Programmers have desks filled with tasks and assignments. They’re busier than ever. How do they get everything checked off their to-do lists and focus on programming a winning station? We turned to five of Radio Ink’s Best Program Directors in America for the answers. And they are five of the most respected and successful PDs in the country.
Chuck Knight
Program Director
WBEB (101.1 More FM)/Philadelphia
As PDs today, we have five important things to keep in mind.
1. Think of ourselves as artists painting on a blank audio canvas. We have to “hear it.”
2. Hire the right people who can do the job right.
3. Be the detail person who organizes and does the setup work for your people so they only need to worry about the hardest job of all, execution.
4. Give your team confidence that what they’re doing is right by spending time coaching them. You can hear confidence on the air.
5. Don’t forget to dream.
Reggie Rouse
PD, WVEE-FM/Atlanta
VP/Urban Programming, CBS Radio
A. Leadership: the ability to get the best out of your team.
B. Ability to be flexible and make programming adjustments that help the station grow.
C. Planning/strategic thinker.
D. Ability to multi-task.
E. Be a great listener.
F. Be a make-it-happen person.
G. Work with sales to help grow revenue.
H. Grow the station’s digital imprint.
Keith Hastings
PD, KISS-FM & KTKS/San Antonio
National Format Leader for Rock & Classic Rock
Cox Media Group
The time when your transmitter is no longer the primary delivery method for your brand is coming. You should have already started preparing. Push yourself, your staff, and your brand to that place. The audience is already there.
Create: This is the greatest job in the world. You have a palette on which to create and present unique offerings. There are others that would kill for the opportunity you have, so don’t disrespect it.
Collaborate and delegate: You can’t do it yourself, and you shouldn’t want to. Build an amazing team and be a leader they are proud to follow.
Accelerate: Because the world around you spins faster every day.
Advocate: In everything you do. For your team members, your leaders, your brands, and your mission.
Celebrate victories: Things move so fast and everyone’s busy. But if you can’t enjoy team victories, you aren’t going to keep winning them.
Dislocate: Your comfort zone. It’s OK to visit it now and then, but the best innovation comes from unexpected places.
Illustrate: Your vision and your ideas to everyone around you. Your team will execute best what they understand and buy into. You lead the way.
Overestimate: The competition. Always.
Eliminate: Distractions, negative people, and negative thoughts. The only one that can ever hold you back from creating great radio is
yourself.
Don Parker
PD, KMEL-FM/San Francisco, Pride Radio
SVP/Programming, San Francisco Region
iHeartMedia
First and foremost is surrounding yourself with extremely talented people who are smarter than you. It’s ultimately the team around you that will lead to success or failure. Beyond the people, you have to embrace change and stay on top of trends more than ever, utilizing every resource at your disposal to ensure you’re staying connected to your target audience. With more information and more critical elements of the job than ever, it’s also imperative to be very organized.
Ken West
PD, WBOS & WROR/Boston
1. Work hard but have fun.
2. Think big.
3. Try epic stuff.
4. If you fail, try more epic stuff.
5. Embrace technology.
6. Make your brand (station) matter to people.
7. Listen to your audience.
8. Treat people as people.
9. ABC (Always Be Critiquing your own station).
10. If all else fails, see number one.
I just left a comment, posted it and walked away.
I am obliged to come back and add to it.
These PDs have just regurgitated a pile of politically correct, adjudicated and smuggled-through-customs jargon and edicts that have little to do with influencing audiences, generating superior services for advertisers or for training and coaching the talent that cries out for support.
Was no one else going to call “Bull****….?
Wow. Settling for VO work sure makes you negative. Chill out, Mountie.
I remember when being a PD was a vocation and not just a massive accumulation of grunt-jobs – most of which are counter-productive or redundant deferences to “corporate”.
These owners and their kow-towing underlings are simply ape-snake nuts. They are crazed, uninformed and, most important of all – uncaring.
I can’t imagine having to accept such a position or situation.
And, it’s painful listening, too.
Way to go John (above)
Your station/company seems to have defied ‘impossible.’ I feel for you. I feel for the listeners.
This is all well and good for those in big markets with budgets for staff and tools. I wanna hear from small-to-medium market pd’s who have little or no budget. From the kind of station where corporate forces you to be distant-VT all day except morning drive and afternoon drive (which the pd is doing – 5 hours). Where the morning guy is your only other staff member besides one weekender. Where a lot of your day is spent concentrating on pulling off several live events a quarter. Where the only attention you can give the daily music log is to hit “run” on selector and let it go. Where three of those logs a month have to go to corporate for “inspection”. Where more time is spent selecting fill tunes for online spot breaks than finding new music for air because corporate isn’t happy with the tunes currently running. And the meetings that eat into whatever time you have left in the day. Where the only music research you can do is looking at the charts and looking at other station’s playlists on their websites. Did I mention the daily blogging and online video quotas that MUST be hit – separate quotas for both you and the morning guy? Where corporate had the station up on the listen line and says your imaging is too old and stale – while management denies your requests for a small (say $500) imaging budget year after year. When just surviving another day becomes the priority.
I’m the weekender mentioned above. I work for the pd who has to go through all this every day. I’m happy to say the station does decently despite the situation. But as a former pd who actually was allowed to concentrate on air product in the not so distant past, i’m disheartened, and somewhat appalled at what the job has become. Radio will not survive this latest technological encroachment unless pd’s are given the chance to take care of their core responsibility – programming the station.
Digital is all well and good. Live events too. But don’t put all that responsibility on a pd (and morning guy, for that matter) and still expect excellence when you turn on the radio. Hire someone to take care of blogs and videos. Bring in a promotions person. Set aside a small amount of budget to let the pd make the station shine – especially if corporate is bugging them to do so.
Whether people listen on the radio or on some forms of digital doesn’t matter. That’s just a delivery method. What goes into people’s ears and touches them on the soul is what they hear emanating from the radio, phone, whatever. And until we get the chance to concentrate more on that, Radio won’t make it through this latest battle.