Be Careful of What You Read

So what do you do for a living?

I have the greatest job in the world (next to driving the Oakland Raiders Cheerleader Bus) getting up early, playing some song and talking to the finest city on the planet.

Beat that!

There are some things about this job that defy logic. For example: the best time slot for a dj is the early morning show, and all of us work long hard hours to be good enough to get up at 3:30am, drag out sorry butts into work, put together a show and pull it off every day. This is coupled with an insane amount of "personal appearances" which are anything from introducing a hot act at a club to mcing a major charity event. Sleep is a myth. Family life is precious. Being able to open your mouth in public and not have someone stare at you with that "I know you, don't I?" look on her or his face...well that's all gone.

And we love it.

And what do you complain about? Do you ever get personal, telling someone that the place they work at sells products you just would never buy, or that you didn't like the way they spoke to you on the sales floor? We get it all the time. "I don't like that kind of music." "The guy on there in the morning has an awful voice." "You suck." All delivered with a smile.

And we love it.

The point of having a good radio station is to serve an audience. We work very hard (not just at my station, but at all radio stations in this city) to make sure we're doing what the audience wants us to do, within the confines of the very specific, and sometimes very odd rules that our governing body the CRTC lays out for us. If you're a private broadcaster, and your audience has the right mix of ages, genders and lifestyle choices, you can sell commercial time to local and national businesses who want their message delivered to the people who will help them to prosper.

Some days are better than others. Getting to stay up around the clock to cover Natalie Lambert's swim(s) across Lake Ontario with Mike Reid from Bob FM, was priceless. Helping raise money for a young leukemia victim. Meeting music stars. All good. Then there's the time that two large jetliners flew into the World Trade Center in the middle of what was a fun and fluffy morning show, or the time I heard my favorite station stop the music to tell me that John Lennon had been shot.

The days in between make up most of our careers in this business. Those days when the only thing that matters is the minutiae that makes up our everyday lives.

And we love it.

Critics, pundits and people with vested interests will come along from time to time, giving their insight into what radio is all about. Sometimes they're dead on. At other times, they just don't get it. Their opinions are important to us, because they're just that: opinions. We in this business need to know what others think of us...what people say about us. We need it as much as we need those folks who love us and everything we do.

So if you ever need to know what's "really going on" in the radio biz. If you ever feel you're not getting the whole story about the ratings, the firings, the hirings, and the music changes. Ask one of us who are truly "inside" the business. Better still, ask a bunch of us, from different companies, formats and backgrounds.

Otherwise, you're just getting whatever someone wants to feed you. Good, bad or whatever.