PhotoDude.com

Fri. Sep 20, 2002

Web Logs, Broadcasting, and Radio Stories

Web Logs, Broadcasting, and Radio Stories – Doc Searls talks about something that makes a lot of sense to me, given my background: a web log has many similarities to doing a radio show. It’s a broadcast.

"Sitting down at the keyboard in the morning, like I just did at 5:30am, feels to me very much like it once felt sitting down at a microphone in a broadcast studio. My setup here in my office, surrounded by keyboards (two), screens (three) printers (two) and speakers (three) feels very much like an old-fashioned broadcast studio, with turntables at each elbow, control board, cart machines, clipboard, box of index cards, microphone on a boom and a big clock on the wall."

"My favorite years in radio were the ones I spent in various capacities working at WDBS, the little commercial FM station owned by Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. You had to work to get the signal in Chapel Hill or Raleigh, but that was part of the station’s appeal, I think. At its best, ’DBS was deeply part of the low rent hippie/student counterculture of the time, which was the mid ’70s "[...] A number of ’DBS folk moved on to Raleigh’s WQDR in the late ’70s and early 80s. ’QDR was an FM station with a huge signal. Its community was more regional than local, and less countercultural (the Sixties had finally ended, basically). But music was still what the station was about. ’QDR was one of the first album rock stations in the country, and for awhile the only popular FM music station in the market with live disc jockeys [...] My point with this nostalgic ramble is that there were real communities involved with those stations. Broadcasting and community-building aren’t mutually exclusive."

A cart machine. Ah, hearing those words brings back memories in much the same way that an 8-track tape would for many people. The album rock ”revolution” of the early-mid 70’s in the Triad was what got me into radio. Obviously, I knew of WDBS, but it was WQDR that did it for me. As a part of the much stricter public service mandate back then, they sponsored an Explorer Club, in very loose affiliation with … the Boy Scouts.

This was in 1972 and ’73. Each week, we’d meet one weeknight at the QDR studios. There was one guy from the station, Dave [Insert Dead Brain Cells Here], who organized the meetings each week, and he’d bring in somebody different from the staff to teach us about what they did. It was a group of about a dozen geeky teens (myself included) and we ate up the chance to go into a full fledged production studio and learn how to make commercials from their production director. We had people like Bill Hard and Chris Miller teaching us that, and much more about the radio business. It was, in retrospect, an amazing way to learn about the business at a very young age, from people who went on to great success.

It helped us start a ”radio station” at our high school, WSHS (Sanderson High School) that broadcast into the cafeterias during the two lunch hours each day. But that little closet in the library launched quite a few careers in radio. In my case, this early exposure to the business ended up allowing me to become PD/MD of an AM & FM in the Macon, Ga. market at the ripe old age of 21. Of course, that early start in the business also made it easy to switch careers after eight years in radio … I was still only 26.

So I very much relate to Doc’s talk about the freewheeling radio days of the early 70’s in the Triad. It is so sad how the business has changed. Sadder, I’ve never really regretted getting out of it. But there’s a dozen or more great tales that I’ve been meaning to place in this space, as a series of ”Radio Stories.”

I think Doc may have given me the kick I needed to start on that.