Sunday, May 5, 2019

"Hitting" the network news on the top of the hour

There are a number of Facebook pages out there aimed at old broadcasters like me. We share memories and war stories and keep the old radio experience alive. On one of them, one of the members related a story where he had some friends in the studio with him during his 6 – Midnight shift back in the 70s. One of his friends made the comment that he has an easy job that all he had to do was to sit on his tail and talk. His reaction to his friend was to get up and tell his friend that the network news started exactly at the top of the hour, you got it. Slowly a look of horror dawned on the friend’s face as he began to realize there was a little more to it than sitting in the air chair and flapping one’s gums.

My very first radio gig was at WUSC-AM which was an affiliate of the Mutual Radio Network. Another was at WIS-Radio an NBC Radio Affiliate. Both of these carried the top of the hour Network news and at WIS we carried the half hour news from NBC as well. That was a lot of timing.

Left: A typical Western Union Clock circa 1955-1975. Courtesy Skinner Auctioneers and Appraisers. So what is involved with airing network news? The trick is to be ready to switch the network on to the air exactly at the time it starts. So if the news starts at 12 noon, you have to give the station identification always in the form of call sign – city of license, just like that, nothing in between. When giving the ID live it takes about three seconds. Something like this; “You’re listening to WUSC, Columbia South Carolina.” “Easy, peasey!” You think. Well, it would be except for the clock. We didn’t have those WWV radio controlled clocks back in the day. What we had was the Western Union Naval Observatory Time clocks. There was one of these behemoths hanging on the wall over the audio board of every radio station in clear view of the DJ when he or she was sitting at the microphone.

These clocks were connected via a circuit provided by Western Union to the Naval Observatory in Washington DC. Exactly at the top of the hour the observatory would send a pulse out to all the clocks that were connected – there were literally tens of thousands of them. When the clock received the pulse, a red light on the face of the clock would flash and the minute and second hands would both snap to zero.

And that is where the rub lies. None of these clocks were very accurate. Some were fast and some were slow. For example the clock at WUSC was constantly one second fast. So you would see the second hand sweep past zero and reset back to it when it reached one second past. The ones at WIS Radio and WIS – TV were consistently three seconds slow. When the second hand reached 57 the light would flash and the hand would snap forward to zero and keep on ticking.

So being fast was pretty easy to manage, you could live with a second of silence between the ID and the network news sounder. It gave the news some gravitas, at least that was our story and we stuck to it. But if you believed the three second slow clocks you wound up either up-cutting the news or having the sounder interrupt the ID, a big “no no!” So we knew that we needed to start the ID 6 seconds before the hour so that when it ended the clock flashed and the network news began. When you did your first air shift at a new station it was a guessing game until you could see which way the clock swung.

Now that we have figured out when to start the ID, we need to figure out how to get to that point. There were basically three ways.

Method 1 was to “backtime” an instrumental by starting it in time for it to end in time for the ID. Every record had a run time listed on the label. Subtracting the run time from the time you wanted to start the ID gave you the time to start the record while keeping it turned down. You simply turned it up as you were making the segue from the last full song you were playing and you were good to go. This was the easiest.

Method 2 was to find something to talk about after the last song of the hour. This worked well when you had 15 – 30 seconds to fill. There was always some station event to promote or you could cross promote one of the other DJs on the station. This was a little more difficult than “backtiming” because you had to adjust what you were saying as you watched the clock approach the magic moment. The station ID would be the last thing you said at the end of that time.

Method 3 was the most difficult and by far the coolest of them all. This involved you having to calculate the time the record before the last would be ending and then finding a record that fit that time and the station ID. That meant shuffling through a stack of records in a very short time and choosing the one that fit.

There were few things as satisfying as finishing the ID and seeing the light flash immediately and hearing the network news sounder begin as you were turning off the studio microphone.

This is why I tried to “hit” top of the hour at all the stations where I worked, even if they did not have network news. With the exception of the radio controlled and the NIST internet time service clocks on the computers in my home studio, these days the available clocks are not all that accurate. Case in point at one station there are three clocks in front of me that don’t agree with each other. There is no network news but I still try to “hit the top of the hour” on the NIST clock that I use as my show clock. You would never know it because of the delays involved with digital broadcasting. For example, at WUSC-FM, there is ten second delay circuit than can be “dumped” if someone says something “naughty” on the air. There is another seven seconds in the transmitter as it converts the digital signal it receives from the studio into an analog signal for the FM transmitter. If WUSC ever brings back network news, I’m ready! Oh MY!

1 comment:

  1. One of the reasons I liked ABC was the ten second tone burst prior to the newscast. That made the asynchronous clocks outdated.

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