Jock Patter

[fwmw]

I'm listening to a terrestrial radio station - it's a niche format, older skewing, and probably a bit more female leaning than I would readily admit, as I am male. The studio and transmitter are somewhere in our state.

However, the jock patter is tightly controlled. It is Sunday though.

The jock never backsells.
The weekend jocks are younger than the music, by 10-20 years.

During the week, mornings and afternoons have some actual personality, but it seems middays and nights are identical to the weekend.

If I were to read the PD's mind (I know him by name, but never met him), I would imagine he has such a tight grip on the weekenders because he fears their ad-libbing skills.

However, if I turn the coin upside down, I wonder how the weekender would ever develop any ad lib skills, beyond the Fine Art of Liner Card Reading.

If you're a DJ reading this, what did your PD (either now or Back In The Day) do to push you away from "say these exact words" to freeform discussion and conversation that still made for great radio?

I have no desire to identify the station at all and will delete any emails here that ask what the station is.

They are playing one of my favorite songs now, so...fwmw out!

 

[ChiefEngineer]

The PSA for Planned Parenthood never changed. We always had the same card for 10 years.

Only a note was added. The note indicated pregnant and knocked up are two ways to say what happened to the little girls. You could use one and not the other after someone did.

We were ALWAYS encouraged to ad lib but with the ability to ad lib came some responsibility. They WERE knocked up weren't they? At 16 it didn't seem to be a poor term but as a father of several girls I might see the old man's POV. 3 decades later....

Always talk about somewhere in town you could go, things you could do when you read the weather.

At WNAP we were told to read Cosmo to bond with our target demo female listeners. GAG

This is an area that takes TIME to impress upon jocks, weekend or other. You don't have the time. With 20 transmitters and another 10 to build how can we impress upon jocks the things they NEED to know? Cant. Conversation usually comes and time is spent after (knocked up) or another similar comment makes it to the air.

 

[reformed]

Could another possibility be that the weekend jocks are just lazy or "burning off" their shift on the weekend after putting more of an effort into their weekday shift? Just a shot in the dark, as we don't know which station or PD we're talking about, but I have worked with plenty of jocks with plenty of talent and very little work ethic, especially when it comes to their required weekend duties. Great sounding jocks turn in to liner readers on Sunday afternoon.

As for me, I was raised in radio to make my own way and occasionally I'd get pulled back by the PD, but that was 20 years ago. Today, especially in one of the "big box" stations, it's lower pay, worse hours and "here kid, read this." What a shame.

 

[fwmw]

Could another possibility be that the weekend jocks are just lazy or "burning off" their shift on the weekend after putting more of an effort into their weekday shift?

Oh, that wasn't obvious in my first post. No, I'm talking about a true weekend person - different, and younger people from the more older/experienced weekday DJ's.

 

[PTBoardOp94]

I think that some of the weekend jocks are told to suck. Why do I think this? When they fill-in during the week, they suddenly get a lot better.

 

[BobRoss]

Could another possibility be that the weekend jocks are just lazy or "burning off" their shift on the weekend after putting more of an effort into their weekday shift?

There's no excuse for great full-time jocks to suddenly become dull liner-readers on the weekend. Even without doing tons of prep to come up with original content, any decent full-timer should be able to at least re-word the liners, even a little bit, on the fly.

When I was in radio, the PD encouraged part-timers to listen to the full-timers. (In this particular market, many of the part-timers are brand new to radio.) At the time, all 3 of them had been in radio for at least 10 years each, some of them at the station for 10 years or more. The idea wasn't necessarily to imitate the full-timers, but to at least get a feel for how much you can ad-lib - when, where, how much talking you can safely get away with before it goes too far.

When I became a full-timer who had a bit of a role overseeing the part-timers, I finally saw the flip-side. Even when you have really good part-timers who show potential, sometimes they just refuse to let go of that safety net. Either they're just too afraid to stray from the liner cards, or if they do, they tank. Miserably. Some people get it, some people don't. You can't really "teach" ad-libbing, even if you tell people they can ad-lib. Either way, I partly agree with PTBoardOp94... I don't think part-timers are "told" to suck on the weekends, but they certainly get better with weekday experience. It's a lot easier to learn something and become better at it when you do it 5 days in a row, as opposed to one or two days a week.

One good way to give part-timers more experience than usual -- if you don't have a live overnight person, let the part-timers voicetrack that shift. Granted, voicetracking doesn't "feel" the same as doing it live... and it might be tough to pretend it's 2am when it's really 6pm. But it gets them in the studio every day, talking into the microphone. And since voicetracking is basically a non-stop talk session, it might get them to realize how boring the liner cards can sound after reading the same one three times in 20 minutes (even though they might air 2-3 hours apart from each other). Do a rotation, so everyone takes turns doing a week of overnight voicetracking.

 

[1316wwood]

I would have thought the phrase "Jock Patter" would be banned by the FCC.

Hey, she had/was quite the "Jock Patter".

Didn't "Jock Patter" do 70's porn before he became a dj?

Ok I'm done now. Sorry.

We now return to your reguarly scheduled posts....

 

[sclohonet]

When I started in radio 25-30 years ago, it was at full service A.C. stations where we were encouraged to ad lib, create features, be creative, etc.

Later in life, when I worked for "More Music, Less Talk" stations, I still was able to be creative and local by tossing in a word or two during a song intro or outro.

If a P.D. only wants liner jocks, he/she should just let the computer run the show and save the money.

If the jock wants to be creative, then he should until he is told to back off.

I once had a boss that told me it is better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission, (sometimes!)

 

[PTBoardOp94]

I once had a boss that told me it is better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission

I'll have to save that line for the kids

BobRoss: One of the reasons I said that was because it was something that happened. There is a no phoners policy on weekends, for example, at once place where I used to work. Even though the regular all night and evening jocks have at least one shift on the weekend.