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News at the top of the hour?

V

vchimpanzee

The car I was driving today has a clock whose time I don't know how to set. I also don't know if the clock is correct.

But I have seen this before. WBRF in Galax VA (classic country) no longer has news at the top of the hour but when it did, during the last year or so, it would start whenever the song ended, not at the precise time it was supposed to. So there was some sort of method to delay.

Same today on the station I was on. I was in the car when the anchor said something like "news on the hour", only it wasn't. It was four minutes late, assuming the clock was accurate, which like I said, it might not be. Later in the day, it was two minutes before the top of the hour. I'm pretty sure the clock didn't end up being off by six minutes from where it was this morning. Though I did have the oil changed. But that wouldn't, for example, involve taking out the battery.
 
With voice tracking/automation it sounds a lot better to record the news feed and play it back a couple minutes late rather than cutting off a song to try to hit the precise top of the hour.
 
Depends on what automation system they are using. Unless there is a "hard" break time, at the top of the hour there could be a "reset time or restart time" usually at 57 to 59 minutes. The system will "wait" until the song ends then start the next hour. If the last song starts at 58.59 seconds and the reset time is 59 even and the song is 4 or 5 mins log your going to be late. There are some really good music format programs that can get the music time within a minute or two every hour. Too many variables without actually seeing their stuff.
 
One station I used to like managed to start a song and then have the top of the hour station ID five seconds later. If they were that close, they could have done something other than get our hopes up.

By the way, the station I mentioned above was the one with kids doing the legal station ID, even the translator, if anyone has seen that thread.
 
Freed from the constraints of a single phone line or a small number of satellite audio channels, networks, I suspect, are now feeding their material to stations asynchronously - probably still at a set time but intended for replay later. Then there are the digital-based media (HD, for example) which delay broadcasts several seconds to allow a buffer to build up. So the actual top-of-hour may have occurred a few seconds before you actually hear it on the air. And there are plenty of other sources for synchronized time, the cellphone being the most common.

The Bob and Ray joke on their Shoddy Showmanship album - “we’ll have the correct time in about 10 minutes” - is both anachronistic and, surprisingly, reflective of what goes on with audio programming now.
 
We had like this for our legal ID. It was set to trigger at the first opening after X:00. So if a 4 minute song started at X:59 it wouldn't play the legal ID until that song was done and the legal ID playing at almost 4 minutes after the hour.

In this case I'm guessing the newscast is prerecorded and likely downloaded automatically into the automation system and set to play and the next opening after X:00.
 
stations that start a song and have the ID hit 10 seconds later simply have it set to hit the id at a certain time, exactly.. be damned whats playing before or when it started started

Stations that delay the news till after the last song of the hour.. these days, the system has FTP software built into automation.. or a standalone program that goes out at a pre determined time.. usually 45 to 55 after, grabs the file, downloads it to the right place on the network drive at the station and then shoves it into the automation using a pre determiend cart number... very few are still recording a live feed and playing that back 5 minutes later or whatever
 
Some automations can record a newscast or other audio and play it back while still recording it.
Or the news is fed at :45 or :55 etc, it's recorded then played back.
 
And realistically ... how many listeners actually care what time the newscast starts? A lot of them find the news an annoyance anyway!
 
vchimpanzee said:
Later in the day, it was two minutes before the top of the hour. I'm pretty sure the clock didn't end up being off by six minutes from where it was this morning. Though I did have the oil changed. But that wouldn't, for example, involve taking out the battery.
Click to expand...

If the newscast is sometimes aired before the top of the hour, depending on last song played, then I think we know. The station is recording the previous hour's newscast and airing it plus or minus a few minutes of the top of the next hour.

I can remember when overnight, WCBS-FM NYC would run the first couple of minutes of the CBS Radio News. It was an oldies station at the time and as a CBS O&O, management felt it was good to air the network newscast for its overnight audience. The DJ, Bobby Jay, sometimes had trouble playing a song that would fit the time leading up to the newscast. Either he'd have to fade it down early or he'd have to play a loooong jingle to fill time. Eventually the station just recorded the previous newscast so he could air that and wouldn't have to back-time.

Unless some networks feed their top of the hour newscast early? There was a time when NBC Radio News did that for stations that wanted a before-the-hour newscast. Even WNBC took advantage of that. But other than NBC during this time and the American Contemporary Network, I don't know of any network that feeds its hourly newscast early.
 
Gregg. said:
I can remember when overnight, WCBS-FM NYC would run the first couple of minutes of the CBS Radio News. It was an oldies station at the time and as a CBS O&O, management felt it was good to air the network newscast for its overnight audience. The DJ, Bobby Jay, sometimes had trouble playing a song that would fit the time leading up to the newscast. Either he'd have to fade it down early or he'd have to play a loooong jingle to fill time. Eventually the station just recorded the previous newscast so he could air that and wouldn't have to back-time.
Click to expand...
Pretty embarrassing that a jock in market #1 couldn't be bothered to backtime.

Gregg. said:
Unless some networks feed their top of the hour newscast early? There was a time when NBC Radio News did that for stations that wanted a before-the-hour newscast. Even WNBC took advantage of that. But other than NBC during this time and the American Contemporary Network, I don't know of any network that feeds its hourly newscast early.
Click to expand...
Fox News and ABC News both offered a pre-feed of their newscast the last time I used their product. (For ABC, that is dated, for FNR it is pretty fresh).
As far as I understand, NPR News and CBS News are live.
 
All the way back in 1978, when I was programming KOLO in Reno, I wanted to get away from backtimes and/or jocks who'd talk in the clear for too long trying to get to the NBC news at the top of the hour.

NBC did two feeds of the same newscast---at :54 and :00.

So I had engineering put an ITC cart recorder/player deck in the studio. It would record the :54 feed onto a five-and-a half minute cart. The newscast could then be played back anytime after :59:30.
 
Kelly A said:
No average listener cares, nor even cared back in the day, that the newscast wasn't bang on the TOH. To believe otherwise is just silly.
Click to expand...

Gene Autry, when he bought both KMPC in Los Angeles in 1952 and KSFO in San Francisco in 1956, had TOH tones installed. On stations that did their own newscasts.

Now, I grew up in a house where KMPC was on all the time, and so I didn't question it. But really----why?

Worse, for some reason, when Paul Drew was programming KHJ in the early summer of 1973, he installed a TOH tone there---twice as loud as KMPC's---and since KHJ didn't do news at the TOH, it went off during songs----and only illustrated how far behind the jock was running that hour.

It was gone by fall.
 
NBC did a pre-feed of the news at XX:54 or XX:55 ( I honestly don't remember after all the years.) It was recorded digitally in a unit that held 6 minutes of audio and took up about 6 rack units. That recorded newscast was what actually fed at the TOH. However, the newscaster remained in the booth during the refeed in case something had to be updated.

Now many networks make the cast available for download at around XX:45. The station automation downloads the cast and schedules it to play as close to the TOH as needed (or really, anytime in the hour.) Backtiming into a cast used to be a fun game to play but occasionally you would screw it up and have to dump out of a song. When you had a song with a "cold" ending, just gave the ID and, wham, there was the network news open, you really felt good.
 
bigdonho said:
NBC did a pre-feed of the news at XX:54 or XX:55 ( I honestly don't remember after all the years.)
Click to expand...

:54. See my post five posts up from yours. If you were doing it digitally, then it was after we were doing it with carts.

bigdonho said:
Backtiming into a cast used to be a fun game to play but occasionally you would screw it up and have to dump out of a song. When you had a song with a "cold" ending, just gave the ID and, wham, there was the network news open, you really felt good.
Click to expand...

Dumping out of a song early could piss off a listener but a perfect join did nothing for them. That was just us doing what we were supposed to do.
 
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