"Wasilla, Alaska: Hello!"
Maybe Sarah Palin won't be bringing her mangled syntax to talk radio after all.
Whew!
The main objection to Palin as radio talk-show host is that she would have to hold forth for three hours a day. While some of her recent remarks may indicate a talent for improvisation, anyone who’s listened to Rush Limbaugh or Thom Hartmann or Don Imus or Howard Stern or even Ryan Seacrest knows it’s the rare personality who can blab extemporaneously for 15 hours a week. And relying on callers to get you through won’t help, because as we’ve all experienced, callers-in are usually more embarrassing than compelling.
I'm a former radio announcer who worked at two small-market stations. The first was an FM station where I had an eight-hour live show. I played a lot of bad-format, adult contemporary music, sneaking more than a few songs from my own collection in where I could (always when the owner was too far away to pick up the signal.) It's a good thing I had a big mouth, because we didn't use a lot of canned content, and my only call-in segment was just 15 minutes long. The second was an AM outlet with a more traditional four-hour shift and the occasional New York Yankee or college hockey broadcast falling in my time-slot to shut me up.
Take it from someone with a pathological aversion to dead air: when you open that microphone and the "on air" light shines, you'd better have a whole lot more to say than "you betcha!"
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