Channel in a few different places, some manned overnight, some not, some part of the time but not always. Cumulus was the same. Sometimes manned, sometimes not.
I don't think there's really any rhyme or reason to it. It's how the local managers set their budget and prioritize their spending. I've found that to be true more often than not. Clear Channel for example gets a bad rep for programming decisions that are supposedly made by corporate, because often the local managers will blame corporate when they make a cut. Lemmie tell ya, if you've ever been axed in a Clear Channel budget cut, thank the local manager because he made the decision, not some faceless suit at corporate. He might have been told he would have to trim his budget by $X, but he wasn't specifically told to axe the midday person or the night jock on X station. He could have trimmed expenses elsewhere.
Overnights are an easy target. What's the worst that could go wrong? One Clear Channel station I worked at had the Prophet lock up during playback of a voicetrack. It kept repeating part of the voicetrack over and over. Kinda ruins the illusion doesn't it? A silence sensor wouldn't have caught that. I seem to remember reading about a similar incident on WKSC "KISS-FM" Chicago a few years ago. It made All Access.
I'm of the opinion that a station billing tens of millions of dollars in a market like Chicago can probably afford to staff up around the clock. It should be staffed around the clock. It's ridiculous that something like the WKSC Prophet meltdown should ever occur without a human there to intervene.
Radio as an industry has to be totally insane to think it can keep generating bigger and bigger returns for investors without investing in the product - RADIO. I loved the remark Clear Channel's Chicago GM made when he made his most recent cuts. It was something to the effect of they're "not a radio company." No, they want to be thought of as a MEDIA company and would be staffing up accordingly in 2008. It was something about hiring more graphic designers or something like that. Pathetic. You're not a MEDIA company, you're a RADIO company. Hire some friggin' RADIO PEOPLE and stop trying to find ever more creative ways to kill the golden goose. Radio is still the most pervasive and convenient delivery mechanism for audio entertainment. Talk all you want about the internet, iPods, whatever. Done right, local radio has the ability to connect with people and deliver results like no other media can.
I'm certainly not saying you shouldn't properly support your on-air product with good web design, streaming, photos, video clips, etc. You need to do all of that these days, but the on-air product must come first. Without it, you have nothing. Radio as an industry has to stop believing the hype. We're not dead, we're not dying, we're not going to lose our asses to "new media" UNLESS we allow it to happen by continuing to water down our own product.
Remember the dot com bubble and subsequent burst? That's the result of hype and fantasy gone awry. Unfortunately, that same type of fantasy about "new media" seems to be clouding the judgement of way too many radio people. The way I see it, the radio industry has two choices, either develop a search engine that kicks the s&%t out of Google and become the king of new media, or get back to operating your radio stations like radio stations. You already OWN that mountain. Act like it.
