News at the top of the hour?

[bigdonho]

: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.



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.

Yea, but it made you feel good when it hit just right.

 

[Cold Coffee]

I remember those ancient days, back in the 1900's when we had to back time to hit that news at the top of the hour. But 20 years ago the computer replaced most board op's and DJ's. And, it does a better job.

Many news feeds today are accessed through a link. The news starts at the beginning every time after the song ends.

The computer does what it's told.. It won't steal from the station. It won't bad mouth the station on a gossip board either.

 

[Cold Coffee]

The downside of automation is that most people no longer waste their time training or wanting to be DJ's. So, if you want to do the community radio thing? You won't find many volunteers anymore.

 

[Mark Roberts]

The computer does what it's told.. It won't steal from the station. It won't bad mouth the station on a gossip board either.

Just wait 'til AI takes hold....

 

[Mark Roberts]

The downside of automation is that most people no longer waste their time training or wanting to be DJ's. So, if you want to do the community radio thing? You won't find many volunteers anymore.

In an article in today's New York Times about the decline of Hollywood (with the peg being the Skydance acquisition of Paramount), this stood out to me:

“We cannot in good conscience encourage you to pursue our profession,” the Art Directors Guild, which represents set designers and other film specialists, said in May, when it suspended its training program.

It resonates with something I've wondered for some time now: how journalism and media training programs can justify their existence...even if they make substantial changes.

I've also noticed that many college stations I've heard on my travels are automated. From a practical point of view, that's a reasonable thing to consider. But they sound dull and lifeless, for the most part. It may well be training people to be the modern equivalent of switch-flippers.

(Gift link to that article, by the way: A Diminished Hollywood Welcomes a New Mogul)

 

[Mark Roberts]

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.

WGN in Chicago had the same thing well into the 2000s, even overnights when there wasn't a newscast every hour.

 

[michael hagerty]

WGN in Chicago had the same thing well into the 2000s, even overnights when there wasn't a newscast every hour.

Yeah. KMPC and KSFO's time tones were 24/7 as well.

KMPC always had a newscaster to anchor, no matter what. They started taking a network newscast for overnights around 1979-80 when they were making big changes.

Even in the early 70s, KSFO was staffed until 2:00 a.m. and then the overnight jock had to read their own news.

 

[michael hagerty]

It resonates with something I've wondered for some time now: how journalism and media training programs can justify their existence...even if they make substantial changes.

There are very few people going to those programs who are looking at radio news. And there are still lots of jobs in TV news, though, on the local level they don't pay what they once did.

 

[Cold Coffee]

TV news is replacing old guys with young women in many cities.

 

[michael hagerty]

TV news is replacing old guys with young women in many cities.

Apart from the majors, the money in TV news is at a point, where about all you can attract are people fresh out of college. And the majority pursuing journalism careers have been female for more than a decade.

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

The downside of automation is that most people no longer waste their time training or wanting to be DJ's. So, if you want to do the community radio thing? You won't find many volunteers anymore.

the other problem finding volunteers is if you live in a smallllllllllllllll town

 

[vchimpanzee]

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.

61 Big WAYS in Charlotte NC, the Top 40 station, would advertise news at :55 and music on the hour.

 

[vchimpanzee]

And realistically ... how many listeners actually care what time the newscast starts? A lot of them find the news an annoyance anyway!

That's how I know to set my clock in the car where that can be done. That clock is usually a minute or two slow, and maybe more when the time change happens.

One station I listen to always seems to have news at exactly the right time but I think it uses a satellite format. And a recorded voice says, "It's 10:00" or "It's 3:00".

 

[Cold Coffee]

61 Big WAYS in Charlotte NC, the Top 40 station, would advertise news at :55 and music on the hour.

In the old days, we did that for ratings. You did not want news or ads to start any quarter hour.

 

[Cold Coffee]

That's how I know to set my clock in the car where that can be done. That clock is usually a minute or two slow, and maybe more when the time change happens.

One station I listen to always seems to have news at exactly the right time but I think it uses a satellite format. And a recorded voice says, "It's 10:00" or "It's 3:00".

Most people use a smartphone instead of WWV or any station to set a clock anymore.

 

[vchimpanzee]

Most people use a smartphone instead of WWV or any station to set a clock anymore.

I don't have one of those. My TiVos, when I connect to the service, say "Setting clock". However, I normally don't have to do that manually.

 

[Cold Coffee]

I know people who hate modern technology. But, I love it! I'm always learning.

 

[michael hagerty]

61 Big WAYS in Charlotte NC, the Top 40 station, would advertise news at :55 and music on the hour.

Different stations did news at different times. The Bill Drake RKO stations were famous for news at :20 before the hour (and in the early days, both :20 after and :20 before). Some stations went for news at :15 and :45.

The object was to be in music when your competitor was in news. And usually, only Top 40 stations used the strategy. Most other formats tended to just go with the top of the hour or top and bottom.

 

[Mark Roberts]

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.

My radio career, measured at the top of the hour:

Station 1 (part-time, late 1970s): Country music and agriculture. No national network. News at the top of hour, rip-and-read by the DJ from the UPI broadcast wire. Even so, we were expected to hit the top of the hour. Plenty of the old "instrumental to the top of the hour" trick. Everything live.

Station 2 (college, volunteer, late 1970s): Progressive rock. No network. Newscasts interspersed throughout the day at various times. Minimal expectations as to hitting precise times. However, there was a twist. The university, rather sprawling geographically, had an IBM system for synchronizing clocks by periodically sending tones through the electric lines. Guess what leaked into the station's audio? Especially through the phono preamps? So we had time tones anyway!

Station 3 (college, j-school, late 1970s): Classical/jazz/NPR. NPR didn't do hourly newscasts then and there wasn't a Morning Edition yet. In non-NPR hours, the station produced its own newscasts as well as a newsmagazine 6-9 am. Yes, we basically did our own Morning Edition. We were expected to hit the top of the hour, but there was always a dry read from the announcer before introducing the news. News was always live.

Station 4 (professional, early 1980s): Full-service AC, standalone AM (as I said elsewhere yesterday, the most endangered species in radio, though this one is still around as a cookie-cutter talker). ABC legacy affiliate. ABC-I newscasts at the top of the hour carried live, including the top-of-hour tone, usually with an adjacency or two sold. Local newscasts at :54 carried live. One of my part-timers once got the idea to pre-record the final newscast of the evening. Her production skills were excellent and I couldn't detect the pre-recording on the air. Nor did she tell me she was doing this. She was caught out one night when the tape broke. The station owner heard it and was very unhappy about it. Discussions ensued. She went back to doing the news live. Yet Paul Harvey's midday broadcast was always taped for rebroadcast. Some network features were taped; others weren't (for example, Howard Cosell was never taped for some reason). Sports schedules could throw this schema out of whack and the latest ABC-I newscast might be tape delayed, but local news was always live.

Station 5 (professional but mediocre, mid-1980s): Full-service AC with CHR on the FM. AM had no network, with local newscasts at the top of every hour. We were expected to hit the precise time. Sometimes, the old instrumentals trick was hauled out. FM had "Mutual lifestyle" mornings only and brief local updates, with a limited degree of flexibility as to time. Station owner cared more about the AM than the FM, though I think they got more money off the FM.

Station 6 (professional, all-news, mid-1980s): This was KTRH Houston, which was all-news most of the time. It was a CBS affiliate in those days. Under my first ND, there was some flexibility in when the various programming elements arrived during the hour, but CBS news, with the top-of-hour tone, was always carried live. There were also hours with gardening shows (early morning remnant of legacy agriculture programming) and sports talk (latter part of PM drive), plus Larry King overnight. Then the News Director from Hell came in, ushering in a strict news wheel, positioned around traffic and weather on the 8's. The talk shows were pared back. I detest that guy to this day but I think those were the right moves for the station at the time. I don't know what the NDFH did to accomodate Astros baseball; I was out of the station by then. Under the first ND, after the end of an Astros day game, there would be a five-minute newscast featuring our best stories of the day, to showcase our work and to try to retain listeners from the game. That would take precedence over CBS news.

In this ensemble, no station generated its own time tone, though #2 inadvertently had one. Just imagine, say, a quiet segment of Yes's Close to the Edge being interrupted by a high-pitched squeal. Fun times.

 

[Mark Roberts]

There are very few people going to those programs who are looking at radio news. And there are still lots of jobs in TV news, though, on the local level they don't pay what they once did.

True about radio news. That field was dying even 40 years ago. It took a pretty traumatic firing to get the point across to me, but at least I learned and pivoted to another profession. As for TV, even in a market of Denver's size, the quality really varies now. The lead sportscaster at KUSA is just a couple of years out of the Cronkite school at ASU, and the nightside reporters seem very green*, though a couple of them are really good. On KCNC, the constant requests to viewers to "call our reporter in _____ County with your tips" seems kind of embarassing. KDVR (Fox 85 31) has so many hours of news that it feels like they'll take anything they can get.

(* = as in inexperienced, not as in Martian or any other kind of extraterrestrial individual.)