The Infinite Dial

I've been listening to "The Takeaway," the new morning offering from WNYC New York and Public Radio International in bits and pieces over the last few days, on Friday morning I finally got to stream an entire show. "The Takeaway" is the newest public radio attempt to co-opt a younger, more diverse audience than NPR's "Morning Edition." When I first tuned in, earlier this week, there was a story on how actors such as Terrence Howard and Morgan Freeman were bringing a new audience to Broadway -- a piece that felt metaphorical for the show's own ambitions.

The FAQs on WNYC's site promise that "The Takeaway" will differ from "other morning news shows" by being "broadcast live, rather than featuring pre-recorded interviews and long pre-produced features" with more give-and-take between hosts John Hockenberry and Adora Udoji and their guests.

The hard-news to lifestyle ratio is a little different, too: Friday's features includeded a report from the Serious Play conference on avatars and the "second life" phenomenon and a bit tying Hillary Clinton's decision whether to withdraw from the presidential race to advice on breaking off a relationship or leaving a job. The experts being interviewed were as often from the blogosphere as the print media. There was also a newscast that ended with a Gordon Ramsey actuality on the proper use of seasonal ingredients.

That said, "The Takeaway" often struck me as "Morning Edition" on Casual Fridays: less produced, more lifestyle news, but also with a lot of content that it wouldn't be impossible to imagine in the smaller number of lifestyle slots on "Morning Edition" or other NPR shows. And while Hockenberry occasionally got a little firm with his interviewees, asking one uncommitted Democratic super-delegate what further information he could conceivably still need to make a decision now, much of the interviewing is still in that expository, seemingly pre-interviewed style which guides the respondent to give the basic information of a news story instead of heading off into parts unknown. Commercial radio's morning shows can certainly be formulaic, but the best ones give you an "anything could happen" feeling that isn't yet on display here.

It remains to be seen exactly what elements will prove compelling for a new public radio audience. NPR's own effort, "The Bryant Park Project," more overtly recalls commercial radio morning shows, down to finding its own way to acknowledge "American Idol." And during his short-lived daily tenure on public radio, former Tom Joyner Morning Show commentator Tavis Smiley came over with an established fan base but also the livelier style of his previous radio home.

In that regard, Smiley's move to public radio was a lot like casting Terrence Howard and Morgan Freeman in plays by Tennessee Williams and Clifford Odets respectively. The content didn't change. The star power did. And the audience came along. As public radio looks for the right content and tone to broaden its base, it is simultaneously true that a new generation is used to a certain tenor from its radio, and that much of the appeal of public radio is the alternative from commercial radio it provides. Ultimately a balance will be struck.

Every now and then, I caution broadcasters about those breaknotes that sync directly to the "now playing" display on your Website or streaming audio player and often give more information about the internal workings of the station than you might wish listeners to have.

Here's a new one from a very successful station in a top 75 market:

Under the "Artist" field: "Voice Tracker";

Under the "Title" field: "Live Jock."

In other words, there was a live jock on at the time (and it certainly sounded that way), but there were obviously provisions for when there weren't that included letting everybody know about it -- which is a little more oversharing than merely showing listeners that you are playing "Music Image Promo #7."

Have any programmers/Website managers noticed this on their own stations? Is this an easy fix? Or is it one of those onerous things that PDs are aware of, but live with because it's not an easy fix.

Warren Cosford is a former boss of mine (at WLIR/WDRE Long Island) and a veteran programmer who was at CHUM-FM Toronto in its '70s AOR heyday and through its transition to one of the first Rock ACs (which eventually led to the Hot AC that it is today). There's an interview with him today in the new Canadian radio trade fyimusic.ca which, among other things, has some interesting memories of the early days of FM that might motivate those overseeing HD-2 multicast channels.

There's a story posted yesterday on MSNBC.com that an online study on "American Idol" is being undertaken in this season of declining ratings, including at least two perceptual questions about host Ryan Seacrest. From this, the story concludes that, in the words of its headline, "Seacrest's 'Idol' future may not be so secure" and speculates that Seacrest's multi-media ubiquity might finally be catching up with him.

Before you start worrying too much about Ryan though, consider that the producers of "Idol," if they're smart (and that's pretty well-established) have probably done perceptual research on the show since the beginning. In those studies, they've probably asked the same questions about Seacrest every year, in the same way that a radio station perceptual would typically ask about the morning show. That doesn't mean that every element of the show isn't under scrutiny this year, or that this study wouldn't resurface at contract time. But it does mean that to look at the inclusion of any one item is to look at it out of context.

An interesting tidbit from yesterday's release of Arbitron March PPM data for Philadelphia and Houston that has, as best I can tell, gone uncommented on elsewhere:

Halfway through March, Smooth Jazz KHJZ Houston became Top 40 KKHH. That station, which was already declining in previous months, went 2.6 - 1.9 6-plus. Urban AC KMJQ (Majic 102) was off 6.9 - 6.7 but maintained its market lead. AC KODA (Sunny 99.1), which had been tapering off since the Christmas music ended, was up 4.5 - 5.9. The traditional jazz station, noncommercial KTSU, went down as well 0.6 - 0.5 although few partisans of either station would see the other as in any way connected.

Another full month might better tell the story, of course, but for now it's intriguing that the demise of Smooth Jazz seemingly does everything to help the Mainstream AC and nothing for the Urban AC -- this even though one of the existential issues for Smooth Jazz had become its musical proximity to Urban AC.

So what do you do when you have a morning host like WDCG (G105) Raleigh, N.C.'s Bob Dumas with a series of seemingly calculated outrages over the years, some of them trifling (anti-bicyclist) and some more serious? For more than 20 years, broadcasters have perfected the art of letting the people they offend become their public relations machine in a way that rarely backfires (Imus, Opie & Anthony) and rarely backfires indefinitely (Imus, Opie & Anthony). So what to do when neither engaging nor ignoring is the perfect strategy? There's always suggesting alternatives as this Raleigh News & Observer story does.

I'm listening to a radio station in Toronto at the moment. The afternoon host just tried to hand it off to the traffic woman, but stopped himself mid-sentence, saying, "Ah, she needs a moment or two. We'll just give her that moment." He padded for a second or two longer, then the traffic report began. It was deftly handled, but no less noticeable for that.

First I thought, "No matter how little air-talent talk these days or how much voice-tracking you do, there's still not much you can do if the traffic person isn't ready."

Then I wondered, how often in this less foreground era of radio do we still hear mistakes? Not just traffic reports that aren't ready but news at the top of the hour that hasn't been well backtimed? Or more serious bloopers? And how many of those on-air bloopers these days are tied to automation systems?

So I'm curious about how often you hear mistakes these days. And in a spirit of "praise in public, humiliate in private (or at least anonymity)," please don't use this as an opportunity to single out rival stations, personalities by name.

And here's the question that must now be asked anytime somebody goes into a small market and encounters a live and local personality:

Didn't they get the memo?

How is it that some stations carry on with a local staff when many stations in much larger markets went to the hard drive and/or jockless a long time ago?

Meanwhile, check out this small-market station (discovered by iN3 Media Partners' Robert Unmacht) and their playlist with 50 songs (and many, many extras).

One of the interesting trends to emerge from "American Idol" in recent seasons -- proven again last night by David Cook's version of "Always Be My Baby" -- is that audiences are surprisingly open to hearing songs they know creatively reinterpreted, whether it was Blake Lewis' "You Give Love A Bad Name" last season, or Chikezie's "She's A Woman," or even to discovery of songs. Jason Castro clearly has a career as a music supervisor in TV or at an ad agency if this Idol thing doesn't work out. So is it time for well chosen cover songs to make their way back into the A&R person's bag of tricks? Thoughts in this week's Ross On Radio.

It was only 15 months ago that CBS Radio's WTGB (the Globe) Washington, D.C., with its eco-friendly-themed Triple-A format seemed like a major move into the music radio mainstream for environmental issues. Now, Oldies sister WOGL Philadelphia is qualifying listeners to win a Toyota Prius by listening for the "Go Green Artist of the Day." (It's also the final step in the long journey away from retro-themed car giveaways by Oldies stations although I'm still personally waiting to win that Hybrid Mustang!)

For the last few years, Modern Rock has often been a trade magazine chart panel in search of a format. Despite everything you hear about the more centrist leanings of many Rock stations these days, the Modern Rock panel has always been an uneasy mix of "true alternative" stations that will play Feist and Band Of Horses (but often steer away from mainstream guitar rock) and harder rocking stations that are just a Muse or White Stripes song away from the Active Rock chart.

There's a vivid demonstration of that this week on the Modern Rock chart where the No. 1 song is Puddle Of Mudd's "Psycho." It's the hookiest, most melodic song in a long time from the one-time Limp Bizkit proteges. But even in its chart-topping week, it's being played by only 50 of Mediabase's 72 Alternative reporters.

Some of the stations that aren't playing "Psycho" are duopoly outlets that have an Active Rock sister station next door. A few are the adult-leaning true alts that you might expect to have an issue with it. But a lot of the holdouts are mainstream standard bearers such as KROQ Los Angeles, KITS San Francisco, WBCN Boston, or CIMX (89X) Detroit.

So what does this tell us:

1) There truly is no consensus in the format right now;

2) Things are a lot slower in the format these days. PDs talk about songs taking longer to kick in. And during this second boom of adult/library-based modern stations, many are playing fewer currents and more gold. Some of the holdouts will likely go back for this record in a few weeks. (The long-running "Never Too Late" by Three Days Grace, which finally crossed to the pop side, is No. 1 on KROQ now.) That said, when the right reaction record like Flobots' "Handlebars" comes along, it seems to find its way much faster, not unlike the superstar Country titles that don't take six months to climb that chart like everything else.

3) Even PDs who are willing to play Seether, Breaking Benjamin, Atreyu, and Incubus are among the holdouts -- so perhaps it's not sonic, but instead an artist image issue among PDs who somehow consigned the band to Active Rock five years ago.

In any event, it's another case of a format that doesn't have a ton of its own hits being finicky about the ones it does have. And I'm guessing that PDs and label people will have plenty of other recent examples.

Bonneville's new L.A. Triple-A is on the air and I wanted to put the first hour out there for anybody who's come to look for such things on this site. Here's KRBV (100.3 the Sound) L.A.'s sign on at 10 a.m. local time.

U2, "Beautiful Day"
Los Lonely Boys, "Heaven"
Rilo Kiley, "Silver Lining"
Rolling Stones, "Gimme Shelter (Live)"
Talking Heads, "Once In A Lifetime"
Lifehouse, "Hanging By A Moment"
Spoon, "Don't You Evah"
Elvis Costello, "Every Day I Write The Book"
Doors, "Love Me Two Times"
Keane, "Somewhere Only We Know"
Police, "Driven To Tears"
Bruce Springsteen, "Girls In Their Summer Clothes"
Foo Fighters, "Learn To Fly"
Grateful Dead, "Uncle John's Band"
Nirvana, "About A Girl (Unplugged)"

A few months back, I likened today's stripped-down CHRs to the minimalist AM top 40s that popped up in the late '70s and early '80s, in a failed attempt to save the format on AM by making it more like FM rock radio. Those stations were pretty much lost to time and, in most cases, deservedly so. But the last Ross On Rado column on KHJZ (Hot 95.7) Houston and its super-tight rotations has prompted a thread in the comments on consultant Frank Felix, who took a handful of AMs to his 13-current, liner-card-driven format, most notably XETRA (The Mighty 690) San Diego. In its extreme terseness, the Mighty 690 fascinated at the time and, apparently, still does.

For all we've heard about morning teams being encouraged to share more of their real lives with listeners, the time programmers don't want candor is when there's a personnel change involved. That's why few stations give jocks the opportunity to say goodbye to listeners. And that's why it's all the more amazing that KOST Los Angeles morning man Mark Wallengren suddenly let loose on-air about life without partner Kim Amidon, particularly with his PD sitting in the studio. Here's The Orange County Register's report.

Readers have a lot to say about the recent Ross On Radio column, "How Fast Is Too Fast: The 45-Minute Power Rotation," a column inspired by the monster sign-on rotations on KHJZ (Hot 95.7) Houston, among others. To see their comments click here and scroll down, and then check out the discussion that began on Radio-Info.com.

Saw this yesterday in "Monday Morning Update," the newsletter that SupeRadio's "Open House Party" host John Garabedian sends out to affiliates:

"Radio has been pleading with labels for at least 25 years to stop putting out singles with no 'intro time.' After our constantly whining about this, we have this week gotten a commitment the top level at BMG that all their singles in the future will have "lead-ins" (record company term) so radio has a place to identify and intro the song. To other labels reading this, any PD choosing one song add from three otherwise equal new releases will instinctively avoid adding the one with zero intro time because it means extra work. Thank you BMG!"

If this indeed transpires, I'm happy to see it. Songs that start cold, not because that's the best way to start the song but because the intro is loaded up with the producer's shout-outs to himself, have driven me crazy, too. Garabedian's contention that this would be an issue for most PDs surprises me however. Some Top 40 stations like WHTZ (Z100) New York go out of their way to create intros where they don't exist. (For Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend," it sure sounded like they spliced on a piece of "Mickey.") Most don't seem to care about such mundane matters. They'll let a jock stop the music before an :02 intro and play a two-second drop over the :23 intro of the next song.

In principle, I believe that the trademark murmurings that keep most jocks from talking over the intros have become a cliché -- helping to reinforce any sense that music has become generic and failing to help brand songs or artists in any way that would stop pop and R&B music's sales slide. How can you know or care what a song is when every song now begins with "you know what this is"? (There are exceptions: the "one-two-three-four" that starts Mario's "Cryin' Out For Me" is a great moment -- even if it seems to belong to a different record.)

Sadly, as radio becomes increasingly jockless, what will really end up over those newly-created intros is probably going to be nothing. While I consider the long faux-radio intro and ending of Chris Brown's "Kiss Kiss" completely extraneous, it's ironic that they're longer DJ breaks than exist on most of the stations that play it.

Amidst the various gloomy reports in America's radio trade press, I was interested to find this report from the U.K. Commercial radio in the UK actually grew 7.1% in the fourth quarter of last year - and the industry grew as a whole for the year.

Of course, commercial radio is a far younger industry in the U.K., which helps it. But what stands out is the last paragraph where one sees the impact of coordinated efforts by Commercial Radio's representative agencies. Surely there is a lesson for U.S. radio in that.

In America, the Jack- and Bob-FM Hot AC/Classic Hits hybrid may have been thought of as the next generation of Oldies. But in Canada, it was the closest thing to an Oldies format that had ever existed on FM. Canadian government regulations required stations to take roughly half their music either from 1981 or later or from songs that weren't top 40 chart hits (easier for a Classic Rock station than an Oldies station).

But as the Oldies/Classic Hits format moved further into the '80s, it was inevitable that it would become easier to do the format on FM. Quebec already has a French-language gold outlet. And this week, Newcap has launched a '60s/'70s/'80s-gold-based format on former Smooth Jazz outlet CIQX Calgary, now known as XL103.

As a longtime fan of Canadian radio and music, this is a launch that I was particularly proud to be involved with. Check it out here.

It's one of those things that people talk about wistfully when they recall the old days of Rock radio: coming out of a concert and being able to hear those artists on the radio for the ride home.

The Eric Clapton/Steve Winwood tour came through New York last week for three nights, so just out of curiosity, I checked out Classic Rock WAXQ (Q104.3) and new Triple-A rival WRXP (which in some ways invokes the spirit of the old WNEW-FM).

Both stations acknowledged the shows, although Q104.3 did so much more extensively:

Mediabase shows that WRXP had "Layla" playing around the time the shows let out on the second night; I heard them playing Clapton deep cut "The Core" when the show let out on the third night.

Q104.3 did six song sets of Clapton, Winwood, Blind Faith, Cream, Traffic, etc., for all three nights -- starting about 15-25 minutes after everybody would have been back in the car (and after WRXP's briefer tribute had ended).

All in all, I felt better than I did a few years ago when I came out of the musical "Jersey Boys" and couldn't find any place to hear the Four Seasons. WCBS-FM was gone. Suburban WMTR, which played a lot of Four Seasons, was in sports. I finally heard "Sherry" on the now-defunct AM oldies format on WWKB Buffalo, N.Y.

There are undoubtedly going to be some readers who find programming for the concert crowd to be just one more "Two for Tuesday"-style cliché. But it's something I wasn't hearing as much for a while. And it's not a bad way for a station to connect with listeners when those opportunities are becoming rarer.

On Friday, Washington DC's Smooth Jazz outlet, WJZW, became the latest in the format to be unceremoniously dumped, leaving yet another of radio's ever-dwindling bodies of rabid fans with nothing more than a "thanks for listening" letter on their website. I'm sure there were reasons for the flip, and I hope those reasons extend beyond merely the most recent book. WJZW has had a very good run as a Top 10 performer in that market, but becomes yet another casualty in a long line of format flips designed to infuriate listeners. I have written before about the "snow globe" theory of audience dynamics that many programming experts still subscribe to--if we shake 'em up, they'll settle somewhere else, and we will either get them with Station 'A' or Station 'B.' Unfortunately, they never consider the third option--that the globe isn't sealed, and they never settle anywhere, period.

So we sound the death knell of Smooth Jazz in DC. Is it now time to sound the death knell for the format? I have mixed feelings about that. Clearly there are some markets (San Diego and Seattle, for instance) where the format is far from dead--it is dominant. Some of you may know that in a prior life I spent quite a bit of time working in the format--indeed, for WJZW itself back in the 90s--and have seen the format through its best and worst times. I've heard stations that you can't turn off when they are really humming (The Wave in LA (KTWV) always sounds perfect for its place and time to me) and I've heard forgettable jukeboxes--devoid of passion, local flavor and personality. When executed properly, the format can be a golden goose. Done poorly, it can also be positively moribund. With New York and Washington dropping Smooth Jazz, are the format's best days behind it? Is it a classic format? Or as much of its time and place as Arrow was?

I don't think New Adult Contemporary (NAC) is dead. There are very few formats that generate as much passion 35-64, or can still move those same adults to get excited about new music--it is like Country in that regard. It can also be a terrific sales performer--take a potential advertiser to a station concert or Sunday Brunch for a great NAC station and they can't help but be impressed. NAC generates passion, excellent qualitative numbers and sounds great in public settings (hello, PPM!) It is a format, however, that benefits from a dedicated sales staff, a luxury few clusters can afford. Even so, I would dispute the notion that NAC is dead.

I do think, however, that Smooth Jazz (TM) is on its last legs. The format needs more than just "TV" to survive--it needs to tap into a more compelling benefit than "smooth out your workday," like it is little more than a Xanax. There are few formats that respond as readily to local customization; yet many Smooth Jazz stations sound remarkably the same. There are, of course, programmers who have successfully crafted unique sounding NAC stations, but those are a struggle. In the case of WJZW, WQCD and other notable format flips, some operators have decided to switch rather than fight.

I'm not close enough to the product these days to dig authoritatively into the issues with currents, cover songs, or burn scores, so I won't go down that path here. Where Smooth Jazz (TM) has really failed to evolve is in how it is marketed. Even today, stations are rolling out the same purple-y sax logos and billboards with Dave Koz and Sade, proudly proclaiming themselves as "Smooth Jazz" even though there is plenty of research suggesting that the word Jazz may turn away as many potential fans of the music as it invites. The primal need to relax in this country is a powerful benefit that NAC could tap into and market in a thousand clever ways--with passion, with humor and with a more universal approach--yet the format continues to identify itself with unfamiliar artists and events geared to "jazz buffs" instead of helping moms get their kids to soccer practice, or otherwise truly mattering to the 95% of potential listeners who will NEVER go out to see Kirk Whalum at the local jazz club. Brands like Calgon, General Foods International Coffees and Quantas and don't market flakes, crystals or increased cabin legroom--they market where they take you. For too long, the tired, overworked "Trip-a-day" contest has served as the format's proxy for this, but contesting is not branding.

Reinventing NAC will take vision, commitment, guts and, yes, an investment in branding and marketing. Yet those few stations still putting Smooth Jazz on the air view it as a cost-cutting measure, or the ugly stepsister to the "more popular" AC. NAC could be a magical format, bringing disparate ages, sexes and races together. To do that, however, it can't be the ugly stepchild, and it can't be a format-in-a-box. The format has tremendous potential if and only if it is treated as a big box station, not as a jukebox, and if it is marketed for how it can reach and touch everybody, not just the select few who know who Boney James is. I'd love to see that happen. Until then, I fear we will continue to shake listeners completely out of the snow globe, never to return.

A few things I've listened to over the last week (or two) that rated a mention:

* Classic Rock WCSX Detroit "putting the 'U' in February" as an excuse to include listeners' playlists and play some deep cuts. Not quite as out there as the "Deep Cuts/Lost Tracks Thursday" I heard on WLUP Chicago recently, but I did hear songs I had forgotten about (e.g., Santana's "Open Invitation").

* New York's Top 40 and Urban stations deciding what to do about the reference to WBLS p.m. driver Wendy Williams in the new Mariah Carey single, "Touch My Body." So far, I've heard WKTU and WHTZ (Z100) leaving it in. At least one of WBLS' urban rivals has edited the name out of the line "all up in my business like a Wendy interview," however.

* Sammy Hagar (and Shadoe Stevens') Cabo Wabo Radio -- I finally got around to listening to this station, launched last December. I was expecting Classic Rock, but it is actually the best place to hear recent music from the Active and Alternative Rock charts in large quantity that I've come across recently. And, as you'd expect from those involved, it's very well produced albeit jockless in the midday segment I heard.

* KDND (the End) Sacramento, Calif. -- I gave PD Dan Mason a plug in the stations of the year column, but they continue to impress. Nice to hear a large-market CHR that is sounding bigger, not more minimal, with each listen.

* WLND (the Legend) Chattanooga, Tenn. -- I've written about their Atlanta sister, WLTM, but this earlier Clear Channel Country Oldies station also has real depth, including some of that novelty/reaction Country music that has completely disappeared even from Country Gold outlets.

Best oldie of the week: The Donnie Elbert version of "Where Did Our Love Go" on CKWW (AM580) Detroit (edging out Santana on WCSX)!

Like a lot of people in the industry, my first exposure to many new songs -- if they haven't already been released internationally -- is when they're serviced on-line or when they come in the mail. Unless it's a superstar release and a station big enough to have it early, I'm not likely to hear it on the radio for the first time. (The last time I can think of it happening, in fact, was Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" on WHTZ [Z100] New York.)

That doesn't mean that I don't still buy a lot of music. And it doesn't mean that radio never puts music on my agenda. It just tends to be a certain type of music -- either obscure Oldies or songs that are beyond the pale even of what's being worked. I find songs by listening to them at various industry Websites, by Googling the lyrics I hear on the in-store music at the CVS or the Chipotle. And I buy a lot of songs that I own on vinyl that are finally becoming available at iTunes Music Store. But radio still sells me a song every now and then, such as:

* WRXP New York -- I thought I already knew Cold War Kids' "Hang Me Out To Dry," but it sounded great in their second hour and I realized I didn't have it.

* Liverpool's Juice FM and Oxford's FM 107.9 -- My two go-to stations for hearing new British imports, since they're less recurrent- and gold-driven than many of the other major British outlets (particularly those that can still be listened to from the U.S.).

* WGHT (North Jersey 1500), WBGO Newark's Felix Hernandez, and WFMU's Michael Shelly. On any given weekend, at least one of these New York area stations will send me looking for an oldie that I didn't know or hadn't thought of for a while. (I think it was WGHT that recently prompted my purchase of an Orlons b-side.) Shelly is the one most lijkely to send me in search of music that can't be easily found anywhere.

* WBOS-HD-2 (Radio You ) Boston -- Sent me in search of two songs (one a Death Cab for Cutie cover obscurity, the other by the group Oddway) after my first 45 minutes with this indie rock channel.

* WHTZ-HD-2 - I've got some issues with Z100's artist-interview-based new music channels. They have tended to leave segments running forever (long enough that acts are talking about things that happened several months ago). But it's often my only taste of the album from many secondary acts and they have sent me in search of several songs -- most recently the Lyfe Jennings cover of 2pac's "Keep Ya Head Up."

There are also the stations that indirectly sell me a song -- I see it on their playlist and listen to it, without actually hearing the station play it. That's happened several times recently, most amusingly with the song that was being championed as the U.K.'s Christmas No. 1 by a DJ at BBC Radio 1: Malcolm Middleton's "We're All Going To Die [Alone]." (Not surprisingly, it became no such thing.)

An intriguing question at Radio-Info.com today: In this primary season, if you could elect a president of radio, who would it be? R-I.com's Dana Hall suggests WBEB Philadelphia owner Jerry Lee and Greater Media's Peter Smyth. She also bemoans the inability of the late station owner/Country legend Buck Owens to put his name in the ring.

A lot has been written here about the mess that many stations make of the on-line streamed versions of their stopsets. Some stations are doing a better job of selling local spots to parallel the national ones that would create an AFTRA issue. Others are still giving the audience 4 to 6 minutes of dire-sounding PSAs, bad incidental music, repeating morning show promos, fill songs, or some combination thereof.

In recent weeks, I've been spending more time than usual with Internet-only radio, and I've had the following moment of clarity (which I admittedly could have had a year earlier if I didn't do most of my on-line listening to terrestrial).

Almost every major on-line service offers a premium subscription level with no stopsets -- even though their stopsets are much shorter than most terrestrial stations. Terrestrial stations that at least do the work to fill their stopsets with actual songs are effectively giving the listeners that for free.

So while the best scenario would be to actually resolve the AFTRA issue (and the accompanying Arbitron issue of separately tallied stream listing), and the second best would be to sell more Web-only spots, stations that can't do that have a pretty clear mandate. It's time to fill those breaks up with songs, not fill music or McGruff the Crime Dog (the undisputed king of streaming PSAs) and to tell your stream listeners that they're getting commercial-free music without paying extra for it.

Since leaving WZZN, Chicago's "True Oldies Channel" affiliate, last year, longtime WLS afternoon/night hero John Landecker has been teaming with another WLS veteran, Turi Ryder, and shopping a team morning show. If you're interested in hearing them together, they'll be on suburban Classic Hits outlet WERV (the River) starting Monday (25).

Snarkiness in a station's on-air presentation is a question that radio has been grappling with for nearly two decades now. It began with the first on-air admonition to "don't be a d---head" and returned a few years ago with some of the less successful imaging on New York's version of Jack-FM. At a time when it feels like advertising overall has gotten edgier, snarkier and even more violent than ever, it's nice to see today's guest commentary in Advertising Age that declares "Snide Advertising Is Bad for Business and Society."

In today's Chicago Sun-Times, longtime radio columnist Robert Feder looks at how that market's radio stations responded to last week's shooting at Northern Illinois University. Feder praises the job done by WBBM, WGN, and suburban WERV (the River) and its OM Matt DuBiel, but he notes that Talk outlet WLS both chose to "bail out" of coverage at 7 p.m. to air a taped Sean Hannity program then ran on-air promos "bragging about its coverage."

Seeing Feder's column this morning reminded me that the recap of how local media covered a major news event, particularly a tragedy, used to be fairly standard within journalism. Now, it's rare to hear a music station break for anything other than tragedy, it's common to find national talk programming when you're looking for local information, and it's less common to see this sort of story about how the news was covered.

While Feder has a 10-to-15 year start on many of his colleagues, it was gratifying during the '90s to see daily newspaper coverage of radio proliferate in many markets. Much of the coverage, of course, was frustrating -- people who clearly didn't like radio in the first place and were now determined to make PDs pay for their failure to play enough (insert name of obscure critical favorite here). But the increased coverage also reinforced the notion of radio as a major medium and if broadcasters didn't take sufficient advantage of it, you can't blame the messenger.

So with newspapers, facing their own financial travails, continue to thin their workforces, you have to wonder what's going to happen to media coverage, and radio in particular. Writers who cover radio as a beat -- even the avenging angel rock critics -- generally have a better, more informed take on the industry. They are less likely to repeat the truisms about the business that are not necessarily true (e.g., "In response to the massive inroads made by Satellite Radio, panicked broadcasters have retreated from their lowest common denominator programming of playing the hits every half-hour"). They are also more likely to figure out that the man living on the billboard that said, "I need a job," didn't just coincidentally become a station's new morning man.

And more coverage of radio means that there will be continuing scrutiny, some of it perhaps unwelcome by others, of how radio covers the news or fails to. Radio's importance during a crisis continues to be one of broadcasters' talking points whenever radio's importance in listeners' lives is challenged. If radio is performing well, we need that story told. If radio is not, we need to be able to address it. It is distressing to think that one day there may be nobody to cover the news, and nobody who knows that it isn't being covered except for the people looking for information.

Since the National Election Pool, on whose behalf Edison Media Research conducts the Exit Polls, put the question of listening to "conservative talk radio" onto their surveys of Republican voters last week in Virginia and Maryland, much discussion has ensued. Indeed, McCain got his worst percentages in both states among those who listen frequently to conservative talk radio. But another look inside the numbers shows that while McCain might not be the perfect candidate for the most frequent conservative-talk listeners, he might not be the disaster some people make him out to be. Edison's Larry Rosin asks, "Just How Much Do Talk Radio Listeners Hate McCain?" here.

I was out of town two weekends ago, and spending a lot of time with a station that I don't usually hear on the weekends. The part-timer on the air was one of those jocks who were slick and immaculately researched -- there was a factoid or artist trivia in every break The only problem was that as I try to write about it 10 days later, I can't remember what any of those factoids were; none of them were all that compelling.

Later on, I heard another station in the same market running its Saturday Night Flashback Show. This part-timer sounded like he was 20 years old, making his way not so confidently through records that were probably older than he was.

Back at home, I've been listening to a small-market station from a few markets away. The midday host is the kind of jock I've been hearing on full-service stations for 30 years: sounds 50 years old (but often turns out to be 26), gives every local sponsor at least 45 seconds of extra value on their live-read :60 spot, and usually punctuates his ramblings with phrases like "oh, my goodness."

In an era of increasingly jockless and voice-tracked weekends, and weeks, hearing these jocks really stands out. They are the jocks that advocates of voice-tracking and syndicated programming have in mind when they ask if it wouldn't be better to have a stronger national talent, or just liners and jingles.

And the answer is . . .

Live jocks still embellish a station's presentation for me. And with the possible exception of Mr. Oh My Goodness, nobody here detracted from the music to the point where I would have happily opted for jingles and sweepers. But I can only say that I appreciated them being there on general principle. They were the random guys in the carpool who are decent enough company, even the harmless loudmouth, but would never be your friends on the weekend.

That doesn't mean that each of these three jocks wouldn't be missed by somebody if they weren't there tomorrow. Even the Soft AC card reader turns out to be a major part of somebody's life when they're suddenly not on the air. But at a time when the right to have live personalities on the weekends is under fire, programmers need to bring their air talent to a place where their contribution to the station is beyond reproach.

The first jock, Mr. Trivia, would have been the easiest to coach. He already sounded decent enough on the air. Some punchier writing, some better source material, and maybe a second shtick to keep him from relying on trivia at every break would have made a big difference.

Mr. Saturday Night probably just needed more care-and-feeding than the Saturday night guy usually gets from a busy PD. This jock was still sufficiently raw that I'm not sure what his particular gift was yet -- but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he's just like any of our readers in their first job at a decent sized market and just needs some time.

Mr. Oh My Goodness is probably the biggest challenge. You get the impression that he is either a thoroughly pleasant guy with no content, who would just be tormented if you asked him to develop some, or the kind of jock who would take enormous umbrage at any attempt to edit a single precious syllable. Self-editing would make him better, but not the kind of guy who helps you win the argument against voice-tracking.

Advocates of jockless or voice-tracked stations often couch their argument by offering two unpalatable (to me) alternatives: bad local personality or national/no personality. Why not great local personality? Because it's a scarce commodity these days (and getting scarcer as the places to train talent are reduced). But if you're ever listening to your own radio station and you don't feel like you would go to the wall to protect your own talent from the next round of budget cutting, that says something.

When word began circulating last fall that WNYZ-LP New York, the LP-TV station that broadcasts audio on 87.7 FM, was switching from Russian pop to some form of Top 40 with Star & Buc Wild as the morning show, it was immediately clear that they would need to do two things:

1) Find the format that will make people seek out a frequency that is not even on every radio dial and doesn't have any existing traffic (except for Russian pop fans).

2) Sound "big-time" enough to be taken seriously and simultaneously underground enough to take advantage of the odd "TV on the Radio" nature of the station. There is certainly an audience out there for whom broadcasting at 87.7 FM gives you some extra points for not being radio-as-usual.

Being some form of Top 40 instantly eliminated some of the things that would draw people to a left-field frequency in New York: an all-Caribbean format; a harder-core rap format than what's being played on the two mainstream Urbans, or some sort of younger-targeted/indie rock-driven format (in which case you could play the group TV on the Radio).

That left playing current dance music -- which hasn't been heard much in the market since WKTU segued to Rhythmic AC a year ago, although it still maintains some presence on WHTZ (Z100). And that was indeed the format that the new Pulse 87 unveiled yesterday under new PD Joel Salkowitz, who was doing a similar format on his "Original Hot 97" Website.

As heard in its first two days, the new Pulse 87 is about 40% freestyle and lost '80s/early '90s dance of the sort that would have been on the original WQHT (Hot 97) New York, (okay, Hot 103.5 actually), about 20% current pure dance product, and 40% dance remixes of current pop and R&B hits. (As Billboard's Silvio Pietroluongo pointed out, what's not there yet is some of the dance music from the last two years or so that the market never got to hear--something which was a big part of the current WKTU when it launched in 1996).

It's not a bad time to be launching a dance music station. With recent hits from Cascada, Enur, Bob Sinclair, and even Rihanna's "Don't Stop The Music," you have a better chance of finding enough hits to represent dance music in a research cluster or a TV spot. And we can set aside the issue of whether Rihanna or even Enur represents "real" dance music: there's a lot of danceable R&B and pop right now and regardless of how listeners view it, it still helps them accept the music that comes from the dance community (as opposed to Timbaland or the Neptunes).

As for that other question, of how an LPTV pushes its way into the market with the big guys, adding Salkowitz to the mix added some extra credibility. On its first day (sweepers only, no moring show yet), Pulse certainly sounded slick enough in the opening stage, with one misstep: sending listeners to the Website for audio, even though there's not yet a Listen Live link at this writing.

And streaming will be key for the station. I was told that the signal would be surprisingly good on the station and it was -- I can hear it at my home in Northern New Jersey, about 30 miles from the city, although it's sometimes spotty. It dies out about 10 miles to the west, about 20 - 30 miles short of where other NYC FMs start to fall apart. And here in Somerville, what you get on 87.7 is the audio from Philadelphia's TV 6. But it's a comparable signal to, say, KNGY (Energy 92.7) San Francisco -- a well-respected station that hovers just under a 1-share at most times, and which many market observers think would do better with a better signal.

There's been some speculation among dance and radio fans in the last day about how and if WKTU would react. Yesterday and this morning, it felt like the station was doubling down on freestyle/late '80s (a monitor this morning shows Samantha Fox, Lisa-Lisa & Cult Jam, and George Lamond in close proximity) -- music that has always been on the station but felt like it was appearing with greater frequency today. As for current dance product, it's likely to be there only if the combination of Z100 and Pulse 87 is able to create some more records of the magnitude of Enur.

Here's WNYZ from around 5 p.m. yesterday. All non-dance songs are represented by dance mixes:

Ida Corr vs. Fedde LeGrand, "Let Me Think About It"
Ne-Yo, "Because Of You"
Justin Timberlake, "Until the End of Time"
Corona, "The Rhythm of the Night"
Mary J. Blige, "Just Fine"
Nelly Furtado, "Promiscuous"
Sandee, "You're The One"
Santana f/Chad Kroeger, "Into the Night"
Erika Jayne, "Stars"
Cascada, "What Hurts the Most"
Filo & Peri, "Anthem"
Hillary Duff, "Stranger"
DJ Antoine, "This Time"
Flo Rida, "Low"
India, "The Lover Who Rocks You All Night"
Sean Kingston, "Take You There"
Jo Jo, "Too Little, Too Late"
Ne-Yo, "Sexy Love"
Samantha Fox, "Touch Me (I Want Your Body)"

Meanwhile, if you're looking for another dance choice, one of the other great brands in New York dance radio is now represented by an on-line radio station as well. Longtime A&R person John Parker, now of Robbins Entertainment, is paying tribute to B91, the Brooklyn non-comm that started dance music on its journey to Hot 97 in the late '80s. Check out his station here.

When Emmis launched Triple-A WRXP New York last week as "New York's Rock Experience," it was with a nod to the cult that has sprung up around non-commercial KEXP Seattle, even if the music mixes barely overlapped. Now, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that the real KEXP will be heard in New York next month through a deal with non-commercial WNYE.

I didn't want to let the recent departure of KMBY (X103.9) Monterey, Calif., go unmourned. X103.9 was the most recent in a series of attempts at an Alternative/Hip-Hop hybrid, one of those formats like the Classic Rock/Country format that makes sense to everybody but often turns out to be an unstainable niche for a terrestrial station.

As do most stations, X103.9 had morphed a little since its heavily publicized launch. The music had gradually become a little more hit-driven and a little less extreme. By its final week, the powers (Flo Rida, Linkin Park, Finger 11, Timbaland./One Republic, Soulja Boy, Linkin Park, and Snoop Dogg) could have been the hits on any rhythmic-leaning large-market Top 40 (although X103.9 was playing them a little less--39 times a week or thereabouts). And if you looked further down the playlist, there was still Avenged Sevenfold and Flyleaf next to Lupe Fiasco and Gnarls Barkley.

When the first attempts to acknowledge that Hip-Hop had usurped guitar rock's long-ago place as "the only music that mattered" to a 22-year-old male came along, the issue was that there was still an age limit on a male rock listener's tolerance for rap. A 22-year-old might understand the mix perfectly. A 32-year-old would not. Lately, there's been another wrinkle. As many Top 40 programmers will tell you, Hip-Hop is definitely not the only music that matters to a 16-year-old either. So suddenly the notion of a Rock/Hip-Hop coalition isn't only limited from above but from below.

And yet, as was noted when we wrote about KMBY at the time, if X103.9 wasn't the way to go after the young males who are becoming disenfranchised from radio, the onus is still on broadcasters to figure out what is. You can't help thinking that the architect of today's Adult Modern hybrids or even the new WRXP New York are figuring that stations that mix new and old, whether it's Led Zeppelin or Local H. are targeting 18-24 males because, in the absence of galvanizing new music, they've turned to older music themselves. But it's hard to imagine somebody else's music being the thing that draws younger listeners to the radio again.

One of the interesting stories of the last year or so has been the continued rise of Oldies KLUV (K-Love) Dallas which is generally believed to have gotten a boost when Smooth Jazz sister station KOAI (the Oasis) switched to Rhythmic AC -- leaving them as one of the few 45-plus choices.

So the departure of WQCD (CD101.9) New York yesterday had to provide some encouragement to the folks at WCBS-FM, one scanner punch to the left. The new WRXP, with its ample Classic Rock component will undoubtedly be of interest to some CBS-FM fans, but they're also likely to send some folks in the other direction. So maybe it was no coincidence that the first song I heard on CBS-FM when I punched in this morning was Chuck Mangione's "Feels So Good." (I'm not waiting for Count Basic and David Sanborn, however.)

Meanwhile, WRXP, which signed on hosted in afternoons, has been jockless (at least for now) when I've heard them in late nights and mornings. During those times, they've been running a lot of those drops that sound like they could as easily be a jock or a listener as the station voice--so they're not without their WRFF (Radio 104.5) Philadelphia-type elements.

This is, by many accounts, the year when politics became pop culture: whether because of the writers strike or the economy, the year when more Americans took an active interest in the future of their country. So how are music radio's morning shows -- geared more to talk about Britney than Barack -- reflecting that?

Judging from the hour or so of New York-area morning radio I heard today, Super Tuesday might as well have been just another election as I punched across my 11 music buttons. It was covered most extensively by the Urban stations. It got the obligatory top-of-the-newscast mentions on a handful of others, before they went on to their far more extensive coverage of the Giants' Super Bowl win and today's victory parade. Super Tuesday was treated topically by only one non-Urban station that I came across.

R&B stations can most reliably be counted on to urge their audience to get out and vote and this morning was no exception. The election was covered on Urban AC WRKS (Kiss 98.7), where I caught the tail end of a pundit interview, and on R&B/Hip-Hop WWPR (Power 105) where morning host Ed Lover was talking to first Diddy and then Chris Rock about the election. Diddy, because of his work with various non-partisan charities, did not endorse a candidate on-air, but Rock wasn't shy about championing Obama and neither was Ed Lover.

I didn't hear the election mentioned on WQHT (Hot 97)'s morning show, although I was told later by New York Daily News radio writer David Hinckley that Diddy made a slightly more pro-Obama appearance with morning host Miss Jones, who was strongly pro-Obama, anti-Clinton.

I didn't hear Steve Harvey, carried here on WBLS, mention it either until I was pulling into the parking lot at the end of my hour of listening. Harvey had spent most of that hour in a mock squabble with another team member, but finally chastised himself for not talking about the election earlier, urged listeners to vote (going no further than "you have a chance to make history either way," then adding that he figured he was talking mostly to Democrats), and launched into President Bush at length.

Most other places, it was the usual, perfunctory "polling places are open now" first story. (And, yes, I did hear about Britney Spears first on at least one station, although since she's between fresh outrages this week, I didn't hear as much about her.) The only exception was Opie & Anthony, heard here on WXRK (K-Rock), who were in the middle of a bit in which they appeared to be playing the first half of actualities from African-American listeners, then trying to guess whether they would be supporting Clinton or Obama (a bit they've reportedly been doing for several days with white voters as well).

Coming up with a good air name is one of those lost programming arts that you don't hear a lot about these days. For one thing, with fewer starter positions, there is less new air talent. There's more emphasis on sounding real. And the notion of a PD sitting around looking for the perfectly cadenced name that has just a hint of pop culture resonance seems as quaint these days as, well, a PD who has time to go through all the new superstar albums in search of the next hit single.

But as I delete an endless amount of SPAM each day, I've heen intrigued by the wide variety of "from" names -- the ones that are generic enough to sound like somebody you know, the ridiculous ones that are meant to get attention, the ones that come through in Chinese. So I began to wonder if you could find a good on-air name in the deleted items folder.

There are certainly many generic sounding 3-4 syllable names in the SPAM folder: not necessarily names you would change to, but names that would be perfectly acceptable on the air if they were already yours: Linda Weaver, Lucas Barber, Michael Tolbert, Dave Simon, Lee Corley, Cliff Baxter, Sheryl Grimes, Rene Fletcher.

There are definitely a few entries in the "Randy VanHalen"/"Skyy Walker" tradition of air names that invoke a current celebrity or pop culture figure: Suzanne Winters, Ella Bergeron, and Jonas Santana were the two I came across this morning. There are also names that are similar to people in our industry: Jami McCracken (longtime Country PD Gerry McCracken), Daryl Holt (Canadian PD Darryl Holien), and Geoff Gavin (We've been without Bill Gavin and the Gavin Report for a while, but the surname is still familiar to most broadcasters over 30).

There are the goofy or dated names that you wouldn't use now (Hubert Foster, Ismael Crow, Faustino Higgins, Murray Hodge), unless you were trying to be contrary and a couple that sound like they belong on a Classical station from 20 years ago (Cornell V. Nolan, Corinne Prince).

There are a few that would have been great air names in a different time, when punchiness and alliteration were key: Gary Plummer, Kirby Kent, Beth Bingham.

The coolest name in my SPAM folder this morning? Far and away, Katherine Funk. The Katherine part would have to be changed, but Funk could work for Hip-Hop or R&B Oldies, right?

Sp what's in your SPAM folder?

If Fort Wayne, Ind., isn't usually on your radar as a market, it's worth checking out the fall numbers for Russ Oasis' Country WBTU. The heritage Country FM, which had languished until being relaunched last year as US93.3, was up 4.3 - 8.6, pushing ahead of rival WQHK (8.0 - 7.7): a net gain of more than four Country shares over the spring book and nearly two shares over a year ago.

The easiest way to describe US93.3 is that it's like hearing "Froggy Country" in its early days, but with patriotic references instead of amphibians. The jocks are Sam Adams, Dolly Madison, Clara Barton, Andrew Jackson, Betsy Ross, and Patrick Henry (all shown as registered trademarks on the station Website). Frequent listener club members sign up for "U.S. citizenship." The station's current variation on the ages-old "High/Low" contest is "Operation Tax Refund," in which listeners have to guess what amount the check from the station's "Department of the Treasury" is written for. The language of the station is developed to the point where it has its own on-line glossary..

Musically, US93.3 is yesterday-and-today Country, imaged around "the newest of the new and the legends the other guys have forgotten about" with a heavy presence of early- and mid-'90s titles. Like Oasis' WKLU Indianapolis, its spotload is low (only four minutes in the two hours I heard). And like Oasis' other stations, its formatics are grounded in traditional top 40--in the 3 p.m. hour, Dolly Madison could be heard talking briefly about hockey's Ft. Wayne Komets playing that night or about Edwards and Giuliani pulling out of the presidential campaign.

In other words, US93.3 is a relatively developed package.at a time when stations are going more minimal. It plays a lot of music, including a lot of "oh wow" titles. But presentationally, it's not going to be mistaken for an iPod.

Here's US93.3 at 3 p.m. today:

Gretchen Wilson, "Here For The Party"
Josh Turner, "Another Try"
Billy Ray Cyrus, "Achy Breaky Heart"
Tim McGraw, "It's Your Love"
Craig Morgan, "International Harvester"
Vince Gill, "Trying To Get Over You"
Tanya Tucker, "It's A Little Too Late"
Gary Allan, "Watching Airplanes"
Rodney Atkins, "Watching You"
Clay Walker, "Dreaming With My Eyes Open"
Chuck Wicks, "Stealing Cinderella"
Brooks & Dunn, "You Can't Take The Honky-Tonk Out Of The Girl"
Reba McEntire & Linda Davis, "Does He Love You"
Brad Paisley, "Letter To Me"
George Strait, "One Night At A Time"

If you're at all surprised by the (relatively) more pop/rock direction that Top 40 has taken in the U.K., consider the discussion now taking place in the U.K., where The Guardian published an article last Friday complaining about BBC Radio 1, the influential national Top 40 network, and its increasing emphasis on the softer side of Britpop -- acts like the Feeling and the Hoosiers (largely unknown here) as well as acts like Scouting For Girls that play like a cross between Britpop and American teen punk.

Indeed, for a country whose Top 40 was always distinguished by a greater emphasis on dance music, teen pop and cutting edge rock than ours, the recently published top 10 songs of 2007 according to Music Week are a relatively mellow bunch, nothing that wouldn't fit on a British version of Fresh FM. The top 10 are:

1. Kaiser Chiefs, "Ruby"
2. Take That, "Shine"
3. Gwen Stefani, "The Great Escape"
4. Mika, "Grace Kelly"
5. Nelly Furtado, "Say It Right"
6. Justin Timberlake, "What Goes Around Comes Around"
7. Plain White T's, "Hey There Delilah"
8. Scissor Sisters, "I Don't Feel Like Dancing"
9. Maroon 5, "Makes Me Wonder"
10. Scissor Sisters, "She's My Man"

That doesn't mean that there aren't some cool records in there that America has thus far missed, but you have to go down to Gym Class Heroes at No. 13 or Leona Lewis at No. 14 before you get to anything vaguely rhythmic besides Justin. The first dance record is Booty Luv's "Boogie 2Nite" at No. 19 and there are a mere handful of dance records anywhere in the top 75. That's increasingly typical throughout Europe these days; I recently asked one European consultant if there was anywhere to hear dance music on the radio. He thought about it and suggested Estonia.

Okay, it's rare in the post-Bob- and Jack-FM era that a trainwreck segue is in any way remarkable. But I felt the need to share the one I heard this morning while listening to heritage Australian rocker Triple-M/Sydney. Australian Rock radio, like its Canadian counterpart, has always been a little broader than its American counterpart. And Triple-M, at least in overnights (the only shift an East Coaster can easily hear besides morning drive), is now leaning to the Adult Modern side -- gold-based and with some songs you definitely don't get to hear very often over here.

Here's a very enjoyable stretch of the station at 1:20 a.m.

Big Audio Dynamite II, "The Globe"
Simple Plan, "When I'm Gone"
U2, "Pride (In The Name Of Love)"
Good Charlotte, "I Don't Want To Be In Love"
Suzanne Vega, "Luka"
Tonic, "Open Up Your Eyes"
Billy Idol, "White Wedding"
Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Tell Me Baby"
Gavin DeGraw, "I Don't Want To Be"
Smash Mouth, "Can't Get Enough Of You Baby"
Talking Heads, "Psycho Killer (Live)"
Nickelback, "Saving Me"
Smashing Pumpkins, "1979"
Foo Fighters, "Long Road To Ruin"
Simple Plan, "Don't You (Forget About Me)"
Three Doors Down, "Here Without You"

The segue in question, if you didn't figure it out for yourself, was Good Charlotte into Suzanne Vega (although I suppose that's not impossible here on the right Hot AC's Flashback Weekend). The imaging for this, during the jockless overnight shift, was still that of a mainstream rock station: a lot of "Triple M Rocks" drops and one hailing "musicians who know how to tune our guitars."

Throughout our debate on the role of imaging, there's been a recurring theme from advocates of the new presentational austerity that can be roughly paraphrased as follows: "No matter how much I liked listening to CKLW Detroit and WLS Chicago growing up, they would mean nothing to today's audience." But the new austerity isn't new either, and it wasn't a panacea the first time. For more, see this week's Ross On Radio, "The Last Days of CKLW."

WJPZ (Z89) Syracuse, N.Y., -- the student-run noncommercial station associated with Syracuse Univ. -- has always run more like a mainstream, commercial station than most college outlets, doing Top 40, Rhythmic, and (if memory serves) Dance formats over the years. And now it's gotten local press following a marathon of Michael Jackson's "Beat It," followed by a heartbeat to promote its segue from Mainstream to Rhythmic Top 40 tonight as "The Beat of Syracuse." In an interesting sign of the times, however, besides generating the inevitable call to 911 by a concerned listener, the stunt also set off a flurry of text messages to the station.

I was listening to Public Radio the other day and there was an interview with one of the many engineers in this country who is trying to build a car that doesn't run on gasoline.

The questioner said: "Do you think Americans are ready to give up their gasoline-run cars?" His answer: "I've never heard anyone say that they are loyal to gasoline. People love their cars, and they love the freedom and mobility and experience they provide. No one loves gasoline." He said the last word with something of a snort.

And while I suppose people at Exxon or Shell might disagree, of course he is right.

Which made me consider: "Are people loyal to radio?" Well, not really. I would guess that very, very few people are loyal to the actual piece of hardware in their dashboard or on their nightstand. Similarly, no one is loyal to the frequencies. You won't hear anyone say: "No matter where I am and no matter what I do, I'm a 102.7FM guy through and through."

In many cases, radio is simply a channel through which a different loyalty is expressed...we certainly know the intense loyalty that many people feel towards individual musical artists. There's a reason we so often put the artists on the billboards or in the television commercials -- THEY are the true source of the loyalty.

Of course many people are loyal to specific morning shows, talk hosts, or myriad other elements of radio programming. But of course that is the point. It is the content, the programming that is the car. How you consume that programming, the device, the frequency -- they are simply gasoline.

I was really looking forward to hearing Jack-FM or something like it come to Eastern Europe. Even before the wall fell, that area was a hotbed for all things Eurosynth: Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, New Order, and a zillion others from the category that had much less impact in North America. Even now, listening to the Russian contemporary format on WNYZ-LP-TV in New York, soon to be Pulse 87 FM, it's possible to hear new music that sounds like '80s Europop.

There's actually disappointingly little of that music on Kekc-FM, the new Russian licensee of Jack-FM serving Moscow and St. Petersburg. Only about four songs an hour are in English and there are definitely some '80s-sounding Russian music, but there's also a lot of traditional sounding balladry and a lot of more generic pop/rock that is hard to place in any particular decade. The English language songs I heard in my first half hour were Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" and Bryan Ferry's "Slave To Love."

Ferry, by the way, already has more of a presence on Kekc-FM than he has on its counterparts here in the U.S. WCNR (the Corner) Charlottesville, Va., PD Brad Savage sent an e-mail around to friends/colleagues on Friday night headlined, "I discovered the best radio station EVER," in which he writes, "I did hear "Lemon Tree" by Fool's Garden, a worldwide smash that U.S. audiences didn't get in 1996. I also just heard "Jealous Guy" by [Ferry and] Roxy Music. Different is Good!" Savage also writes that "the imaging rules," although the station voice sounds more sonorous and (if you can tell this about somebody speaking in a language you don't speak) somewhat less ironic than the U.S./Canadian voice.

To hear the station, click on the right-most drop-down menu icon on the right-hand side of the page.

A friend of mine mentioned to me that his mother has been listening Imus via the Internet since his return to radio on WABC. She had been a fan of his on MSNBC, but does not have RFD-TV on her cable system (and she is not in a current Imus radio market).

Intriguingly, he said she is not really enjoying the experience, not because of any changes in Imus, but "because of the endless commercials for the other WABC personalities in the breaks."

This blog and plenty of others have made the point that the listener experience of Internet Radio from over-the-air brands is being hurt by what we are covering the spots with. It always helps to get this kind of evidence. People are listening on the streams, and yet we are tolerating negative experiences that we would simply never tolerate on our over-the-air signals.

Mainstream(ish) formats are still sufficiently rare in the non-commercial band that I'm always fascinated when I run across one. I hadn't checked out WMWX (ClassX Radio) Cincinnati since its debut, but reading about some recent lineup changes prompted me to check them out again this morning. The station is doing a mix of deep cuts Classic Rock and like-minded recent material and reminded me, at its best moments, of my other favorite deep cuts outlet, KCDX Phoenix.

Here's ClassX at 11:30 this morning:

John Fogerty, "Eye Of The Zombie" (1986)
Eagles, "Ol' 55" (1974)
J.K. Northrup, "So Long" (2007)
Eagles, "I Don't Want To Hear Anymore" (2007)
Soul Asylum, "Sexual Healing" (1993)
Bob Seger, "The Fire Inside" (1991)
Neal Morse, Mike Portnoy & Randy George, "Where The Streets Have No Name' (2006)
ELO, "I'm Alive" (1980)
David Gilmour, "Wish You Were Here (Live)" (2007)
Albert Cummings, "I Feel Good" (2006)
Kiss, "Strutter" (1974)
Supertramp, "Sister Moonshine" (1975)
Bryan Adams, "Let's Make A Night To Remember" (1997)

Here's one to ponder:

During one of the discussions that followed the news of WNNX (99X) Atlanta's imminent demise, the question was raised, "Just how long should you expect a radio station to remain viable?" As my caller pointed out, Atlanta now has twice the number of radio stations it did in 1992, while the musical movements that buoyed the station in its mid-'90s heyday (grunge and singer/songwriter) have long peaked.

And as longtime Cleveland PD John Gorman wrote recently in his programmer's memoir of WMMS Cleveland in the '70s and '80s, "The Buzzard," "everything has a shelf life."

There are, indeed, FM music brands that have endured: WGCI Chicago, KROQ Los Angeles, KIIS Los Angeles, WHTZ (Z100) New York, WPGC Washington, D.C., KEEY (K102) Minneapolis, and KRBE Houston are just a few. Most have endured ups and downs, but all are at a place in their cycle where the problems -- although severe at the time -- now seem like an aberration.

Is it just a willingness to change with the times? Many of today's troubled Modern Rockers were more than happy to follow the music through multiple changes in the late '90s and early-to-mid '00s. And some stations, Z100 in particular comes to mind, always do better when they deliver expectations instead of trying to recast them.

Extending a station's shelf life will only become more of an issue as platforms and listening habits continue to evolve. So how to extend a brand for more than 15 years? Or should you expect to? Your thoughts please.

Just a reminder: If you haven't seen it already, be sure to check out the list in last Wednesday's Ross on Radio of the Most Intriguing Stations of 2007, as well as readers' own suggestions and comments.

As Cumulus' WNNX (99X) Atlanta heads into its final weeks as a terrestrial radio station, it's important to remember how influential the station was a decade ago. Launched in late '92 on the former WAPW (Power 99), 99X was built by Top 40 people (Brian Philips, Leslie Fram, Sean Demery), and was, for that reason, one of the easiest Modern Rockers for industryites outside the format to follow or relate to. And in the mid-to-late '90s, 99X was one of the reasons that the Southeast was dominated by stations that tilted to the modern AC side, whether they were Alternative reporters (WRAX Birmingham, WAVF Charleston, S.C.) or nominal CHR stations (WAPE Jacksonville, Fla., WDCG [G105] Raleigh, N.C., WYOY Jackson, Miss.). Indeed, the song I most associate with 99X in that era is Tracy Chapman's "Give Me One Reason," one of those songs that fit nowhere until it got played everywhere.

So with the news that 99X would be relinquishing its frequency to Top 40 sister WWWQ (Q100), it was nice to be able to get in at least one more listen to 99X as a terrestrial station. (There are several promos an hour for the station's online/HD-2 successor which, the ads promise, will be "the first visual radio station.") To Cumulus' credit, it doesn't sound like a radio station that's going away next week. It's still a very listenable radio station, but the old 99X mystique has been gone for a while -- worm down by the series of direction changes since the early part of the decade that many Alternative stations have gone through.

In some ways, Modern Rock's earliest success stories, particularly the ones evolved from pop stations, were the stations that had the most problems when Alternative and Modern rock smashed together in the early '00s. Stations like 99X and the former WPLY (Y100) Philadelphia were among the last to harden and could never entirely satisfy either the rockers or the "true alternative" people again. When 99X went to adult modern in 2004, it seemed to go narrow just as WBZY (the Buzz) came along to siphon off the rockers.

Things ultimately weren't any easier for Y100 or the more recently departed WAVF and WRAX. WKQX (Q101) Chicago -- another station with similar origins and challenges -- is still among us, but recently moved back toward the harder side of the format. The irony, of course, is that WPLY's departure helped set the stage for WRFF (Radio 104.5) and a resurgence of Adult Modern. But with a few exceptions, most notably KNRK Portland, Ore., it has been easier to do that format with a blank slate (e.g., WSWD Cincinnati) than a set of heritage calls.

But just as WPLY left Philadelphia with a hole for WRFF to cover multiple positions, there's now a hole in Atlanta for somebody to come in and play the Greatest Hits of 99X, whether it's a new Modern AC, a new mass-appeal Alternative, or WZGC (92.9 Dave FM) moving a little more toward the center. Whatever the station and format's recent travails, 99X will leave its musical footprint in the market -- whether that's felt in format changes a month from now or 18 months from now.

Here's 99X this morning at 11 a.m.:

Beastie Boys, "Sure Shot"
Wolfmother, "Woman"
Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Scar Tissue"
Incubus, "Dig"
Weezer, "Buddy Holly"
Foo Fighters, "Long Run To Ruin"
Nine Inch Nails, "Head Like A Hole"
Paramore, "Crush Crush Crush"
AFI, "Love Like Winter"
Bob Marley & Wailers, "One Love/People Get Ready"
Linkin Park, "In The End"
Oasis, "Champagne Supernova"

This could have been an anti-climactic First Listen to write. The hole in Orlando for something in the Oldies/Classic Hits neighborhood on FM has been pretty obvious for a while now -- particularly since there were two Alternative outlets in the market. And the former O-Rock has been signaling its intentions by running "The History of Rock & Roll" this week. That said, the first hour of WOCL (Sunny 105.9) was very good, and very well-produced. If it wasn't as momentous as the first hour of sister WCBS-FM New York, it did have that "we've been here doing this all along" feel that few just-launched stations achieve these days.

Here's the first hour of Sunny 105.9:

KC & Sunshine Band, "That's The Way (I Like It)" (1975)
Foreigner, "Feels Like The First Time" (1977)
Prince, "1999" (1983)
Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," (1965)
Four Seasons, "December 1963 (Oh What A Night)" (1976)
Marvin Gaye, "Sexual Healing" (1982)
Doobie Brothers, "Listen To The Music" (1972)
Maxine Nightingale, "Right Back Where We Started From" (1976)
Billy Joel, "Uptown GIrl" (1983)
Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl" (1967)
Barry White, "You're The First, The Last, My Everything" (1974)
Huey Lewis & the News, "I Want A New Drug" (1984)
Fleetwood Mac, "Don't Stop" (1977)
Beatles, "Twist & Shout" (1964/1986)

Even when he was group PD of United Broadcasting in the '80s, you didn't read much about Bill Parris, but he's always created quirky, intriguing takes on any format he does. And he's already had a knack for getting to some groups of records a few years before they end up back on the radio. When UBC did a short-lived Adult Top 40 format on WYST (92 Star) Baltimore in the early '90s, shortly before it became WERQ (92Q), it was the first place I'd heard "Hungry Like The Wolf" back on the radio in a decade. When suburban D.C.'s WINX was doing Oldies in the mid-'90s, I remember hearing it throw in "Staying Alive" and "That's The Way (I Like It)" and thinking it was kind of gutsy to play those songs as Oldies again. Now, of course, they're a regular part of most Oldies stations.

In recent years, Parris has doing a format that can best be described as the early '90s version of 92 Star a decade or so later on two AMs, WKHZ Ocean City and WYRE Annapolis, Md. The format is meant to promote a website, KHZTV.com that will launch March 1 as "an e-store for new DVDs and music from indie creators," but which is up and running now, if you want to stream the format. The "oh wow" records now are from the late '90s/early '00s. And even if this seems like an unusual mix now, I don't doubt that there will be something like it in the mainstream in a few years now.

Here's a recent hour of WKHZ in mid-mornings:

Kool & the Gang, "Celebration"
Good Charlotte, "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous"
Meredith Brooks, "Bitch"
Sean Kingston, "Me Love"
Aerosmith, "Jaded"
Prince, "1999"
Avril Lavigne, "When You're Gone"
Michael Jackson, "Bad"
EMF, "Unbelievable"
Sheryl Crow, "If It Makes You Happy"
George Michael, "Monkey"
James Blunt, "1973"
Santana, "Maria, Maria"
Murray Head, "One Night In Bangkok"
Lionel Richie, "All Night Long (All Night)"
Jennifer Paige, "Crush"
Billy Ocean, "Caribbean Queen"

While AC and Smooth Jazz programmers struggle with the notion of being "today's Easy Listening format," there's at least one radio person who wants yesterday's Easy Listening back. CFRB Toronto's 39-year-old staffer Dave LeBlanc makes his case for "audio paradise" in Sunday's Toronto Star.

It's interesting that 2008 is beginning in much the same way that 2004 did, with the launch of gold-based, adult-leaning Modern Rockers. This time four years ago, you'll remember, existing Alternative stations were rushing to cover their bases, lest somebody come into the market and siphon their upper-demos, as KBZT San Diego had done to heritage XETRA-FM (91X) at the time.

Few markets, as it turned out, had the Alternative heritage or shares that justified the move. Most of those Pixies songs that PDs were so excited about playing again came back at the bottom of the music test -- a lot of today's Alternative listeners had just never heard them. And many of the stations in question either crept back to Mainstream Alternative or somehow evolved.

But 2007 wasn't a bad year for some of the holdouts, such as KNRK (94/7 FM) Portland, Ore., or for new launches like WRFF (Radio 104.5) Philadelphia. Not every market is going to have the same conditions as Philly (no current-based Hot AC or Modern AC, no other Alternative, and a history of female-friendly Alternative in the market), but by year's end, the building boom was on again -- particularly within Clear Channel. But it has now jumped the border as well.

In Canada, CHUMRadio switched to a similar format in November on its CKLC (98.9 The Drive) Kingston, Ontario, billed as "essential alternative." And Newcap's CFUL (Fuel 90.3) Calgary, which launched with Alternative last year has evolved to "Classic Alternative," emphasizing the late '70s through the late '90s, under PD Murray Brookshaw, known to most American industryites as the former PD of CIMX (89X) Detroit.

Canada is going to be an interesting market for gold-based Alternative. Only Toronto had a dedicated Modern Rocker in CFNY. But Modern Rock was always a bigger part of early '80s AOR radio and even Top 40. (Acts like Split Enz and XTC were much bigger radio presences at both formats than they were here.) And Canada has always been good at furnishing homegrown rock for the 35-40% Cancon that most stations have to deal with (suffice it to say I've heard a lot of Tragically Hip so far).

Here's Fuel around 1 p.m. on Sunday (30):

Red Hot Chili Peppers,"The Zephyr Song"
Pearl Jam, "Black"
Tragically Hip, "Blow At High Dough" (Canadian)
Sum 41, "Still Waiting" (Canadian)
David Bowie, "Let's Dance"
Matthew Good Band, "Everything Is Automatic" (Canadian)
Gin Blossoms, "Hey Jealousy"
Alien Ant Farm, "Smooth Criminal"
Cowboy Junkies, "Sweet Jane" (Canadian)
Live, "All Over You"
Theory of a Deadman, "Hello, Lonely (Walk Away From This)" (Canadian)
Lit, "My Own Worst Enemy"
Clash, "Train In Vain (Stand By Me)"
Barenaked Ladies, "The Old Apartment" (Canadian)

We're going to kick off 2008 with as many "First Listens" of new stations as we can. Check back here daily for more.

As 2007 comes to a close, it's safe to say that while some people in AM/FM radio may be displaying more intestinal fortitude than others, nobody is having a great time. Few are getting the tools they need to do their job, or the respect from managers, advertisers (or their teenagers) that we all thrive on. And even if you're working, many of your friends and mentors are not.

All that stress has to go somewhere, and in recent months, there has been a greater-than-ever level of bitterness in the debate over our business. On one side, the "today's radio sucks" communiqués from veteran programmers - particularly those exiled from the business - have been getting more bitter, while those who do have jobs have ratcheted up the "stop whining and deal with it" rhetoric.

Challenging years have been the rule, not the exception, for radio in this decade. But the level of invective has risen. And with that in mind, I'd like to offer these holiday thoughts:

1) Having a positive attitude about radio--as it transitions to the multi-platform content delivery system that so many broadcasters envisioned this year--is admirable. Demonizing those who have issues with today's industry, is uncalled for. Sometimes they're right. And over the last five years, I've heard the same "get with the program" speech from a lot of people who have since been exiled from day-to-day radio themselves.

2) Don't forget, hire a vet. Yes, we have devoted ourselves over the last year to the discovery of new talent through our "30 Under 30" program. We have suggested that the industry try to jump-start HD multicasting by both developing younger broadcasters and targeting the 12-to-24s who represent radio's most frightening audience attrition. That said, a lot of the smartest people in the business are sidelined right now at a time when the industry needs all the smart people it can get. And they're not sidelined to make room for younger broadcasters. They're sidelined so other middle-aged broadcasters could do twice as much work.

3) Broadcasters have a lot of battles ahead of them in 2008. Perhaps they could begin by not engaging each other in wars of attrition--on the air, on the streets, or in the trades.

Throughout 2008, the InfiniteDial.com, will continue to be a constructive voice for positive change in this industry. Despite it all, in 2007 there was a lot of radio that we enjoyed listening to. We're not naïve about our business. We have our concerns and we plan to express them. But we're not looking to put forth our ideas by telling everybody else how bad theirs are, and our feedback shows that readers appreciate this.

As another year begins, broadcasters are challenged by their resources, a changing world and the bad deals their bosses made, sometimes as many as ten years ago. The majority are still operating in good faith because they care about the medium, want to do the best possible job for listeners, and perhaps because they look forward to The Infinite Dial as much as we do. And it is time to build the new paradigm in a spirit of mutual respect.

The slug line for KEGL (the Eagle) Dallas, which returned as an Active Rock station earlier this week, is "Rock is Back" and that's true in several ways. It's not just that we've seen three major Rock launches in less than a week's time. I also took a spin through the playlists of various major-market Alternative stations today and was reminded anew of the crunchier feel of that format these days. For every WRFF (Radio 104.5) Philadelphia (bookended on the true alternative end by indie act Band Of Horses and on the hard side by Linkin Park), there's a WKQX (Q101) Chicago that has started rocking harder again. In between, there are an increasing number of stations that will still play a White Stripes or Silversun Pickups here or there, but lean to the harder side of the Alternative chart.

What's interesting here is that one of the stations in the latter camp is KEGL's sister station, KDGE (the Edge). With the Eagle flying again, I took a look at a monitor of the Edge tonight to see if they'd changed their music, but there was still a strong dose of Korn, Chevelle, Avenged Sevenfold, and Atreyu, although it was cut by some of the station's '90s heritage titles from 311, Tripping Daisy, etc. In Cincinnati, it was interesting to see Clear Channel sign on a modern AC that wasn't all that far from Adult Modern WSWD. Here, they're short-spacing themselves a little. (Both stations have a '90s Alternative component, for instance, although Eagle's is more likely to be grunge.) And that again says something about the perceived new sexiness of Rock radio.

All that said, Eagle on its third night was very palatable, even to a 45-year-old whose own personal tastes run more toward the true-alt side, with some amusing imaging. Here's KEGL at 10 p.m. tonight:

Ozzy Osbourne, "Crazy Train"
Live, "I Alone"
Stone Sour, "Zzyzx Rd."
AC/DC, "Back In Black"
Puddle Of Mudd, "Famous"
Linkin Park, "Breaking The Habit"
Guns N' Roses, "Sweet Child O' Mine"
Godsmack, "Good Times, Bad Times"
Green Day, "Basket Case"
Three Days Grace, "Just Like You"
Pink Floyd, "Brain Damage"
Ozzy Osbourne, "I Don't Wanna Stop"
Staind, "For You"

A few weeks ago, the comments in our series on the Ten Best Markets For Radio Listeners sidetracked into a discussion on the importance of imaging and whether it will matter to iPod-era listeners in a PPM world. Some thoughts on this matter -- and why "no hype" isn't the answer for everybody -- in this week's Ross On Radio.