The Infinite Dial

Title: Online Program Director for the Chicago cluster of Clear Channel communications

Who is David? "Born and raised in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, home of the WGN-AM Transmitter, I used to stay up late at night scanning the radio dial while watching the tower light blink and hope that someday, I'd be there. My love for music, audio and tech has always played a key role in my life. During my high school and college years I was a club DJ and drifted away from radio as I was focusing on TV. Then, one fateful visit to see long time family friend Aris Hampers in Grand Rapids Michigan changed it all. After touring his studio and watching the magic of radio I immediately changed my major and have been re-married to radio ever since. My first job was a technical producer at WLS-AM, then moved on to become a producer on the Roe and Garry Sow (WLS-AM) which eventually became the Roe Conn Show, where I produced the "best of" cd's and the imaging for the show. During my time at WLS, the duty of webmaster was added to my role and in 2005 I was hired by Clear Channel to manage the radio station websites."

What would your dream job be? "Expanding my role as Online Program Director to add PD duties of a single station to really make the web and traditional radio mesh together to evolve radio into something we've never seen or heard."

Who has been your greatest influence? "I would do a disservice to all of my role models to only name one, but to name the top would be; Roe Conn, Garry Meier, Aris Hampers, Jonathan Brandmeier, Steve Dahl, Rick Gillette, Darren Davis and Mark Driscoll."

What is the one format that you can't believe nobody has done? "I believe the niche formats of satellite radio has made this question slightly null, but I think a true dance format hasn't been fully explored or given enough time to succeed and I also believe a "chill" format could perform well on terrestrial radio. I believe in 10 years or so, chill will be the new smooth jazz."

How could radio do a better job of attracting younger listeners? "Radio needs to become the place they go to find their new music. We can't win the war against iPods, but we can certainly fight. Radio is going to need to find a way to lower spot load, play more new and local music, cut the clutter and do what the younger demo wants. Get to the music. Formats in general are going to need to evolve. Pick 20 iPods at random and you'll be hard pressed to find one that has a single format on it. Radio as an industry need to become more like an iPod with expanded playlists, less imaging, more dead segs, and less useless talk. When a jock turns on a microphone, what comes out of their mouth must be worth the listeners time to listen."

How will radio remain relevant in a digital world? "In order for radio to remain relevant, the websites of the radio stations, along with on-demand products such as videos, podcasts, downloads, etc must be always top of mind. Radio stations need to start thinking of themselves as a website with radio station attached, not a radio station with website attached. The days of radio station websites with bios of jocks and nothing but "where we'll be" and "here is what we're doing" should be over. Radio station websites need to become hubs for the listeners. Jocks posting blogs, pictures, videos, etc. The website needs to be about the listener, and not so much about the station. The social networking aspect of the worlds most popular websites need to be implemented into radio. Can a local radio station website compete with the likes of MySpace and Facebook? No, and we don't expect to take them on, but we have un-tapped resource of loyal listeners that will gladly use our websites for things other than streaming the station and reading about how a dj grew up in Toldeo and worked his way all the way up to their current station. While people do care about the bio of a jock, there is a reason the "Lollipop" video has been viewed over 800K times on YouTube. Any radio station that offers a video on demand product should be backselling the heck out of the fact that you can watch that video anytime they want on the website. And if the station doesn't have a video on demand product, they should create a page that embeds the YouTube video. Internet advertising continues to grow and the AE's need to make sure that they are well versed in the internet advertising standards and all the products and features of their radio station websites because that's where it's headed...frankly....we should be long there by now, but we're getting there."