I don’t know how many times I’ve said “holy cow” or something similar to that this week but I can’t count them on my fingers and toes. At the same time, I realize how lucky I am in that I’m retired and pursuing my retirement activity in broadcasting without significant financial worries.
Broadcasting can be a lot safer from my home studio rather than sitting in a workspace that is serially shared by a number of other DJs the way it used to be. Some of my fellow broadcasters have lost their show times on local radio stations due to access to their studios being restricted to “essential personnel” who ride heard on the stations’ automation systems.
That’s a big difference from the way it used to be before automation systems when a live body in the air chair was required if you were to stay on the air. As much as I love live radio and wish there were more of it, I remember the down side also.
One of those memories was of the winter of 1967 when the bug hit the DJs at WCOS pretty hard. Most of our part timers were college students and they went down first. But not before contaminating the equipment in the control room, so the bug hit the full time staff pretty much all at the same time. I am pretty sure that it was a flu bug because the symptoms came on pretty fast, for me during a 5 hour on air shift. If it were a cold, it would have taken a couple of days. I’m going with that self diagnosis because I was young and immortal back then and did not see a doctor. Yeah, the WCOS Good Guy became the WCOS Tough Guys that week, or more precisely we became the WCOS Hoarse Guys. Not a single one of us had any voice left. But the show must go on, sick or not. One of my fellow DJs even brought a pillow from home that he laid on the desk in front of the audio console to put his head on while the records played. I used my winter coat. Somehow, we got through that.
So far only one of my retirement radio gigs has been affected by COVID-19; my Monday morning Backbeat show on WUSC-FM. The campus of the UofSC had been locked down and in person classes have been replaced by online classes for the rest of the semester. Live shows on WUSC-FM have been suspended until further notice and the robots have finally taken over the station. At this time, I have no idea as to when we will resume live broadcasting.
All of my other radio broadcasts (live and pre-recorded) are continuing normally since they all originate from my home studio through the magic of the internet. I have even picked up some extra hours on KLYC in McMinnVille Oregon in the interim while we train a new DJ over there. The local staffs of the stations I am on in Poprad Slovakia and Skegness UK have vacated the main studios to remotely control their broadcast day from their homes as I do for OurGenerationRadio.com. So far most of my other DJs have been able to maintain their show schedules.
I need to point out that it is easier for online broadcasters to weather this period of social distancing than it is for the terrestrial broadcasters because the tools that control the stream are already internet enabled due to the nature of streaming media. Most over the air radio stations have encapsulated their broadcast equipment with private networks for security reasons. There have been several dramatic instances of what can happen if someone hacks into their network, some have resulted in fines for the stations and jail time for the hackers.
In the past week or so, many of my old broadcasting friends have asked why don’t I broadcast my WUSC-FM show from home. This need for security is the main reason. As far as I know, I am the only DJ on the air there that has the setup and technology to go live remotely and it is not fair to ask the station to build out the infrastructure to do that for only me. There is also an expense to that and the fact that the IT technicians who would need to be on site to accomplish the task are not there and have other pressing tasks to accomplish remotely needs to be considered as well.
Doing these online shows and KLYC have helped me to not become quite at stir crazy as I would be otherwise. And for that I’m grateful.
At this time we have no idea as to when the UofSC leadership will relax the campus lock down and give the live DJs access to the station. But there is one thing that I can do for the folks who listen to the oldies every Monday. For the duration of the social distancing event, I will be broadcasting my WUSC-FM show on http://ourgenerationradio.com 10AM until noon Eastern time and as usual I’ll be taking requests but instead of over the phone I’ll be taking them via my facebook page; https://www.facebook.com/rick.wrigley Oh MY!
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