A radio Blog?
As I find photos and remember stories I'll add to this part of the website. I might even dig up an aircheck or so, record it in MP3 so you can hear why I left........just kidding.
What I'll also do is comment on what happened in the 80's and 90's, my golden years for radio and what's happening today. A kind of blog when I've got something to say.
Easter 2006 There was a great piece in the paper last weekend from comedienne Judith Lucy. She worked for the network some of my radio friends called 'the Evil Empire", Austereo. She did breakfast at 2DAY FM in Sydney.
What can I say about Judith's comments? Right on the money, with an inch on either side to spare BUT - she'll never work in radio again, which was probably what she was ensuring!.
In the 80's and 90's when Austereo became a powerhouse and earned the title of "Evil Empire" they practiced everything Judith outlined - obviously still do. I've always said arrogance and "my way or the highway" will be their downfall. The DMG network is giving them a flogging or a race for their money in most of Austereo's markets..........couldn't happen to nicer people!
Judith said "They want your first-born, every waking moment is to be spent bettering the radio station, the consultants are doing the same things they did 20 years ago when they were on air. there's no sanity, they can fire you for anything, the biggest sucks get the best jobs. You MUST go where ever they send you, if you don't you get to do mid-dawn in Darwin or don't work for Austereo.
I observed that their station Program Directors don't really make any decisions, the implement the consultant's commands (even tried that with me at 2GO - it go to the point that my input was completely ignored even though I lived and breathed the broadcast area and the station).
Actually, I'll tell you what happened at 2GO and how I came to leave their employ. Not long after I arrived they engaged a company called ESP to consult on a programming level. These guys were all ex Austereo and were consultants for all the Austereo stations. 2GO had MMM and 2DAY in Sydney on one side and NX FM and KO FM in Newcastle on the other side competing with 2GO on the fringes of the broadcast area.
I got my first black mark when I innocently asked "Isn't having these guys consult us a conflict of interest for them as they won't have 2GO do anything that will harm Austereo's ratings in Sydney and Newcasle? Strike 1.
About 2 months before I left we did some auditorium testing and did all our songs. You get about 100 typical target listeners in a pub, feed em, coffee and tea them and get them to listen to songs and rate them. Easy. When the results are tabluated according to what the industry calls "burn factor" (kind of like "sick of the song" factor) you draw a line somewhere on the list, anything below the line you play, anything above the line has a high burn factor and you don't play it. I purposely oversimplified this explaination but you get the general idea.
Anyway not 3 weeks later our group Program Director and my direct boss rang and faxed a list of songs he wanted us to play. I took a look at the auditorium tests we'd just done - interested to see where they rated - and all had a high burn factor and our audience told us not to play them. I followed orders and added them to the playlist as instructed but next time I was speaking to the Group PD I said "Did you know all those songs you gave me had really high burn factors and our local research says we shouldn't play them? Strike 2. (Once I got into trouble for that one it "twigged" as to what was happening - 2GO was eating into Austereo audience somewhere probably KOFM in Newcastle and Austereo was putting a stop to it).
Feb 1998 - Consultants and Group PD "came down from the Mountain", Sydney and Gold Coast respectively, for the quarterly programming meetings. I got booked for a 3pm meeting. They met with the breaky crew without me which I thought was strange. I finally got called in at 4pm. I thought it was going to be a strategy meeting. Instead they trumped up some charges that I said some things around the station that I didn't etc and they fired me. 9am next morning, after firing me late afternoon the day before, they announced my replacement. A mate of the Group PD from Rockhampton who was threatening to leave the network unless the Group PD got him a better gig!
And so ended a 20 year radio career that included 2 national awards for programming and a finalist award for 2GO.
Here it is 8 years later and according to the Judith Lucy article - Austereo and radio in general is still up to it's old tricks.
