There I was, doing a Labor Day 6-10 morning air shift on WICH AM 1310 in Norwich, CT. I'm almost totally sleep deprived, but I'm oddly psyched. It's up to me today. The computer log is lacking any pre-programmed music, and the music format rules are pretty wide open. All the news people have the day off. If I want to fill time reading some headlines since I often do news anyway, I guess that's OK too. It's all no big deal as long as I don't swear and do play all the commercials on air. In this remote territory of radio lawlessness, what do I do? I bring my own order into the vast frontier based on what I understand the general format to be.
First, I get the local and world news, sports, weather, lottery, lighter show prep, birthdays and community calendar together to go at specific breaks in the hour as close to what they'd do most other mornings of the week. Much of the prep is done the night before, since I hate racing around minutes before airtime. Then comes my favorite part: the music. Sixties would be the core music era, but WICH is not strictly a Baby Boomer oldies station. WICH often mixes in standards that appeal to a listener over 65, so I sprinkle Sinatra, Bennett and Streisand in with the less raucous rock n' roll 50s/60s oldies and the tunes that were adult contemporary hits in the 70s/80s... basically three general eras. Then I work on getting as much song-to-song contrast with songs I know to be strong during each half hour, realizing people's attention is in limited supply.
Why do I do all this? Many air personalities wouldn't care. For one, it shouldn't matter whether there are 10 or 100,000 people listening. I try not to think of that, and least of all about ratings. It's all about relating to a listener one on one anyway. If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound if nobody's around? Hey, I'm still here, so yes.
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