Posts Tagged ‘broadcast’
Posted by The Editorial Desk / Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
DCRTV Breaks Stories, Spreads Rumors and is a Daily Must-Read
By Buzz McClain
Photography by Seth Freeman
You half-expect the headquarters of DCRTV.com to be a fortified bunker. It is, after all, where Dave Hughes daily, sometimes hourly, lobs bombs at the local media industry via his website by that name. Throughout the day he raises his head above the parapet to throw explosive news briefs and self-described “rants” about content, talent and management. Those notes can have repercussions when it comes to hirings, firings and the general business dealings of the region’s TV outlets, radio stations, media websites and publishing houses.
The last several months have been particularly intriguing, as stations and newspapers have changed formats, fired executives, frozen wages, dismantled departments or gone out of business completely—and the news is either broken first or anticipated well beforehand by the seemingly omniscient Dave Hughes.
The DCRTV bunker, as it turns out, is a walk-up condo in Reston, distinguished inside by how tidy it is. More college dorm than foxhole, the walls are lined with shelves of CDs (lots of bands from the ‘80s) and DVDs (lots of sci-fi B-movies and TV shows). A den boasts two folding tables that have neat piles of advertiser files and ratings printouts. The kitchen is distinctive in that it’s obvious nothing is ever prepared or consumed there.
The “nerve center” of the website is in the living room, which is given over to a small makeshift table with keyboard, monitor and PC. Next to it is a TV stand with small flat-screen TV and four remote controls neatly lined up under it; next to that is a bookcase with HD, satellite and terrestrial radios.
“This is it,” Hughes says. “This is where it all happens.”
If the headquarters of DCRTV doesn’t quite live up to the war-like image, at least Hughes, 51, doesn’t disappoint. He’s wearing faded camouflage pants and a white T-shirt. Later he’ll pull a camo cap over his shaved head to complete the urban soldier image. His long gray goatee and bushy moustache entirely obscure his mouth, so you don’t know if he’s smiling when he says that his website gets “40,000 to 50,000 unique readers a day, half of that on weekends and holidays.”
Fifty-thousand a day? “Yes,” he confirms. “It’s hit a million in a month.”
“Nature abhors a vacuum,” says Jim Farley, vice president of news and programming at WTOP news radio, who says he’s checked those figures. “[Newspapers have] virtually stopped covering local radio and TV, but people are curious about what’s going on in the industry. In the absence of that is this little gossip forum that begins to get news tips and, lo and behold, the stuff he’s breaking are pretty big stories. He’s got an advantage—he can print rumors—but an amazing percentage of what starts off as rumors come to pass.”
According to one major FM station executive (who asked not to be named because his company has a policy of not reading DCRTV), “I’d say 80 percent of people in the business read him. He has knowledge, but the rule of thumb is to take what he says with a grain of salt. Some of [the rumors] are complete bull from someone with an ax to grind, but [Hughes] is not to be taken lightly.”
“Anyone who says they don’t read it is lying,” says longtime radio wiseguy David Burd, now at WTOP. “The bone I have to pick is he doesn’t do his research. If he wants to be an expert and be taken seriously he needs to check facts. And tell him the Unibomber look is done.”
DCRTV began as a page of Hughes’ personal website in the mid-1990s when he “realized everybody started going to my website just for the page on radio,” he says. “I started up a little chat thing with people about radio, and that’s where DCRTV was born. I started to realize, OK, that’s where I’m going to focus my website, and all of a sudden people started to come, and it started to build up.”
The site, now a dozen years old, is supported by advertisers—he says he has some 60 to 65 regular ones—and nearly 300 individual donors (donors have access to DCRTV Plus, including an archive of historic photos and other material). Hughes says he’s “just about breaking even,” but also takes the occasional web design freelance gig, and he contributes to Baltimore sport site www.PressBoxOnline.com.
Hughes’ father worked for Xerox, and his mother was a nurse. The family relocated when Hughes was a teen from a New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia—where young Hughes was exposed to New York City ‘60s pop radio powerhouses—to Northern Virginia, where he scanned the airwaves in search of something similar. He consequently became familiar with AM stations WPGC, WEAM, WEEL and the like before discovering the joys of free-form rock on WGTB-FM and WHFS-FM in the ‘70s.
After graduating from James Madison University in 1980, he worked as a journalist, first at a Reston weekly, then for broadcasting trade publications. After launching his website, Hughes’ mother fell ill. His move back home to care for her made him the object of ridicule on the air, particularly with Don Geronimo and Mike O’Meara on WJFK-FM, who would try to diminish any DCRTV blurbs by pointing out they were from a grown man living in his mother’s basement.
“Which I was,” Hughes says. Although he’s not longer confined to a basement, he seems to have little physical contact with the world beyond his door. “I’m in contact with a lot of people but not in person. I’ll be in contact with 100 people every day, but it’s emails or the phone. It’s not for everybody.” (If the news side of DCRTV is slow, check out the Mailbag tab, where Hughes moderates a volume-heavy chat.)
He forces himself outside by taking walks and going out for lunch, usually before 11 a.m. For an astute music buff, he doesn’t attend live shows—“my ears can’t take the noise”—and he doesn’t cook, declaring that the electric stove was last turned on during the walk-through with the realtor. Movies are his main outlet, and he says he takes in “two a week or so with friends, or whatever.”
Hughes perks up at the mention of his own fantasy radio station. “I would do a really cool adult-rock station,” he says animatedly. “I’d get Weasel and Cerf [from WHFS’ glory days], Jon Ballard at BIG[-FM]. I’d give the deejays a certain amount of freedom but there would be a playlist. We’d make it a quarter classic rock and deep cuts—the Beatles and the Cars but stuff you don’t hear all the time; the Stones, but something deeper.”
“Then I’d throw in a quarter of stuff that was New Wavish from the ‘80s. The Police, The Talking Heads, stuff like that. New Order, Depeche Mode. Then a quarter of it dependent on the date and deejay preference, and then another quarter just familiar [music], mix it all up. Something like that, but give it its own real personality.”
But how to handle the industry FM average of 23 minutes an hour of commercials?
“It’s a problem,” he says. “I’m not an advertising guy. That’s where I wouldn’t do well in radio. The problem with radio these days is you have to put the advertisers ahead of listeners: Play what the listeners want, and advertisers may not like that.”
The station that comes closest, Hughes says, is WQSR-FM 102.7 in Baltimore, the Jack. “On weekends it’s all ‘80s—Flock of Seagulls, ABC—probably me and five other guys in their late forties are listening.”
And would he be a host on his own station?
“No,” he demurs. “I hate the sound of my voice.”
(July 2009)
Posted by The Editorial Desk / Thursday, March 19th, 2009
Can Our Reporter Keep Up with a Man Who Is on the Air from Sunup to Sundown? No.
Text by Buzz Mcclain / Photography by Jonathan Timmes
At 6:45 a.m. I’m idling at the dark, cold school-bus stop. My daughter is in no mood to talk so I have Fox Sports on the XM radio. I’m listening to a rant by Steve Czaban, the host of the national broadcast called “The First Team,” as he opines on sports, of course, but also other things in pop culture that occupy the blurry fringes of the early-morning mind of the average male listener. He’s informative, sure, sort of, but he’s more than that. He’s amusing without any “morning zoo” excess.
So now it’s 6:45 p.m., and I’m driving in the darkening remnants of rush-hour traffic to pick up my son from his piano lesson. I turn on the radio to the local sports station, ESPN 980 AM, and the voice coming out of the Prius speakers is Czaban’s. He’s the co-host of “The Sports Reporters” with Andy Pollin on ESPN 980, on the air from 4 to 7 p.m. each weekday.
It’s the Czabe again. I do a double take. He seems to be on the air from 6 in the morning to 7 at night every day on two different sports talk stations. Can that be right? It doesn’t seem possible. Maybe he’s taped.
But no. Not only is it possible, but if I were in my car with the radio on at 8 a.m. Wisconsin time, I would be listening to Czaban doing a different broadcast on a different station in Milwaukee.
Milwaukee.
Solly Rings His Bell
Is there more than one Czabe? How does he keep a schedule that has him on the air nationally and in two local markets for 13 hours a day while maintaining a 4 handicap in golf?
To find out, I followed Czaban for a Thursday from sunup to sundown, to see exactly how a man can stay on the air and stay on top of things without, I don’t know, sleeping maybe?
Czaban’s producer, Steve Solomon, calls Czaban’s phone at 4:30 a.m. every morning because “alarm clocks can’t be trusted,” Czaban said. Czaban lives with his wife Deana and daughters Catherine, 9, and Megan, 6, on 10 acres in Round Hill, west of Leesburg and near the Loudoun County-West Virginia border.
Now consider this: The station where he broadcasts from is in Rockville, Md., just west of the District of Columbia. Czaban’s house is 25 miles closer to Winchester than it is to Rockville.
The Czabe is unfazed by the commute.
“It’s 52 minutes door to door,” Czaban says, fluidly reciting the vagaries of traffic that he breezes through in his 2005 Acura, from his long driveway to the McDonald’s near the station where he takes his morning sustenance.
Breakfast is long gone by the time I get to the station at 7:30 a.m. (alarm clocks really can’t be trusted). He’s already been on the air an hour and a half when I make it to the fourth-floor suite of ESPN 980.
Czaban is about the right size for his authoritative baritone. He’s 40 and keeps his hair clipped short so as to blend it with his ever-heightening forehead. He’s easily 6-foot-1 and comfortably carries his 228 pounds, “but I should be 205,” he says. Remarkably, he appears healthy, not exhausted at all. I expected suitcases under the eyes.
He sits at an oblong table with his back to a bank of windows looking out at Rockville Pike; as he talks into the microphone in front of him he deftly punches up the sound effects heard on the show from a box of 1,000 of them he has at his right hand.
Across the table is his “First Team” partner, Scott Linn, who, along with Solly (he hates that nickname, but they call him that anyway), has the same morning-to-evening schedule as the Czabe. Brutal as that may be, they live far closer to the station in Montgomery County.
Listeners tuning into 150 Fox Sports stations and XM’s national broadcast eavesdrop on a running conversation between Czaban and Linn, who have been together since June 2002. Linn scans listener emails, reads the Internet and makes notes from newspapers, while Solly forwards periodic phone calls to Czaban.
Czaban, who wiggles in his seat the way a golfer might waggle at address on the tee box, has a few notes on a computer printout of topics. What’s astonishing is how much detail he applies to a variety of subjects, and how much color his clever turns of phrase bring to the conversation.
“He’s the iron horse of broadcasting,” remarks “Smokin’” Al Koken, who hosts 980’s afternoon show with John Thompson and Brian Mitchell. “How he has the energy and passion at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. to do what he does, that’s the true mark of a professional.”
Here’s how: When the show goes into commercial at 8 a.m., Czaban cracks open a two-ounce 5-Hour Energy shot, one of many. He’s so beholden to the elixir that he calls his home theater—a 110-inch projection screen flanked by 60-inch plasmas so he can watch three games at one time—“The 5-Hour Energy Dome.”
When the Fox Sports show is done at 9 a.m., Czaban goes on the air from the same chair and microphone for 30 minutes with Bob Madden and Brian Nelson—“Bob and Brian Mornings,” the No. 1 show on rock station 102.9 FM, the Hog, in Milwaukee. He was 27 and temporarily out of radio when he became a feature on the show, and now he’s “like an adopted son” in Milwaukee, Czaban said.
‘The Mean Streets of McLean’
Czaban grew up “on the mean streets of McLean,” matriculating to Cooper Middle School and Langley High. His father was a computer-systems analyst for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and his mother taught elementary school.
“The whole ‘mean streets of McLean’ became one of my favorite cliches on the show because the suburban streets of the McLean Hunt were anything but mean,” explains Czaban, who played drums in a high-school garage band. “Nice, quiet, tree-lined, very middle America. We played tackle football in the park every weekend during the fall and winter. Basketball games in driveways of at least three different kids. I played whiffle ball in the yard, where my roof over the front porch was the ‘upper deck.’ Stuff like that.”
It was around age 11 he hit his personal sports zenith, when he made the McLean Little League All-Star baseball team and discovered the joyous wonders of golf. He realized then he’d maxed out in the former and devoted himself to the latter.
His passion for golf manifested in the form of the creation of the annual Potomac Cup, a tournament between golfers from Virginia and those from Maryland. He started it in 2001, humbly, and now “I’m blown away with where we’re at with logoed shirts, logoed golf bags and all the different stuff we do.”
Virginia, by the way, leads 5 to 3.
His first move from the area was to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he earned a degree in communications in 1990 and for four years did the play by play for the Gauchos’ football and basketball games, while also hosting a local sports show. He moved back to his hometown and was again out of radio when Andy Pollin hired him at WTEM-AM (now ESPN 980) to do updates as a part-timer. “He’s sent in a tape, and it was pretty good,” Pollin recalls. “He was working as a range monkey over at Avenel. I remember calling his mother to see how to get hold of him.”
Then he was on to Chicago for One-On-One Sports Radio Network, where he met Bob and Brian, Charlotte’s WFNZ-AM, six months at ESPN Radio and then back to WTEM, where he was finally paired with Pollin on “The Sports Reporters.” Pollin, 50, an area native whose extensive institutional memory of local sports is collected in the new “Great Book of Washington, D.C. Sports Lists” with Leonard Shapiro, believes their partnership works because of their differences.
“We’re very different,” he says. “A different age, different politically, different interests, that works well on the air, but in terms of what we can bring to the table, we generally agree on what we want to talk about. I know how he’s going to react to certain things, and that’s how we come up with show topics.”
Czaban’s office is next to Pollin’s. It’s a smallish affair and looks like a 14-year-old boy’s bedroom, with framed Sports Illustrated covers on the walls, a large Darrell Green action painting over the desk, and assorted bobblehead and toy collectibles on a bookcase. But the dominant furniture is an overstuffed green chair and ottoman with a blanket on it. It’s where Czaban takes his daily nap.
As he updates his popular website, The Daily Czabe, Czabe.com, with opinions, videos, photos of women in bikinis and reader poll, we talk about time management. Each year he takes four breaks for himself and others with his family. He occasionally does a Sunday Redskins TV pre-game show, but says: “I don’t want to take on any more on the weekends.”
It dawns on me that he has to watch a lot of weekend sports to be as informative as he is. Isn’t that working on weekends?
“You have to watch the games, but you should still want to watch the games,” he insists. “What’s frustrating for me, particularly with the morning show, is I can’t watch as many of the games as I’d like to because I just can’t function on four or five hours of sleep. And that’s frustrating because I’m still a guy in this business who believes in watching long-form sports, watching details, the game within the game. You can get by in sports radio now with the Internet, with just watching the ‘SportsCenter’ highlights and reading stories, but I’m of the mindset that I’m still a sports fan and want to watch as much as I can in long form.”
The idea that every listener thinks they could do his job is not new to Czaban. “As Andy likes to say, ‘Everybody’s got one good show in them.’ One. What are you going to say the next day? And the next day? And the next day? That’s the real trick to it. And in truth, not everybody has one good show in them because there is a sort of a learned art to talking into a microphone and doing it in a way that makes the microphone disappear.”
The Lure of the Chair
Czaban can play 18 holes of golf during his break between shows, but today is not a golf day. So while the Czabe runs “some pretty mundane errands” after lunch—we had a 20-minute meal at a nearby barbecue place—I find myself in the plush green chair in his office.
Whoa. It’s nice here. The sun is on my face, ESPN.com is on his computer monitor, and you can hear faint sports radio down the hall somewhere. It’s cozy. Relaxing. Oh, man, is it relaxing. And before you know it, I’m out.
How embarrassing. But who could resist?
I groggily make way at 3 p.m. so Czaban, Solomon and Pollin can have a pre-show meeting; they quickly discuss a small handful of possible topics in no detail whatsoever and adjourn.
After the meeting it’s Czaban’s turn to snooze, and he closes the door. A few minutes before 4 p.m. he strides into the studio and takes a different seat, this one facing the window with a clear shot of Golf Galaxy across the highway. I find myself staring at it, my mind wandering to the fairway, and despite my nap, my eyes are heavy. And Czaban has three more hours of work to go.
The show moves at pace—in the car the commercial breaks seem much longer than they do in the studio—and at 5 p.m. he has a slice of pizza and a diet Dr Pepper. There’s been no exercise today besides walking to and from the parking garage. He has a home gym, “a nice one, but I never use it. I’d use it theoretically at night, but who wants to?”
At 5:30 p.m. he takes in another slice, plus additional 5-Hour Energy shot. At 6:21 there’s more pizza—free from a sponsor—and at 6:37 he does The Daily Czabe, a humorous roundup of non-sports items that either irritate or appeal to him.
My question is: When did he find time today to discover anything new to talk about? And how does he go all day on three programs and never once repeat himself? In an odd moment, I find myself quoting him to him, forgetting that I had heard him say it 10 hours earlier. Clearly, I’m getting delirious.
At 6:55:46 he says his final words on the air and after quick goodbyes is out of the studio, out of the building, out of the garage and into the thinning traffic for his ride home to Round Hill.
And all I can think is how grateful I am that I can sleep in tomorrow.
(March 2009)
Posted by The Editorial Desk / Friday, January 23rd, 2009
The Voices That Map Your Way Through the Belt Loops
By Susan Anspach / Photography by Seth Freeman
Lisa Baden
“Branch Avenue, honey, did you hear? Northbound at the Beltway, that ongoing construction project, add 15 minutes to your commute.”
Lisa Baden paused for breath, exhaled in a gush of empathy.
“I know!”
The 50-year-old morning traffic reporter’s job—the radio position she wanted ever since first broadcasting the announcements in junior high—is centered first on efficacy, second on understanding.
“Sometimes I feel like I should’ve taken up psychology,” she said between early-hour reports. Between 4:55 and 11 a.m. on weekday mornings Baden is on air with 30- to 90-second segments for either WTOP, Good Morning America or Channel 7 at least once every 10 minutes. Off-air, she and an assistant field anywhere from 250 to 300 calls daily, whose collective on-road insights she deems just as valuable as the feeds that stream to her live from two airplanes, one helicopter, countless cameras and nearly 20 radios.
Also on duty are two mobile units. “Their job is not to get stuck, so they really have to know the roads so they can look at the traffic. Otherwise, they sit for an hour, too.”
As for her dial-in commuters, “There are those [drivers] who get frustrated who want to call and vent. Not that they’ve seen anything in particular, but they just want to vent for a minute. But you listen, and it makes you laugh, and hopefully it alleviates some stress.”
According to Baden, the frustration stems partly from the region’s road layout, which generates a unique brand of highway congestion—an intrinsically snarled one whose navigators aren’t all prepared to take on. “This is a very transient city. People are assigned here, they’re stationed here from all over the world … people who’ve never seen snow, much less driven in it.”
And of Maryland, the District and Northern Virginia, she speaks from 17 years’ experience with broadcast outsourcing company Metro Networks when she says the latter sees the most tie-ups. “Obviously, when it was designed how many years ago, it wasn’t designed to handle the population that we currently have nor the commute that we have. Most of the roads in the transit system were designed for traffic going into the city.
“But then everything started to expand out to the suburbs, so the transit system didn’t keep up with that. And the roads weren’t really designed for suburb commutes, and now we just keep ballooning out, so it just keeps getting worse and worse … It’s amazing, the congestion in Virginia.”
That exponential growth, as well as increased air-space restrictions since Sept. 11, has made keeping pace with the area’s traffic pulse more difficult in recent years, reporter Jim Russ said. Russ oversees 60 staffers from his perch as Metro Networks’ director of operations, a position he has manned for eight of his 17 years with the news, traffic and sports outsourcing behemoth headquartered in Houston. Further traffic challenges Russ cited as specific to the region: that it is comprised of two states and a district, each with its own jurisdictional boundaries, and that D.C. has few roads free of the stop-and-go patterns created by traffic circles and lights. Such layouts result in city clog, as well as trickledown to artery interstates 66 and 95. For his teams of eyes in their Silver Spring offices, abuzz every weekday morning and afternoon with the energy of such notables as Robert Workman, Beverly Farmer, Jerry Edwards and Julie Wright, it all translates to what Baden avers are “the most secure jobs in radio.”
When the Bridge Is Out
Secure, if not predictable. “Because we are D.C., you never know when the presidents, the signataries are coming through,” Wright said. “What keeps it interesting is it’s constantly changing. In a news story, whatever happened, happened, same story from 5 a.m. as 7 p.m. With traffic, everything’s different.”
Though extensive legwork and preparation are conducted before an event predicted to increase car surge—in April, Metro Networks devoted weeks of research to the speculation of the papal caravan’s D.C. whereabouts—some things simply cannot be forecast. “It’s time,” Baden said. “It’s in the now.”
WUSA9’s Angie Goff had yet to complete a week on the job when she was called back after a standard morning shift to cover her first ice storm (“I had left South Carolina! Sweet tea, OK?”). And there was no foreseeing the afternoon in November 1997 that Wright cites as the worst commute in her career’s history. While the staff at Metro Networks were attending an awards ceremony, a man inched to the edge of Wilson Bridge and threatened to leap. The overpass was closed to cars, and the flow-crippling effect shot out in all directions. “That evening, there was no simple solution because alternative routes were just as gridlocked as every major artery.”
Then there’s the issue of delivery. Forty Metro D.C. radio stations and five television stations barter segments of seconds with Metro Networks—which the company in turn sells to sponsors—in exchange for the newsfeed. Reporters, then, are habitually selecting different sets of newsworthy nuggets based on a given region’s commuters’ trends. “I will say, let’s just say I get 100 emails a day,” Baden calculated. “Fifty of them are, ‘You don’t talk enough about Maryland, and 50 of them are, ‘You don’t talk enough about Virginia.’ So it’s all perspective. It’s a juggling act, a balancing act to keep everyone happy.”
To appease those suspect of a slight, on an average day Baden will segment her reports into three, one section per district or state, but she is blunt when she explains that what she sees as requiring her attention will receive it. Both eyes, for instance, were on the real and potential whereabouts of the snipers in October 2002. “Focus has to be where it’s most needed.”
Keeping Right
Further complicating matters, what radio listeners want is not the same as viewers. The back and forth between the two broadcasting styles bears more than consideration; the switch demands a reexamination of audience priorities. According to Baden, “Whereas on TV they’re planning their morning—‘Do I have time to take a shower? Should I pack my lunch?’—and you’re helping people make decisions, radio is real time. Those people that you’re addressing are living it.”
And the deliberation behind formatting can extend beyond the factual. “My personality is a lot different from station to station,” Wright said. “My delivery is different in that I might be more straightforward, more fun. Should Donnie [Simpson of Morningside, Md.’s WPGC] interact with me, I get to be more of me in that station.”
The variations do boil down to a themed set of routines. With a 2:30 a.m. weekday wakeup time, Baden rarely rises with the sun, and regularly with WTOP as her alarm station. She zips via Mini Cooper through her own 50-minute morning commute to arrive at 4:30 a.m., leaving herself just under half an hour’s prep time. The timer she carries everywhere dictates the keen synchronization of the next seven hours. “When you’re on the air every 10 minutes, even going to the bathroom is a challenge.”
Trends crop up within a given week, as well. Friday at Metro Networks are referred to as “Friday light” for the many government commuters who have recently made the switch to extended four-day workweeks. “It’s always been something that people have talked about, but now with the fuel crisis it’s becoming more of a reality, and I think they’re really starting to step up to the plate,” Baden said. “Not just because the commute is so bad, but because it affects not only our economy but also our fuel consumption and environment. So it’s getting pushed higher on the list.”
In the throes of the bumper-to-bumper barriers that do characterize most of the region’s weekday morning and afternoons, Metro D.C.’s traffic reporters have come to expect the unexpected from their tuned-in audiences. In addition to road-obstruction warnings, “people do call on non-traffic-related issues,” Baden said. “I’ve met a lot of nice tractor-trailer drivers.”
Irv she remembers from 10 years ago for his Beltway Prozac dispenser-placement pitch. “It’s nice that people call with whimsical suggestions for those around them because it shows to me that they’re lightening up and, you know, it kind of helps take off some stress … It’s an honor to be thought of as a pal.”
Pedestrian Crossings
While Baden said most of her caller feedback concerns route tips and frustrations, other local TV broadcasters cite call-ins—and run-ins—that pertain less to the profession than they do personal life. Baden suspects she’s an exception to that rule because her voice was heard across D.C.’s airwaves long before her face was projected onto its living-room screens. On a daily basis, however, Goff and Wright field queries pertaining to makeup selection, marital status or a given segment’s jacket.
“When somebody sees you, it’s a big shock [for them], and that can be a double-edged sword,” Wright said. “If you come across as a friend, when they meet you in person they are very open with you: ‘We love your work. I didn’t like that dress you wore the other day, but we love your work.’ It’s kind of like, Wow! It kind of takes you back a little.”
Another job component accompanied by both pros and cons is the element of personalization each reporter strives to pull into her reports—“I think when I’m on air I have to actually tone it down,” Goff said—that can result in broadcast audiences assuming an unexpected level of familiarity. “When people recognize you from TV, they automatically want to touch you,” Wright said. “And I’m a hugger! But I don’t know you!”
Of course, what outsiders feel they can best relate to the reporters on is something few realize they rarely have to endure themselves. “When I told people I was taking a job in D.C., before I could even tell people what my position was going to be, everyone was like, ‘Get ready for the traffic,’” Goff said. “That’s the first thing that comes to mind for people who don’t even live here … Then I realized I’d be missing all the traffic with the hours that I work.”
Their secrets to successful reporting, then, are at a level more advanced than understanding. For Goff, it was sloughing through a series of five media internships and putting in full workweeks of sheer road time to acclimate herself with her area of coverage. For Wright, who racked the most points for Most Talkative her senior year, it was putting her prolixity to work in a field that rewards the naturally chatty, though, according to Baden, the profession prizes the ability to listen over all else. “The secret to being a great communicator is to be a good listener. Because I listen to people all day long, and all I’m doing is just regurgitating. I’m describing what the caller saw, what the airplane saw, what the mobile unit saw, what the police officer told me and what I see.”
“Ooh, in Maryland I’m watching an overturned vehicle! On 29 South, Colesville Road, after the Beltway they’ve stopped the traffic in both directions. I don’t see anyone moving at all in Silver Spring inside the Beltway at Dale Drive. It looks like they’re going to be in the process of uprighting this vehicle, I’m assuming that’s why they’ve shut it down. Northbound out of Silver Spring—whoop! Here they come!—you want to use Georgia Avenue instead. That’ll save you some time. I’m Lisa Baden, 103.5FM, WTOP Radio.”
(December 2008)
Posted by The Editorial Desk / Thursday, January 8th, 2009
After 11 Years Yakking About Sports, Pop Culture and Bikini Contests, Can Radio’s Junkies Keep It Up?
By Buzz McClain / Photography by Jonathan Timmes
It could be any rec room in the country. Four guys sitting around a table, ESPNHD showing highlights on the flat screen as they jaw about yesterday’s game, today’s celebrity scandal and the weekend’s poker party.
Except this session of off-the-cuff, innuendo-laden repartee is overheard by 15,000 listeners a day, most of them driving their cars to work as the morning sun rises over the traffic in front of them. It’s not easy to get out of bed, into your clothes and into your car at such an hour, but the Junkies make the torturous time between 5 and 10 a.m. weekdays just a little less odious for listeners, mostly men between ages 25 to 54.
The Junkies can relate because they, too, have to get up at ungodly hours to be in the WJFK-FM (106.7) studios, when they would rather be, in Junkie lingo, back in bed “roughing up a suspect.” (It’s not what you think. Well, maybe it is.) But each day they drive in the morning darkness, three from Montgomery County, Md., and one from Ashburn, to Fairfax City not to be the first at the station, but definitely not to be the last.
Because there’s “the breakfast rule.”
“If you’re late you have to buy breakfast for all the guys, and I don’t want to [expletive] with it at all,” said Eric Bickel, who is usually the first to arrive. “I leave my house about 4:30 a.m. from Kensington. It’s not so bad.”
E.B., Bickel’s on-air tag, means the traffic isn’t so bad. Getting up is bad, always. “I go to bed late, that’s the problem,” he said, his ball cap hiding a silvery coif that’s a nasty combination of hat hair and bed head. “Late” is 10:30 p.m.
“Jason’s the only one who’s militant and goes to bed at, like, 8:30 p.m.,” added John-Paul Flaim, a.k.a. J.P., indicating Jason Bishop, who, at 6-foot-6 is nicknamed Lurch, after “The Addams Family’s” towering, deep-voiced zombie servant.
“You never get used to waking up at 4:30 in the morning,” Bishop said. “Never.”
“So I don’t—and any of us don’t—sound like ingrates, I realize there are tons of people who get up earlier than us for jobs they despise,” added John Auville, the Junkie with the shaved head who goes by his childhood nickname of Cakes. “So I’m not going to complain about waking up early for a job I love.”
“We are selling out to the Man,” Bickel mockingly pointed out.
Still, he’s not complaining either.
From TV to Radio
The Junkies’ story of how affable boyhood pals from suburban Maryland came to be regional media donkeys (affectionate Junkie speak for a fool) and easily take over morning drive-time for the immensely popular Howard Stern is as inspirational as it is unlikely.
It started with Bickel’s then-future mother-in-law. She thought the boys could do a public access television show about sports. In an “Aw, why not?” moment, Flaim, Bickel and Auville took the required broadcast training at Bowie Community Television and launched “The Sports Junkies,” not knowing when it would air or who would see it.
Kick-off didn’t go exactly as planned. The day they were to tape their first show, “Cakes was at Geoffrey Giraffe doing a double shift,” Flaim remembered. Indeed, Auville, then manager at a Toys “R” Us store, couldn’t get away. Instead of debuting with a two-person show, Flaim and Bickel called another friend, Bishop, who they knew didn’t have much going on, and who just happened to be available. As usual.
“He did the first show, and we said we can’t fire anybody for a stupid show we’re not paying anybody for, so that’s how Jason got in the mix,” Flaim explained. “I’m not sure anyone knows that. Jason wasn’t part of the original plan.”
The program proceeded as a quartet, and while it was fun venting about sports on TV, “I think it’s fair to say that at the time we were all searching for what we wanted to do professionally,” Bickel said in a moment of retrospection. “In the back of our minds we were dreamers. We said, Hey maybe we’ll do this cable access show and who knows, maybe somebody will like it and we won’t have to get a real job.”
A “real job” for Bickel, who has a master’s degree in education, was going to be the position of a high school counselor or basketball coach. Today, he still dresses the part of the latter: Sweatpants and a hoodie compose a typical day’s attire.
Bishop was in the marketing department for the NFL Philadelphia Eagles, commuting to Bowie on weekends to tape the TV show. “His title was peon,” Auville said. “I was,” Bishop quickly concurred. “I was a nothing. I barely got paid anything.” Other than that occupational dalliance, he’s never had a “regular” job.
Flaim finished law school at Temple, a serious educational commitment, while the Junkies were doing weekend radio. “We opened my bar results on the air,” he said. He failed. As a consolation, “It was good live radio,” Bickel said. Flaim passed the bar the second time, but to this day he’s never practiced law.
Auville is the only one who had a real career to abandon at the start of the Junkies’ take-off. He had four and a half years as a manager with the Toys “R” Us chain, a job that taught him, among other things, that “retail sucks,” as he’s wont to put it. He willingly left $25,000 in unvested 401(k) funds to quit and be a full-time Junkie, “which was a pretty penny when you’re 26 and your wife is pregnant,” he said.
A decade later, any regrets? This got a big laugh from all four. “Are you kidding?” Bickel said. “You’re looking at the four luckiest guys in town.”
The Promotion
In 1995, after some 16 episodes of their television show, the self-promotional Junkies sent a tape to The Washington Times, where it was favorably reviewed. That caught the attention of WJFK, who put them on the radio on weekend nights in 1996. They got a raise from their $50 per shift fee the next year, when they went full time and assumed the 7 to 11 p.m. slot. In 1999 the show became syndicated, bringing the Junkies to national attention.
Frequent promotional events, ranging from bikini contests to a tackle football game against the D.C. Divas women’s team (8,300 came to see the Junkies win 28 to 6) to a professional boxing match (5,457 saw Flaim—a.k.a. “The Latin Donkey”—get knocked out in the first round at the Patriot Center by Jay “The American Dream” Watts), raised their profile and assured an audience of young adult men willing to live vicariously through them. The added presence of the Junkettes, their team of scantily clad boosters of considerable feminine pulchritude, didn’t hurt either.
In 2002 they flipped to mornings at WHFS-FM (99.1); three years later they returned to WJFK at midday until they were sucked into the morning vacuum left behind when Stern famously blasted off for Sirius Satellite Radio. The pressure to even come close to Stern’s ratings was on. With caution, Flaim asserted they’ve now exceeded the King of All Media’s numbers.
They don’t come close to Stern’s $500 million, five-year deal Sirius contract, but Bickel said, “There’s lots of money in local radio.”
Like how much?
“Aw, come on man, I can’t go into that,” Auville said, addressing the one topic the otherwise bluntly candid Junkies never, ever discuss. Ironic, considering it’s one of the first questions they ask of their on-air celebrity guests. “Not us. We’re not into flaunting our W-2’s. I’ll just say we make a nice living. We’re regular guys who got a great opportunity and we realize how lucky and blessed we are to do what we’re doing.”
Flaim echoed the refreshing attitude: “I will say we are very happy and lucky to be doing something that we love with great friends. And we’re lucky that we get paid for it.”
Bickel admitted that the show sometimes has a chaotic frat boy sound, but each Junkie is a 37-year-old married suburban father. Auville has three kids, Bickel two, Bishop two, and Flaim has one.
“In the end, we’re just family guys,” Flaim said.
There’s nothing particularly dangerous about the Junkies’ stream-of-consciousness, generally inane, occasionally hilarious carpool-ish patter, unless the odd discussion of fellatio, fornication and various body functions offends you. But such frank content—with its graphic nature denatured by Federal Communications Commission-safe, coded language—is to be expected in today’s ever-coarsening broadcast market. Anyone shocked by descriptions of “ducks,” “swallows” and “spotted owls,” all Junkie slang for unprintable activities, can listen to a less offensive station.
“There’s an edge to it, but an innocence, too,” Bickel said. “We have our moments, but even when we’re at our most outrageous there’s a naivete. I think we can get away with a lot of stuff because people know we’re doing it in a spirit of fun. That’s always been a theme we try to push.
“I think people get that.”
Men Only
Most women do not. The Junkies’ cumulative audience is overwhelmingly men, and one look at their testosterone-driven website, www.junkiesradio.com, with its prominent female derrieres and bursting bikini tops, shows they know their audience.
“It’s a male-skewing station, which is hugely important” when considering their audience, Auville said. Women don’t typically tune to 106.7 for the other shows, which include “The Opie and Anthony Show,” twice fined by the FCC for indecency, sports talker Jim Rome, and “The Don and Mike Show” and “The Big O and Dukes,” both of whose hosts are virtually estrogen-free.
“It’s not that we’re hating on women,” Bickel said, “but you are what you are. We had a lot more women listening to us when we were on HFS, which was a rock station.”
Added Flaim, “There’s a perception that it’s a sports show, and sports might be 25 to 40 percent of a show, depending on the day. But a 35-year-old chick in her car doesn’t want to hear that [sports content].”
They might not want to hear women referred to as chicks, either.
The Final Sign Off
None of the Junkies has considered a future beyond the radio gig. In fact, it seems to frighten them to consider there’s a caboose on the gravy train.
“I’ll be a professional blackjack player,” Bishop offered, and you wonder if he’s kidding.
“We’re tainted,” Bickel said, no doubt speaking for the group. “I could never work a real job again. Once you work four hours a day, you’re tainted for life.”
(April 2008)
