The Reality Out Here in Radioland, and Some News Bits

I spoke yesterday with Eric Teel, Program Director at Jefferson Public Radio in southern Oregon.  Their network of stations and translators reaches a potential audience of 1 million in southern Oregon and northern California.  Despite the large audience, he has a tiny staff.  Eric does the octopus act of programming three stations: a 24 hour news/talk, a 24 hour classical, and a Triple A (adult contemporary).  He recently lost his Operations Manager, so he also takes care of Ops, and he does a long air shift every day.

We were talking about how important it is for producers to realize what stations are up against.  Making a 30-second change in a program’s length can cause him hours of extra work reprogramming his automation and then changing it back.  He has only a couple of full timers and a couple of part timers for three stations, so a lot of the programming has to run automated from Content Depot. 

I discovered all this when I scheduled the Verdi Requiem on the Chicago Symphony broadcasts.  We had to break  format to accomodate such a long work, and it caused a big problem for a couple of stations.  Eric told me it would have been better to schedule even a 1-second segment than to change the number of segments in a program.

Welcome to the brave new world of automated stations.  Bravo to Eric for keeping the plates spinning in his three-ring circus, and I am grateful to him for letting me know what it’s really like out there for stations who are doing everything they can to keep us on the air, despite insanely tight budgets.  Those of you who are keeping classical music on the radio are my heroes!

Some news bits:

WCLV in Cleveland has programmed a Cleveland Orchestra marathon for Thanksgiving: eight full-length live concerts from 2003-2006 will air non-stop on the FM station and also online at wclv.com. 

Radio-info.com reports that Abu Dhabi has just launched the first classical music radio station in the United Arab Emirates.  The opening day featured the New York Philharmonic live concert in the Emirates Palace Auditorium.  The announcing is going to be in English.

And the scuttlebutt continues at WMFE in Orlando that the station is gearing up to go all news/talk.  One of our blog readers got into the Orlando Weekly blog and discovered that station personnel have been told to keep quiet about it.  Looks like we might know in a week whether the switch is going to happen.  The classical music will move to the HD stream.   Hey, Orlando.  How many of you have HD radios?

Have a good weekend, everybody!  It’s rainy in Seattle now after 6 months of lovely sunshine.