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So as program director of the radio station, I had a choice do something to pull the station's ratings out of the mud, or fire everyone involved and flip the format to Polka favorites. Can you guess what I did? I'm jimpouling and this is my view from the middle. This podcast series was never supposed to be a podcast series. It was supposed to be a book. I actually wrote several chapters of the book, and if you've listened to the series for any length of time, you've heard the stories that I wrote about, plus many others. But I realized that I'm a broadcaster, not an author, so maybe putting these stories into a podcast would be more appropriate. Anyway, if I could afford the rights to use it, I would be using the Steelers Wheel song Stuck in the Middle with You as my theme song, since I spent a lot of time in business with cloud to the left of me, jokers to the right, and there I am stuck in the middle of you. Throughout my career in radio, and even when I wasn't in radio, I always seem to have characters operating on all sides of me. If you've been around a while, I bet you can come up with some examples yourself of a boss that just didn't seem to get it, and you wound up guiding him or her instead of the other way around. If you spend too much time asking yourself why this person became your boss instead of the other way around, you drive yourself insane. Then there are the employees you supervise. In the radio business, you sometimes have what we referred to as talent to deal with. These are the on air personalities that make your radio station what it is, so you can't deal with them on the same level as you would, say, a board operator or an administrative assistant. Many times the talent has even paid more than you are, and you have to swallow your pride and realize that they are the money makers that pay everyone else's salary. If they're not for some reason, then it's time to make a change. There's also a fine line between letting the talent get away with murder and establishing your authority over them so you can maintain control. Somehow, I found that there's a psychology in being the boss of a talent. Many times you have to make the talent believe that what needs to be done is actually their idea and that's something you're instructing them to do. Some resent being instructed in any way. Luckily, for me, I always seem to have the reasonable sorts of talent who worked for me. They were professional enough and respected me enough to let me guide them. Some were divas to a certain extent, but you learn to work with that. When It took over as program director of the Orlando radio station WFLA, it's ratings were dismal. Yeah, it wasn't am station, albeit a fifty thousand wat AM station that you could hear from coast to coast in the state of Florida, but it was handicapped by the fact that outside the weekday hours of six am or six pm, the programming consisted of nothing but pay as you go, or broker programming, as we called it. Sometimes these programs were nothing short of shows that pedaled snake oil, vitamin supplements and the like. Others were business people who needed to stroke their egos and pretend they were radio stars. Others weren't bad at all. Sometimes you would run across a show whose host sets his ego aside and let you guide them to the point whether the show is actually something worth listening to. Those are the ones who tend to stay on the air for years, as opposed to the arrogant, ego driven ones who are lucky to stay on for more than a couple of weeks. The COVID nineteen pandemic changed the landscape from many of these brokered radio clients. Instead of coming into the studio to do their shows, many had to do them via skype, zoom teams, or just on the telephone. This, unfortunately had the effect of separating them from me, so I no longer had much in the way of input into their shows. Also, a lot of them were just simply terrible from a technical standpoint, so the quality of the shows technically was terrible on the air, making them totally unlistenable. I had a host who was on the air shortly before I retired from the business at the end of twenty twenty one, who had been doing brokerage shows for years, but he had always come into the studio. When the pandemic hit, he started doing the shows remotely. Not only did they sound terrible, but he would somehow hang up the connection in the middle of the show, in the middle of a sentence, There'd be dead air, mass confusion, dogs and cats living together. Well, you get the idea, But to make matters worse, he blamed the technical problems on us. Now I knew exactly what he was doing to disconnect himself, but he didn't want to hear it and insisted that his producer was cutting him off. I finally started insisting that he pre recorded the show during the week and then we would run it during his normal Sunday time slot. At least that way, if he disconnected himself in mid sentence, we could edit the recordings and no one would know. He didn't like that idea, since his ego told him he was supposed to be live, so I think he finally canceled the show shortly after I left. Primetime for radio is what we call morning drive, usually six to nine am Monday through Friday. It's the time when people are on their way to work and listening to the radio in their cars. The ratings for this period set the tone for the rest of the day, so if you don't get your audience during these hours, you might as well hang it up, change the format and start playing Poka favorites or something like that. Josh Kumishka is a polka poise come to mind, but the six to nine am time slot on WFLA had a point five share in the ratings. Now I know that's inside baseball type industry jargon, but suffice it to say that that number stunk. My boss said he wanted me to do something about it. The station was a news talk station and from six to nine am they had a live talk show, the only local live show that wasn't considered a brokered show. It was a politically conservative show, which did match what the station did for the rest of the day. National conservative host Glenn Beck and the late Rush Limbaugh were on the air for the heart of the day, then Dave Ran and later Tom Sullivan, and then into the brokerat show stuff. I had cut my broadcast teeth in news radio when I started a WQSA in the late nineteen seventies. Later, I managed an all news radio station in Orlando, WWNZ or WINS. I worked with a consultant on the Winds station who was the guy who was credited for the success of the all news radio station in New York City ten ten wins WIS. I learned quite a bit from this guy. Also, with the advent of streaming, stations on the Internet. I listened to many different news and news talk stations around the country to see what they were doing. I also worked with the guy who at the time headed up the news talk format for then Clear Channel Communications. He was successfully running a news talk station in Sacramento, California. So when I was challenged to do something about the dismal ratings of WFLA, I pulled from all these resources, whether directly or from the recesses of my memory. I went back to the basics of news talk radio. So here's an inside secret. Don't tell anyone, but listeners hate waiting on commercials. Big surprise, huh. The Morning Show as it was currently was formatted with extremely long seven to eight minute commercial breaks. News, traffic, and weather were in there somewhere, but no one really could rely on. Win Listeners would get tired of waiting on interminable commercial breaks to end and would tune to another station. You can get away with this during music formats, but for news talk the breaks really needed to be short and severely. This could easily set up a battle between programming and the sales department, who love to have all that commercial time to sell the on air slogan of ten ten Wins in New York was, you give us twenty two minutes, We'll give you the world. That's because they formatted it with news capsules, traffic and weather together on the threes, you know, three past the hour, thirteen past the hour, twenty three, et cetera. The idea being that people in the morning are on their way to work listening their car radios and don't spend more than twenty minutes or so listening. So if you give them everything they need to know in that twenty minutes, you have solid loyal listeners. The format I created, and I won't take all the credit for it, since I based it on other formats around the country. My experience with the ten ten Wins consultant and my past news talk experience was extremely difficult to execute. It had traffic and weather reports every ten minutes, along with news headlines, then full newscasts at the top and the bottom of the hour, commercial breaks that were no longer than two minutes each, and we promoted that fact every time we went to a break back in just two minutes. That sort of thing, and we also wove in the traditional talk show segments, albeit a lot shorter than they were before that the host was used to doing. This was what was unusual about this format. Usually a station will do what they call a newswheel like on ten ten wins or a talk show, but not try to do both. Almost everyone I thought I was crazy for trying it, and many said it just couldn't be done. So we did it anyway, and it worked. It was difficult to do, very active for the host, the producer, the board operator, and the news department. I heard a lot of consternation when I first introduced the staff to it. Here's where the psychology came in. I told the host that, yes, the format was tough to do, but if it was easy, anyone could do it. But we have you. Also, there was some pushback from the sales department, who had a hard time visualizing how cutting back on commercial time would actually help the station in the long run. The ratings jumped. What was a point five share skyrocketed to a four or five share that on the other side of the decimal point for the morning show. The host and the staff, who were reticent about the changes at first, were convinced and felt a lot better about the station and themselves as a result, never heard much from the sales department, but I interpreted the drop off and complaints as positive reinforcement of our efforts. Sdition to being program director of WFLA, I was also director of operations for the Florida News Network. FNN was a unique animal in many ways. Although you can classify it as a radio broadcasting entity, it wasn't a radio station. FNN is a state radio network, and our parent company owned similar networks in Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Alabama. They also owned Premier Networks, a national talk network that syndicate shows like Glenn Beck, Clay Travis and Buck Sexton and Sean Hannity. FNN provides capsualized newscasts of news of statewide interests to radio stations via satellite feed that stations rebroadcast on the air. The idea was that the state network would provide the newscaster and news resources that the affiliated radio station could not provide for itself. Many such stations are small, mom and pop operations with small budgets. It can be a hard concept to wrap your brain around if you're not in the industry, but much to the dismay of many, not even the corporate managers of the parent company. People who are used to traditional radio stations understand what FNN is, how it works, how it makes money, and what resources it needs. As a result, it struggles to meet its potential. Imagine if you ran an ice cream parlor, but the guy who owned the ice cream parlor was an auto mechanic and knows nothing about ice cream. And what if every time you tried to tell the mechanic that the parlor needs to expand to things like frozen yogurt or smoothies, he shot down the ideas simply because he didn't know anything about running an ice cream parlor. How prosperous do you think that business would be? Well, that's the way it was many times for me running the Florida News Network. The corpet people knew radio stations, but not much, if anything, about state radio networks. To make matters worse, Some but not all, had a case of arrogance and ignorance, a deadly combination in the business world. People didn't understand that FNN and the other state networks weren't actually radio stations and shouldn't be run like they were. This resulted in poor decisions on things and dozens of missed opportunities. Even though the network's role was to provide news resources to radio stations, the corporate owners of the network were deprivate of resources it needed to properly do that, with the excuse that, well, that's the way we run the radio stations. At least the auto mechanic understood why the ice cream parlor he owned wouldn't be offering oil changes. It's an ice cream parlor, not a car repair shop. Now, I'm not indicting all the corporate managers, only the arrogant ones who wouldn't listen and even insisted that I didn't know what I was talking about. Hey, I only ran the network for thirty years at that point, what do I know? A funny tidbit here. I keep in touch with the guy who took my place at FNN after I retired. He told me he was in a meeting with the regional vice president in charge of programming for the company. He mentioned something about FNN, and the VP looked at him blankly and said, what's FNN. I rest my case. In the last couple of years I spent with the company, they did reorganize its news division, which had the osmosis effect of helping the state radio networks to a certain degree. But I still couldn't swear to it that those running that division actually understood how the networks operated. Most of their reorganization efforts were targeted toward improving what was done on the radio stations and not necessarily the state radio networks. So there I was in the middle a new concept that would raise a radio station with dismal ratings out of the gutter, and resistance from above to the changes that needed to be made to make that happen. Corporate managers above me, you didn't have a clue as to how a state radio network operated or that they even existed, Yet somehow we were expected to thrive in that environment. Sing it with me now, Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. I'm Jim Pauling, and that's my view from little. In the next episode, we mark our one year anniversary of this podcast. Happy anniversary, baby, Now maybe it's your turn to tell us your story. Next on My View from the Middle,