Greg Fadick, Production Director, WIOD-AM, WFLC-FM, WHQT-FM, Miami, FL
by Jerry Vigil
At a furious pace, broadcasting companies are acquiring multiple stations in the same market. The duopoly craze continues to improve the bottom line by consolidating personnel, increasing workloads, and testing the boundaries of the work force envelope. What was the wave of the future is now the simple reality of today. For the Production Director involved in this reality, some things are certain. Things will change. There will be more work. And your personnel management, time management, and organizational skills will be put to the test. It's difficult to prepare yourself for something that was unheard of only a couple of years ago. So, it is extremely important to learn from those who have made the transition. Greg Fadick is one of the survivors. Join us as he shares his experience and provides invaluable insight for anyone about to take on an additional station for the first time.
R.A.P.: Tell us about your radio background.
Greg: I started out as a part-time jock on a country light bulb -- a 250 watt AM station in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1969. I worked as a part-time jock until I got out of high school, then I went full-time. I worked as an air personality for more years than I care to remember. I worked what we used to call progressive rock, and I worked a lot of CHR. I even worked at an urban station as a night jock for about five years.
I was a pretty good air personality, but in 1985 I came to the conclusion that my real strength was in the production room. And, luckily, at the same time, I was working for a PD who recognized the same thing, and I became the first off-air production guy in Little Rock, Arkansas. I spent a couple of years there, then I got the call to move to Denver and go to work for ABC at Y108. I spent about five years there, really absorbing a lot. That was my first major market gig. The PD at the time was Mark Bolke. Mark is a tremendous imaging guy. I thought I knew a lot about promos and imaging until I got to Denver, and Mark, in a very nice way, showed me how little I really knew.
From there I went to WAAF in Boston and really polished what I'd learned in Denver. Ron Valeri is the guy I worked with in Boston. Ron taught me a lot of concepts. One of my favorites was the concept of audio wallpaper, which is what you've got to make sure your work doesn't turn into -- the kind of stuff that's there, but you never really notice it. Ron got me more into the visual aspect of radio -- being able to create that theater of the mind we hear so much about. From there, I came down here to Miami.
R.A.P.: Was the third station in Miami acquired before or after you arrived?
Greg: I got here about a month before we took on the third station. They went looking for a new production team, and I came in as Production Director. The two stations we started with were WIOD, which is our ten thousand watt news/talker, and WFLC, which we refer to as Coast 97.3, a very light AC. Then the opportunity came up to purchase WHQT, Hot 105, from EZ Communications. They made the decision to buy in the fall of 1992. My actual first day was the first of December in 1992. We took control of Hot 105 right after Christmas.
R.A.P.: What was the initial impact of having three stations on your hands?
Greg: Well, none of us here had ever handled three radio stations before, and we knew we were in a learning situation. We knew we were in a mega-mistake situation. We were going to have to feel our way through it because, let's face it, even today, much less two years ago, there's no rule book on how to run three radio stations. Every situation has its little differences. We spent two years with a lot of trial and error, and we've come up with what we feel is a pretty good system for how things should go.
R.A.P.: What mistakes were made along the way?
Greg: I guess my biggest mistake was assuming that taking care of three radio stations was going to be basically the same as taking care of one radio station, only with an increased workload. It really doesn't work that way. You have the increased workload, but there's an entirely different thing going on. At a single station, you're very, very tight with the Program Director. You almost know what he's thinking when you see him walking down the hall. You're very deeply involved in everything the radio station does, as far as imaging and the sales effort. That really doesn't happen in a three station operation as I see it. You've got to be able to switch gears very rapidly. I have to be able to come in first thing in the morning and put together an "in your face lots of explosions slam your head against the wall" piece of work for WIOD, turn right around from that and do something that's still high energy but yet with an urban tilt and a more classy tilt for Hot 105, then be able to come right out of that and do something for Coast 97. You simply don't get into that single station groove. You've got to be able to immerse yourself completely in one station while you're doing a piece of work for that particular station. Then immediately, when you're finished, you've got to pull out of that and immerse yourself totally in the next radio station. There are lots of things going on around the building, but you just don't have the time and the brain cells to be as deeply involved as you'd like because you're taking care of another station at that time, and you can't play favorites.
R.A.P.: How is the production department set up, and what are your responsibilities?
Greg: We have what I call a two-and-a-half person department here. We have myself, a full-time "Assistant Production Director," and I put the quotes around that because Mark Hoffman's function is basically a Co-Production Director more than an Assistant. He does work directly for me, but on a day-to-day basis he just takes things and runs with them. My responsibilities are to handle all the imaging for WIOD and all the imaging for Hot 105. I handle about twenty percent of the commercial load, and I handle all the special projects which may come up such as sales demos and what have you. I also handle the administrative work of the department including the budgeting. Mark has a tremendous AC voice, and he handles our imaging work for Coast 97. Luckily, it's a fairly medium maintenance radio station. It doesn't approach the kind of maintenance that 'IOD and Hot 105 do. Mark also handles about eighty percent of the commercial load. We both handle a tremendous amount of copywriting.
Then we have a part-time guy, Kenneth Gramer, who works evenings for us. He is designated the dub-meister. He takes care of all of our tape dubs, does a lot of tagging work, a lot of archiving work, and that sort of thing. I advise anyone: don't get into a three station operation without a guy like that. You simply can't spend your entire day dubbing tapes and expect to get anything creative done, especially in a market like this where eighty-five percent of what goes on the air is coming from an agency. It's not unusual for us to have seventy, eighty different carts which need to be dubbed every night.
R.A.P.: Are there any plans to get rid of the carts and go to digital storage for all three stations?
Greg: We've been evolving continually, and we've added a digital hard-disk playback system that we're using right now on Hot 105. We have plans later in 1995 to bring this system on line with Coast. It's the Computer Concepts DCS system.
R.A.P.: What other equipment changes have been made?
Greg: We've done a lot of studio "evolving," and we had good facilities to start with. We have three production rooms. Two of them are 8-track. One of them is a very, very nice 2-track utility studio. When I say very nice, I mean you've got every piece of peripheral gear in there you could possibly stand.
The changes we've made? First of all, we do a tremendous amount of archiving here, and not just commercials and promos. We have just about every Miami Dolphins game since the franchise started on tape. We moved all of that to DAT, which has finally put us into the twentieth century. Being able to store one football game on one DAT tape is absolutely outstanding, and, of course, the audio quality is superb. We originally had an 8-track and a 4-track room. We dismantled the 4-track room, brought it up to eight tracks using the same basic audio chain as the other 8-track room - same console, same mike processing, etc. -- and then we added the Roland DM-80. Hopefully, in 1995, we're going to take out the multi-track analog machine in the other room and equip that with the Roland also.
R.A.P.: How do you like the DM-80?
Greg: The Roland, I think, is one of the primo systems out there. What really impressed me about it was the learning curve. If you've ever done multi-track production in your life, even on a 4-track machine, you can sit down and immediately go to work with the Roland. You won't be using all the capabilities of the system, but it makes sense to you, and you don't have to be a computer geek in order to run it. Then, once you get more and more into the system, the capabilities are just amazing.
Of all the workstations we tested, the only two we really liked were the Roland and the Korg SoundLink, and the biggest consideration was we could buy two Rolands for the price of one SoundLink. The SoundLink is a great system. It has the same, and maybe in some cases a little better, capabilities than the Roland. But this is a business, and you have to deal with the reality of the money.
R.A.P.: It sounds like your studios are geared for the '90s.
Greg: Yes, and we paid a tremendous amount of attention to basic audio. By that, I mean we're using Neumann U89 microphones, not just some Electro-Voice RE-35s we brought up from downstairs. Our engineering department takes the extra steps to set things up right, like aligning our monitors with a real-time analyzer, so what you're hearing out of the monitors is dead flat. It's more of a recording studio setup than it is a radio production room setup.
We pay that kind of attention to basic audio because digital quality is frightening from the standpoint that any little blemish you may have in your basic audio chain that you really don't notice on that analog machine is going to come screaming through when you go digital. You're going to hear a distorted mike chain. You're going to hear a crunchy module in your console. A minor EQ problem is going to be glaring because you simply don't have the limitations of the analog machine to cover your butt for you anymore.
R.A.P.: Let's get back to the three station syndrome. What are some other surprises you came across?
Greg: I've always been a fairly organized guy. I found out when I got here I had to get even more organized. What I found was that when you move into the three station situation, everything increases exponentially; something that is a very small problem when you're working at a single station now becomes a very huge disaster simply because of the volume you're dealing with. For example, it's standard radio that on any given day an Account Executive is going to give you a production order that is not complete, or there's a problem with it, or a mistake -- something that makes it necessary for you to have to take it back to the Account Executive and find out what's going on. That's not a big deal when you're working at a single station because you might get one or two of those a day. Now, with three stations, you're no longer getting one or two of those a day, you're getting five or six or seven because instead of the five or six Account Executives and one Sales Manager you were dealing with, now you're dealing with eighteen or nineteen Account Executives and three Sales Managers. Suddenly, instead of spending fifteen or twenty minutes taking care of that one production order, you're spending two or three hours. You cannot spend your time on the small things. You cannot spend your time making sure cart labels are typed correctly or making sure that spots are dubbed correctly with the trip tone in the right place. That kind of thing has to be automatic. You simply don't have the time, energy, or brain cells to devote to it, and that means everyone in the department has to be paying a lot closer attention because those minor mistakes will kill you.
R.A.P.: What steps did you take to ease up these mistakes?
Greg: I've never been a real believer in deadlines. I know that sounds really strange, but it has always been my experience that if you set a deadline for a sales department, what usually happens is you create an attitude of "as long as I get something in by this deadline, it's okay. The fact that I could have turned it in four days earlier, that doesn't matter. I just got to get it in by that deadline." For that reason I've really never believed in them. Here, it becomes critical. We sat down with sales management, worked out a reasonable set of guidelines, or, as they like to refer to it, a reasonable set of minimum expectations. And we have to enforce them very firmly. You can't function under the single station philosophy of "yeah, we've got this set of deadlines and then we spend all day making exceptions to them." Once again, because of the volume, this simply can't happen.
We looked at the systems and how work was actually getting from the sales department or from the Program Directors to the production department. We had to become more like a business as opposed to catching me in the hallway and saying, "Hey, man, we need this commercial for this bank, and it needs to sound kind of like this." There's a form for that which has to be filled out and turned in, and it flows through our production system a certain way. You simply can't remember what twenty salespeople said to you in the hallway on your way to get a cup of coffee. Sometimes we give the impression of being horribly nit picky, of being horribly inflexible because we are enforcing those guidelines and enforcing those rules a lot, but that has to happen. You can't deal with the exceptions all day. If you do, you're going to find you're spending eight or nine hours a day making exceptions, dealing with problems, putting out fires. It's going to be seven o'clock at night, and you haven't started on your daily work yet, and you're not in a mood to be creative after all that.
R.A.P.: What are some of these "minimum expectations" you employ?
Greg: To get a commercial on the air -- one that we're going to write the copy for, voice, and produce -- we have a minimum of forty-eight hours. Now, notice I didn't say two days. Forty-eight hours means something that is handed to me at noon today on Wednesday will be ready for air at noon on Friday, not at six o'clock on Friday morning. If it's client supplied copy that we are simply going to produce, twenty-four hours. If it's a tape or a tape and a tag, that's noon the day before air.
R.A.P.: And how do you enforce these guidelines?
Greg: That's where your relationship with sales management becomes critical because I don't feel that it is my responsibility or even my place to be dictating policy to Account Executives. They don't work for me. They don't report to me. When I have a problem with someone violating policy, violating deadlines, that's something I take up with the Sales Manager. He in turn handles it as he sees fit. Keep in mind, there's a big difference between an Account Executive talking to me and talking to the guy who signs his commission check. There is a gigantic difference there.
Now, if you get into a situation where you've cried wolf too many times, your Sales Manager will believe you're just a whiny baby. That means when you go to the guy, number one, it had better be a legitimate problem; and number two, you'd better have all your facts in line because if you don't present your case correctly, the man is probably going to ignore you; and number three, it's a relationship you build over time where you show not only the sales management but, hopefully, you show the entire sales department that you're interested in the same thing they are. You're interested in making money, and the only way you're going to do that is to get listeners and to get advertisers. And, therefore, you want them to succeed just as badly as they want to succeed. However, you're not going to kill yourself in the process, and you certainly cannot sacrifice the radio stations in the process.
R.A.P.: There are always going to be exceptions. How do you handle situations where you're faced with the question of sticking to the rules and losing the dollar or breaking the rules to make the money?
Greg: That's a terrible choice to have to make, and I can definitely relate. We're reasonable; we understand there are exceptions. If the Sales Manager were to come to me this afternoon and say, "Greg, we just got this order. It just came down five minutes ago. It's got to go on the air tomorrow because it's for a special sale that runs this weekend. Can you help me?" The answer is yes. If we're talking about someone who made a mistake, that's different. If he comes in and says, "Greg, here's a piece of copy that's supposed to go on the air tomorrow, and, gee, the person responsible for this didn't bother getting it in time. It's been ready for three days, and he just now went and picked it up." I'm sorry, the answer's no. There's far too much to be done every day for us to try and clean up other people's mistakes.
Plus, I've also found in the stations I've been at that you get what I think is a real unfair situation where the people who do respect your guidelines usually end up being penalized because their work is constantly being shoved aside so you can take this last second emergency from the person who doesn't respect the guidelines. I don't think that's fair. And we have tried our literal best to solve that.
A lot of that has to do with communication and education. You have to start and maintain an attitude with the sales department of: "Look, when you come to me with an exception or with a question, I'm going to give you the best available answer. I'm going to give you the best my department can offer. It may not be what you want, but it's going to be the best. If I have to say no to what you have in your hand, I'm going to offer you some alternatives. If there are no alternatives, then I will tell you that." You've always got to have that communication. You cannot exist under an attitude where salespeople say, "Oh, God. I'm not gonna take anything down to Greg because he's just going to tell me no because he doesn't want to deal with it." If you ever get that kind of a perception started, you're sunk. And the only way, unfortunately, you get that perception started is by history.
Now, the other great thing about this situation is our General Manager, Bob Green. Keep in mind, Cox Broadcasting is a very product-oriented company. Yeah, we want to sell. Yeah, we want to make tons of money. Yeah, we want to break every sales quota every month. But we also understand that for that to happen, we've got to be putting a product on the air that is superior to anything anybody else is putting on the air. We're not going to go out and throw clients off the radio, but we're also not going to sacrifice the product of the radio station. That puts a stop to a lot of those last-minute things because the word that comes out of that is, "If you bring something in here at five o'clock this afternoon, it's not legitimate. That shouldn't have happened. That doesn't absolutely, positively have to go on tomorrow or the radio station collapses. It ain't going to happen." And there are those times when, unfortunately, you have to say no. The nice thing for me is knowing that the support exists, number one, in the Sales Manager's office and, number two, in the General Manager's office. They trust my judgment, and that's a proof situation. You can't expect that from the first day you walk into a radio station. I had to prove that they could trust my judgment when I came here.
R.A.P.: How many Program Directors are there?
Greg: We have three. I deal mainly with the PDs for WIOD and Hot 105, but I still interact with the PD from The Coast because I'm responsible for the technical sound of everything that goes on the air.
R.A.P.: Do you have any deadlines or "minimum expectations" when it comes to promos and sweepers?
Greg: Nothing that's really carved in stone. I do have to really take my hat off to all three of our PDs. They all understand what's involved in running a three station operation. Now, it was a little awkward for them at the very start because, as a PD in a single station, you're pretty much used to the fact that the Production Director is at your disposal. This is the guy who images your radio station, and he spends a great deal of his day concentrating on your radio station. It was a little awkward for these guys to get used to sharing me.
Originally, when I came here, I was reporting to just one of the PDs. That became a very unworkable system simply because, when you're reporting to a PD, you're naturally going to give his station a greater degree of your concentration, a greater degree of your work because this is the guy who is signing your time sheet. We've since changed that around, and I now report directly to the General Manager. The PDs are really excellent at keeping me informed with what's coming up over the next couple of weeks, and what elements they'll need. That allows me to schedule how those are going to get done.
R.A.P.: For all three stations, would you say your production department is producing more commercials or more promos and other imaging material?
Greg: I would say about thirty percent more for station imaging. 'IOD is an absolute monster. We have a tremendous amount of promotional work that has to be done daily. For example, we have five high profile air talents on the air every day. Immediately when they get off the air, we cut a very creative, very compelling promo about their show for the next day to try and recycle audience from the other day parts. We have the Miami Dolphins and the Miami Hurricanes. This weekend, for example, is one of the biggest football weekends in South Florida because the Dolphins are playing Buffalo, their arch rival, and the Hurricanes are playing Florida State, the national champions. That's something that has to be sold on the air. That's just the daily stuff. There's more.
Even though we are an entertainment based, humor based news/talk station -- we don't talk about the State legislature; we could care less what the Governor is doing today unless he happened to fall out of bed, in which case we're going to laugh at him -- we still maintain a very high news image. We are recognized as the news radio station in Miami. We maintain a very high weather and sports image. All of that has to be maintained through recycler promos.
And then you add on top of that special things which come up now and then. We were one of the stations giving away tickets to the Eagles concert a few months ago. We do very bizarre promotions with our air talent. Our morning guys did a week long promotion to win the Eagles tickets called The Toilet Bowl Opera in which you stick your head in your toilet and sing. So there's a tremendous amount of every day stuff that has to be done for 'IOD. And then you add in what I would call the normal promos that you would do at any radio station for special events.
Hot 105 needs a large amount of day-to-day maintenance, but not anywhere near what 'IOD needs. You have the standard sweeper maintenance, re-entries from clusters which have to be freshened and produced from time to time. Hot 105 is also an extremely promotionally active radio station. We've got a major contest on the air right now called Megabucks where we're giving away $4,000 a day every day of the week except Thursday when we give away $20,000. Due to the nature of Hot 105 and the personality of Tony Kidd, the PD, we've got promos out the whazoo for any major contest like that. By the time it's all done on a month-long contest we'll probably have ten or twenty promos, not counting winners, not counting elements. It keeps you busy.
R.A.P.: Were Mark and your "dub-meister" already at the stations when you arrived?
Greg: No, I hired Mark in April of this year. We had a huge interviewing and searching process and found Mark working at WAXY 106 here in town. Kenneth actually came in through the back door. By that I mean it took me about a month after I got here to figure out we needed a dub-meister simply because you don't want to take two highly paid production guys and let them dub tapes all day. After about a month of slogging through the tapes every day, we made the decision to bring someone in part-time. Kenneth had kind of snuck in the back door helping out the AM producers. He wasn't on staff as far as the production department, but he was in the building. I interviewed about five guys for that position, and he beat all the rest. I think he's going to be an excellent production guy one of these days. Before he came in here to assist the producers, the man had never been in a radio station before, and to see what he's done the past two years is a lot of fun. It's kind of like watching myself develop years and years ago. And we try as hard as we can, both Mark and I, to not only show him what it is we do every day and how we do it, but to also challenge him, give him something he's never done before, give him something he may be a little unsure of. That's the only way you're ever going to learn it.
R.A.P.: Well, it sounds like you have the right number of people and the right people helping you with the three stations. How do you keep it all under control?
Greg: I can't emphasize communication enough. Communication is essential in this kind of an operation, not just inside the production department, not just between production and sales, but with everyone in the building. As an example, one of the other things you get hit with immediately when you walk into such an operation is that you don't get to listen to the radio station the way you used to. You're not seeing every piece of work come through your hands before it goes on the air. You're not monitoring every piece of work for its quality. There are simply not enough hours in the day, and you can't listen to the same radio station constantly. It takes me a day and a half to sample all three radio stations. I'll listen to one driving in to work in the morning, another going home that night, and the third coming in the next day. So, it's essential that your guys on the air, the Program Directors, the news people, anybody in the building, it's essential that they become your eyes and ears so they can say, "Greg, we've got a spot that sounds kind of funny. You think there might be something wrong with this cart?" You simply can't catch all of that stuff by yourself.
I always fancied myself as a pretty decent time manager until I got in here. I found out I really wasn't as good as I thought I was. Time management becomes absolutely essential. First of all, you have got to learn how to delegate, not just the workload -- that was fairly easy for me -- but also delegate the responsibility and delegate time. I had to get into a mindset that when someone comes to me with something -- let's say they want to have a creative meeting for one of their clients -- I have to remember they are not coming to me personally. They are coming to me looking for a production person. Then, it's up to me to decide, "Okay, is this something I need to be personally involved in, or is this something I should assign to Mark? Which one of us will be best suited to take care of this?" These sound like very small points, but I can tell you from experience, it's very easy at the onset to totally overload yourself, to be going to every brainstorming meeting with every client, wanting to produce every big commercial that goes on the air, wanting to produce everything that happens for the radio stations; and pretty soon you find yourself absolutely consumed and absolutely overwhelmed. You can't do that. You've got to learn to hand it off to other people, and you've got to be able to say to yourself, "This is something I don't need to be involved in. Either this is something I am not very good at, or this is not the best use of my talents." And that sounds very egotistical to say, but you've got to be greedy with your time.
R.A.P.: That sounds like one of the most important things you've had to learn.
Greg: Oh, absolutely. It goes even further. One of the things I carried over from my on-air days that helped me out a whole lot when I got here was that I was the "preparation monster" when I was on air. I literally was one of those guys who would spend six hours prepping a four-hour show. I ignored that for the first couple of years I was in production, then one day I said, "Wait a minute. If air people have to prep, where do production guys get off thinking that we don't have to prep?" And when I tell this to somebody, they say, "What are you talking about? How can you prep to do production?" Let's say I get a new promo production library in. Most of us will take that, listen to a few cuts of it, say, "Yeah, okay, fine," and stick it in the cabinet and not pull it out until we need it. I'll take that home, sit down with the tracking sheets, and literally spend several hours over a weekend at home listening to that entire library and making notes in the tracking sheets like, "Cut number seventeen would be a great effect for opening a contest promo that needs to be high energy," very detailed descriptions. I'll do that with everything that comes in, including commercial libraries. Let's face it, the descriptions you get for cuts on libraries really don't mean anything, or at least they don't to me. That's what I call prep because now when I need that particular cut from a library, I'm not sitting here while I'm actually producing the promo searching back and forth through my library trying to find the right cut. I've got six or eight possibles that I picked out months ago.
The same holds true with just how the daily work flows. Something as simple as my routine every morning. My ritual, I guess you'd say, is that I stock and prep all three of the studios because once I begin to work, once Mark begins to work, you don't want to have to stop in the middle and say, "Oh, jeez, where are the razor blades? I'm out. Oh, God, they're in the cabinet down the hallway." You want the room stocked and set up so when you sit down, you go to work, and you don't stop until the afternoon comes and you're finished.
R.A.P.: Are you in charge of ordering supplies?
Greg: Oh, yes, and juggling those lovely budget figures, too. I go through the same process that all the rest of the department heads go through. In fact, we just finished it a couple of weeks ago. I carry all the supplies, the salaries for myself and my two guys, the music libraries for commercials and promos, even things like telephone expenses, shipping expenses, etc. for my department. I have to sit down and, for example, this year take my 1994 usage, and figure out what I need to do in '95, what kind of stock I'm going to need to keep because I stock the entire radio station. By that, I mean I stock the news department and programming department; everybody gets their audio supplies from me. And based on that, I have to come up with a figure and have to go sell it to the GM and the comptroller.
R.A.P.: Do you budget for equipment for production?
Greg: Equipment we do under a capital. Our equipment goes into the Engineering budget. The Chief Engineer actually makes the proposal for all needed equipment, but it's up to me, first of all, to sell it to him well enough that he feels comfortable going in and selling it to the General Manager. As far as selecting equipment for the production studios, that's something we do together. Now, if push ever comes to shove, my word means more, but we've got a real good relationship with our engineering guys here. We have three of them. We sit around a lot and talk about equipment. And even though we've already done our capitals for '95, we all pay attention to what comes out in the trades, to what we see ads for, and we kick around ideas on how we can possibly incorporate various things. Is this something we'd want to look at for 1996? We try to think about a year in advance.
R.A.P.: You have a great voice. You must be doing a lot of free-lance work.
Greg: Well, believe it or not, I sometimes find time to squeeze that in. I'm voicing for a lot of the Cox stations. I voice for WCKG in Chicago, WSUN in Tampa, and I do some voices occasionally for a country station even, WHKO, one of our stations in Dayton. And then I've got about eight other stations around the country, some of which I've been doing work for even back in Denver days. It's a lot of fun. In fact, my wife and I really got a charge out of driving from Denver to Boston recently and hearing me on about six different radio stations along the way.
R.A.P.: Do you have a studio at home for this free-lance work?
Greg: No. I do that stuff incredibly early in the morning before I start the day here. By incredibly early, I mean like five-thirty, six o'clock. With a voice like mine, it physically takes a lot of wind to move it, a lot of physical muscle work, and I'm not a very big guy. I've noticed that first thing in the morning my voice is in much better shape. It sounds really good. The resonance is there. By the middle of the afternoon you can tell I'm getting tired. You can tell I'm starting to wear it out a little bit by the end of the day. So I try, whether it's for the stations or free-lance, to do most of my voice work in the morning. It may be something I actually don't get around to producing until five or six that evening, but I'll try to get those tracks laid down first thing.
R.A.P.: What production libraries are you using?
Greg: Right now for promos and sweeps, we use Weapons and Money from Brown Bag on 'IOD. For Hot 105 we have Eclipse from Brown Bag. You can kind of tell I'm a Brown Bag fan. For commercial libraries for all the stations we use Sound Designer from FirstCom, and MegaMusic and Slam Dunk from TM Century. We consume libraries. In fact, in 1995 we'll be turning in a couple and picking up a couple more. You've got to keep them rotating in and out, especially, once again, because of the three station deal. If you think you burn cuts in a single station, come down here. We really go through libraries fast. It's amazing.
R.A.P.: Are you the type of producer who likes to use a different cut of music every time you cut a spot for the same client, or do you pick a single track as the theme for the client?
Greg: We will use the same music for a client only if we've established that piece of music as being directly associated with this account. For that to happen, first of all, it's got to be a very long run, and there's got to be something very unique about the music itself, such as punches, stabs, or some holes you fill or whatever, where you basically turn that cut into a thematic for that particular client. Kind of like the Oscar Meyer jingle, even though they don't sing it much anymore. Still, the minute you hear the musical logo, you know who it is. Now unless it has had that kind of an impact, no, we don't use the same music. But we do make very, very sure to rest cuts after they come off the air so that we don't have a commercial going off the air on Saturday, and on Monday another one going on with the same music bed. I think that sounds absolutely terrible.
R.A.P.: Do you keep track of what music bed is used for what client?
Greg: Absolutely. In fact I'm working on a couple of databases at home right now that are variations of one I put together in Boston where you could not only go through and call up cuts by category so you can find things very quickly, but you also have a provision to log in when you used it, who you used it for, and when it will die. It's a commercially available program called Q&A, and I just set up my own custom database in there. I actually started it in Boston because we used a tremendous amount of comedy services, and we had a lot of cuts on the comedy service that, while they weren't really what we were looking for to stand alone and play as a bit, there might be a two or three second drop in there that was absolutely perfect to go in a promo. So, I put all these things together and categorized them so that if I needed, say, some kind of funny Christmas drop, I could type in "Christmas" and it would tell me every drop that I had on file that had anything to do with Christmas, what it was about, where it was located, if I had used it before and, if so, when and for what.
R.A.P.: That's probably not a bad approach for anyone to use, setting up a custom database for their libraries. It's nice to get a library that comes along with some software to use, but you never get software that's going to include everything you have.
Greg: Absolutely. And it's never going to be completely customized for you so it will give you all the information that you particularly want. Q&A is just a basic database program, and it's a very easy program to work with. Anyone with any kind of computer knowledge can put a database together pretty easily if they just read the book. It took me half an hour to set up the database itself. Of course, the long part is entering the data. I did that over a period of time. The nice thing about Q&A is that it has a provision in it called "The Intelligent Assistant." Once you've set your database, you teach the Intelligent Assistant what your database is and what these fields really mean. Then, when you need information, you ask it in plain English. You type in, "How many cuts do I have with heavy lead guitar that sounds like ZZ Top?" and it pops up and tells you. I'm currently in the process of trying to get most of our music libraries and promo libraries on that. The TM stuff we got came with that kind of software, but it's basically usage software. It doesn't call up cuts that you need very quickly like that. As you can see, when you get into three stations, stuff that you used to do by the seat of your pants, you really have to start putting on paper or hard disk.
R.A.P.: What are some of your thoughts on the rapid changes in our industry?
Greg: I think the only thing we all need to keep in mind, as our GM is fond of saying, is that you can't do radio today the same way you did two years ago. The business is changing so drastically, and not just in the realm of technology. We all know that's changing. We all pay a lot of attention to that, but the nature of the business itself -- primarily because of triopoly, duopoly, mega-opoly -- is evolving, and I feel the position of the Production Director is evolving at the same time. A couple of years ago, it was unheard of to have a guy like me reporting directly to the General Manager on department head status equal with a PD and a Sales Manager and running my own department with the autonomy that I have here. That was absolutely unheard of. That's pretty much going to be the vogue as time goes on, and what that means for us is there are skills we've got to develop. We've got to take the time and the concern and the energy that we all spend on our creative skills and apply some of that towards your organizational skills, your time management skills. I recommend to people if they've never had to sit down and do a departmental budget before, go take some classes at a community college. Learn how it's done. You're going to be expected to do it. If you've never had people reporting to you, if you've never had people working for you before, if you've never done an interview before, if you don't know how to do these things, now's the time to learn because you're going to be asked to very soon.
And at the same time, the great part of this, I feel, is that the image of the Production Director is evolving, too. We're finally, thank God, starting to move out of that area where the Production Director was that whiny little guy down the hallway who was always saying he couldn't do this because he needed that. That's coming to an end, and I think we're finally starting to earn some of the respect that we really deserve. It has taken a while.
R.A.P.: From a business standpoint, acquiring a third or fourth station in a market is appealing because you can move the station into your current building and use existing staff to run the new station. Unfortunately, this means some people will get the axe, and that's a little scary.
Greg: When duopoly and triopoly first came along, quite honestly, I was terrified because the first thing I saw was that there were going to be a lot less jobs available, and that's true. That's very true. Take these stations I'm with for example. Before we took on Hot 105 there were two production people here, and there was a guy at Hot 105. We went from three to two and a half people. Yeah, there are going to be reductions. What I found though, is that the good people are going to survive. I mean, I've been doing this for a lot of years now, and I have absolutely no qualms whatsoever about my own career. The good people are not only going to survive, they're going to thrive. They're going to become more prominent, and they're going to stand out. What's going to happen is we are going to lose some people who maybe shouldn't have gotten into production. Now, that sounds terrible to say, but it's true. I know some good people are going to lose their jobs also, but I believe that's only going to be temporary.
One thing that companies are figuring out as they move more into duopoly is when you combine stations, there are places where you consolidate resources, and there are places where you don't. For example, we have a single Continuity Director at these three radio stations because one person can very easily handle that work for all three stations. This company understands that a single production guy cannot even think about touching these three puppies alone. The good companies are figuring that out, and that's pretty well becoming universal -- where you consolidate, where you don't, where you need your resources the most.
I see an evolution of the Production Director becoming more prominent in the radio station. The only thing that concerns me is that we are losing a lot of what I call the farm system, which is the smaller market, the smaller radio stations where you learn your craft, where you get that first shot at production whether you're still on the air, or it's your first off the air production job, and you basically come in rather rough and hone and polish your skills. I see those places going away, and that's very sad. And I do have to say, when I interviewed for the job that Mark Hoffman filled, I got probably 120 to 130 packages, and out of that, there were five "maybes." I think that's a really sad testament on our business.
R.A.P.: Do you blame that on all the satellite programming going into the smaller markets?
Greg: Yeah, I really do, because it's tough to go to a tiny market like a 5,000 person East Jesus, Wyoming and find some nineteen or twenty year old guy who's sitting in an archaic production room turning out masterpieces. It wasn't too many years ago where you had tons of guys like that. Now we're at the point where, if you want to find what I would call that up and coming talent, you've got to go to the medium markets. You've got to go to markets 50 to 100 to find those guys because the guys in those tiny markets who are really, really hot are becoming a rarity, and, yeah, I attribute that to satellite programming. I also kind of attribute it to people like me because we're not teaching. It sounds corny to say, but we're not passing it along. At least, I think we did more of it in the past.
That's one reason I'm really gratified by this publication called Radio And Production. I've gotten to the point where I can barely read most of the trades anymore because they're either TV intensive, or it's nothing more than an article stroking somebody. Well, hey, we haven't stroked this consultant for a while, let's do an article on him. Well, I'm sorry, I really don't care what any consultant has to think. I think we need more informational sources, more trade papers that are informational, maybe even our own bulletin board system. And I'm not just talking about Production Directors; I'm talking about radio as a whole. We need more "how to."
We've got to start sharing more information and more knowledge because, let's face it, we're all not going to be in this business forever. We're all looking at a day when we're going to say goodbye to the radio and go on to something else, and it's a shame to take that knowledge and take that experience with you and not hand it back to somebody before you leave.
R.A.P.: Let's say I'm a Production Director of a two station company that's getting ready to acquire a third station. I don't know what I'm getting into. What's the best advice you could give me going into it?
Greg: Number one, relax. Number two, anything you do from this point on is probably going to break all of your standard perceptions of how a production department should run, so keep your mind wide open. Look for innovation anywhere you can. Maybe take some of the things I said or that someone else has told you, but don't take them as gospel because every situation is different. Understand that you're going through a period of very heavy change. Don't underestimate it. Don't expect to just slide into it, and don't be afraid to make the changes. Then, have fun, because you can still do all the things that brought you to this business in the first place. You can still do some absolutely kick bottom pieces of work, and, in fact, you can do more of them now. And, to me, it's even better having the three stations because where else can you come to work in the same day and do three totally different pieces of work for three totally different formats? It really stretches your creative energy, and it really stretches your horizons. I think it's wonderful, and it looks great on your resume.