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WWJ’s Rob Davidek Knows News Radio Has Changed

“When I started, you’d never jump from a college to a large market radio station. You’d have to go through the medium and mid-sized markets first.”

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‘Hey good lookin’, we’ll be back to pick you up later.’ Are you old enough to recall that commercial? Rob Davidek is the news director and brand manager at WWJ-AM 950, and he seems to remember.

“When I coach people I don’t want them to be ‘Mr. Microphone’ on the air,” Davidek said. “I do a lot of coaching, even if someone has been here a long time.” Davidek wants his air staff to be conversational, to be themselves. He said that’s how they’ll connect with their listeners.

Davidek has been with Audacy-owned News Radio WWJ 950 for nearly 27 years. Born in Flint, Michigan, he started working in radio in 1993 and worked his way up the industry ladder. Davidek says Flint gets a bad rap, much like Detroit does.

“Flint has its problems, but it’s no different than a lot of cities,” Davidek said.

“Detroit is a city that had its downturn, and bankruptcy during the recession. Now I see a city on the rise. A place you have to be. A lot of foreign influence has come in, and they’re buying up the land. A lot of people from New York are here, setting up restaurants.”

Crime-wise, Detroit had 309 murders last year. Davidek said a lot of those weren’t random.

“I know there are gang problems,” he said. “Domestic violence rose during the pandemic. We’re just beginning to see the mental health issues coming out of it. Detroit’s police chief is trying to put a dent in the crime, but it’s everywhere.”

Davidek went to high school in Flushing, Michigan with about 350 people in his class.

“My brother and I used to listen to WLW out of Cincinnati in the late 70s and early 80s,” Davidek said. “At that time, Pete Franklin did sports on that station. We’d listen in our bedroom. We’d also listen to Les Root and the news on WFDF 910 AM. He was good.”

After high school, Davidek went to Central Michigan and majored in broadcasting.

“I kind of knew in my mind that I’d be a sports broadcaster,” he said. “Dick Enberg went to Central Michigan. They had a couple of radio stations on campus and a student-run paper.”

It was on WMHW Rock FM where Davidek did sports updates, covered women’s basketball games, and went on road trips with the teams.

“That was fantastic,” he said. “We also did news. There was a faculty member that oversaw the operation. The teachers and professors at Central Michigan were great. I spent a lot of time hanging around the station. It got to the point where I wanted to decide if I wanted more on-air work or go the management route.”

Things in radio have changed a lot during Davidek’s career.

“When I started, you’d never jump from a college to a large market radio station,” he explained. “You’d have to go through the medium and mid-sized markets first.”

Davidek recently hired a kid right out of Michigan State. The young man saw a posting and wanted to get into sports.

“I’ve come to realize good sports people are even better news people,” Davidek said. “By that, I mean sports reporters cover games, do stories on players and teams, and talk to so many people in sports. They are always asking questions. Why this? Why is that? In the news, we’re curious, but perhaps we’re not able to be as creative as sports reporters.”

Davidek has never been afraid to try something new.

“I’ll change a remote box on a television, hold the ladder for someone if they need it. I’ll do whatever it takes to make the station excel. If I bring someone onboard and their sights are on bigger markets, I have to be okay with that,” Davidek said. “I look at it as my job to help them get ready for the bigger market. The big job. I’ll put them in touch with people that can help, and certainly tell them what I’m thinking. Offer the tips of the trade I’ve learned.”

As he brings talent along, Davidek said he can tell a lot about a person by watching them. Observing the minutiae in what they do.

“When I bring on a new anchor, I’ll have them sit in and watch the current anchor for four hours. Then they can get an understanding of the pace and begin to get the feel of what four hours straight feels like.”

During the second day of training, Davidek will have the current anchor run the board while the new hire goes on air and reads news for an hour.

“I will have them flip the next hour and the new person is running the board while the main anchor is reading. The board is scary. Commercials have to play at a certain time. You have to preview what’s coming next.”

Davidek said he must find employees who aren’t intimidated by working the board.

“Usually, by the second day, I’ll get feedback on the new hire from the main anchor about the new recruit. They may say the new hire was fine, perhaps suggest a few things for them to work on.”

He said he’s seen several anchors make the jump from television to radio.

“Jonathan Carlson came over from television and his reading is great,” Davidek said. “Jon had a good month of training with the guy he was replacing. As he was learning, he wanted to make sure he wasn’t interrupted with a slip of paper from someone giving him direction or a notice. He needed to concentrate. He had to make sure his levels were good, be aware of what commercial was coming up, and be clear as to which reporter he was going to throw to.”

Davidek said they’re lucky to have a great digital managing editor in Marssa Jenkins. She started out as a producer and now runs the department. Jenkins has six people she oversees and she reports to Davidek and the market manager.

“I’m mostly hands-off with what she manages,” he said. “I just watch how many downloads she gets. There are some unusual stories on our digital end. Some crazy stuff that people might refer to as clickbait. That’s a juggling act we have to do. We need to be in the digital space. We know that. Audacy has been pushing for that and our Audacy app is getting better and better.”

Davidek said his station is all news, 24-7, with a couple of paid programs on weekends.

“If a big story comes in, we always have at least one anchor in the building,” Davidek said. “With the recent Michigan State shooting, we were fully staffed and we stayed as long as we had to. Nobody else in town can do what we do every day. For us, if something blows up at 2 am, listeners will tune in here to see what’s going on. If we’re doing our job, they’ll have the information they need.”

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BNM Writers

It’s Time for News Radio to Clean Its Clock

With radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already.

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News radio is an interruptive format that swiftly moves listeners from one informative topic to
the next but over the years we’ve gotten bogged down with an insufferable amount of clutter: too many commercials, endless promos and teases, and pointless production pieces. All of it
interrupts the flow and cuts into the interesting information you promise to provide.

Let’s clean the clutter, starting with the anachronistic basis for it all: your hourly format clock.

I’ve never understood why radio stations root themselves to the clock. The show starts at the top of the hour and you bury your boring features at the end. Why? Why should the top of the hour be considered the beginning of anything? It’s not how people live their lives. Radio isn’t like TV where shows start at specific times. Hell, TV isn’t that way anymore.

But with news radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already. This is especially true with morning shows, where simple logic would suggest that people trying to get to work by the top of an hour begin listening at various times before then.

Who even owns a clock radio anymore?

The 21st century is nonstop. There is no daily news cycle, no beginning or end to anything but
news radio programmers still think of time in divisions of hours, minutes, and seconds. We still draw empty circles depicting analog clocks to plot hourly radio formats.

On news and talk stations, the top of the hour almost always begins with the hourly network
report. It’s the biggest of big-time radio, steeped in tradition, professionally detached, global. In other words, it sounds nothing like your radio station in your unique market and it contains the least interesting content you have to offer.

We cling to the networks at the top of the hour for their prestige, because that’s just how we’ve always done it. Any national or international stories of real interest to Americans, the latest Trump-Biden court decisions, for example, will be well covered in talk shows and you’ll probably want to drop it into your local programming, too. How about a one-minute segment twice an hour, 60 seconds of just the big national and world stuff, in 10-15-second boil-in-the-bag headline segments? I’m just spitballing here. You’re the programmer.

In my heretical news radio mind, the networks do great journalism but they still sound flat,
stuffy, and old-fashioned. They don’t sound like anything else on my station. I’ll dump the top-of-the-hour five minutes and cherry-pick the network sound bites. We’ll deliver them ourselves.

While I’m carving up your format and trying to get you thinking outside the box, do you need
traffic reports every ten minutes? Or, at all? Heresy, I know. Catch your breath and read on.

When we had real-time airborne local reporters telling us what they were looking at it had a gee-whiz factor and the information mattered because it was live, local first-hand reporting. I could imagine the scene as it was being described. Now we have reporters in booths looking at
computer feeds and doing shotgun-style traffic reports for multiple cities. Words without
pictures.

I knew an L.A.-based traffic reporter who did reports for Salt Lake City though she had never even been there. These so-called “real-time traffic” reports are nearly always recorded and delayed for playback. Does this practice serve any purpose at all except to deceive listeners?

Not incidentally, traffic reports are a prime target for AI exploitation. How difficult can it be to
attach state and local transportation agency traffic data to AI voice-to-speech generators? For all I know this is already being done. You can argue it’s cost-efficient but as a longtime morning news host/anchor/personality, I despise it. One of the greatest assets to any morning news team is the interaction between news and traffic people.

When Amy Chodroff and I started working together at KLIF a dozen years ago we had that human contact with remarkable radio veteran Bill Jackson doing traffic from an adjoining studio. Bill wasn’t just a voice, he was a talented news radio veteran and a valued part of our show. He was so good the company, Cumulus, put two more stations on his plate, ripping a valued team member away from us.

As hosts, Amy and I had to assume Bill wasn’t able to listen to the show anymore because he
was too busy gathering and preparing his reports for the other stations. Then he was shipped out of the building to do his work from home which made his insights and witty exchanges
impossible. We couldn’t talk to each other off the air. We couldn’t exchange glances, smiles, and hand signals or bump into each other in the hall. Our show suffered and our audience became a bit more detached.

Bill Jackson, real name Dale Kuckelburg, was also significantly detached from his career.

But I digress. The biggest problem with traffic reports is the shotgun approach I mentioned,
telling everybody in our listening area driving to their unique destinations how traffic is snarled thirty miles away. Good god, we have apps in our cars that do a much better job in real time.

How about the weather? What the hell, we’re swinging the ax here. Let’s be realistic.

There isn’t a day in my life that I don’t wake up with a fair idea of what weather I should expect. I don’t need someone on the radio telling me to carry an umbrella. If it’s iffy the immediate and highly local details are now available at the touch of an app. When the weather becomes of critical and life-threatening importance it’s a major news story and that’s when local radio news shines, making it the center of our continuous attention, not just a regular feature at scheduled times.

It’s your radio station, do what you think is best. I’m only suggesting that you might want to
reevaluate all the things we’ve all taken for granted for far too long.

News radio has always been an interruptive format. We promise listeners “the news you need” in the time it takes them to drive to work. They understand that they’ll receive useful and
interesting content in exchange for frequent subject switching and sponsorships. The great news stations know how to capitalize on that agreement but too many have sold their souls to
commercial clutter that chokes a news team’s ability to serve the promised meal.

As if 22 minutes of inane and repetitive commercials per hour aren’t bad enough programmers, struggling to do their work in a hurricane of increasing spotloads, add to the clutter with recorded promos that simply beseech listeners to keep listening while offering nothing of substance. Meanwhile, the same programmers tell talent to tease, tease, tease the subjects they’ll talk about six, twelve, and twenty minutes from now.

I know the business reality. Radio — especially news radio — is struggling to meet the profit insistence of corporate boards and the overhead needs of staying afloat locally. But at some point, we must answer the question, who do we have to serve first, our clients or our audience?

Station managers and their corporate masters have to stop issuing profit mandates without
offering programmers the opportunity to do their jobs, to provide more valuable content while
limiting commercial minutes, sponsorship rhetoric, and eliminating distracting bells and
whistles.

Clean your clock. Stop filling empty circles with stuff that made sense 50 years ago but is merely clutter today.

The only way to think outside the box is to get rid of the box.

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BNM Writers

AM 680 WCBM Leapt Into Action As the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapsed

Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners.

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As Americans woke up to a cargo ship hitting Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge Tuesday morning, the crew at AM 680 WCBM was already hard at work gathering the facts.

Just before 1:30 AM, a cargo ship lost power exiting the Baltimore harbor, striking a support beam that toppled the 47-year-old structure. In the wreckage, six people working on the bridge died, while drivers were rescued from the rubble in the chilly waters of the Curtis Bay.

The AM news/talk station — which celebrated its 100th anniversary Thursday — went wall-to-wall breaking coverage, something most outlets now avoid because of budget concerns. 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director Sean Casey told BNM in an email exchange how his crews handled the breaking news.


BNM: When did you guys hit the air with breaking news coverage?

Sean Casey: We first broke in with updates at 3:30 AM, approximately two hours after the bridge collapsed. Breaking news updates continued every half hour until 6 AM.”

BNM: How did you coordinate coverage in those moments?

SC: Full wall-to-wall coverage started at 6 AM and included full newscasts as well as interviews with state and local law enforcement agencies, eyewitness call-ins, and our national news partners. Our producer made call-outs and our news department shifted to full-blown local coverage.

BNM: How much experience did you have in putting together coverage of an event like that on the fly?

SC: Having been on the air during 9/11, I used the same formula that listeners want to know: Who, What, When, and Where? The why will come later.

BNM: How does your coverage show the importance of both local radio and AM radio?

SC: In times of breaking news events that impact our listeners, local AM radio stations are more in tune with the local listening audience. Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners. We also know the local players and officials and can get immediate reaction.

The talk component of our news/talk format offers listeners a chance to vent, share, and communicate with each other in good and bad times. This is why AM radio is still relevant. In some emergencies you can lose your cell service or have too weak of a signal, AM radio remains viable for in-car listening and at home with battery backup.

The AM 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director concluded his thoughts by noting the importance of a team effort, not only in coverage of breaking news events but also in operating a successful station and business as a whole.

“One of the biggest concerns we have is budgetary. More and more AM stations are abandoning the format because of its expense. Very few can afford a live and local news staff and show hosts,” Casey told Barrett News Media.

“Now more than ever, it’s vital that there be synergy between ownership, sales, and programming to maximize ratings and revenue so that we can continue to deliver vital information to listeners in our market.”

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BNM Writers

News is the Only Thing Missing From Election Coverage

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected?

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The first thought I had when I heard NBC had hired Ronna McDaniel as a commentator for $300,000 a year was to wonder how many actual journalists they could have hired for that money. Then, I recalled that NBC had laid off dozens of news staffers just a few months ago. Then, I remembered that I had just recently written a column decrying news organizations throwing pretty much anybody on the air as a “pundit” and this….

This was worse. It’s one thing to grab some rando who happened to be a minor functionary for the Executive Branch. It’s another to hire someone whose job was to promote election denialism and pretend that her opinion is something valuable for viewers. And, yes, it’s just as ridiculous when news organizations hire former presidential press secretaries (that’s you, Jen Psaki and Sean Spicer), their very jobs were to spin everything in their bosses’ favor and now you’re going to pay them big salaries for, um, what? Because they “have a name” or you’re afraid someone else will snap them up? Why them?

The McDaniel deal lasted five days, one completely unilluminating interview, and one unexpected Chuck Todd spine-growing outburst, so it’ll all blow over soon enough. The problem is, though, the part about having fired several news staffers, and what it means in an election year on both the national and local levels. If you have the money to hire an alleged pundit – any alleged pundit – you have the money to hire reporters, and I don’t mean anchors or opinion show hosts.

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected? Who’s probing Project 2025 and why isn’t it front-page, first-segment news? Who’s pressing the Biden administration on Gaza? Is anyone reporting on the candidates’ record on climate change?

Beyond prescription drug prices, is anyone digging into the broken healthcare system and demanding answers from the candidates about what they’ll do to fix it (and not letting Trump get away with “I’ll have a better plan, a beautiful plan” without a single specific detail, like they did in 2016)? Why didn’t anyone focus on, for example, the GOP candidate for governor of North Carolina and his incendiary past comments well before the primary?

Pundits are not going to do the legwork on the issues; they’ll just talk about swing states while John King and Steve Kornacki point at their touchscreen maps. We need reporting on the things that matter (and can affect that horse race, even if most people have made up their minds). It shouldn’t just be Pro Publica and scattered independent journalists doing the dirty work.

Honestly, I don’t want to hear the complaints about the quality of the candidates or how this is a rerun or any of that. (We’ll leave that to The New York Times.) We are a horribly underinformed electorate and we got the horse race we deserve. It might just be idealists like me who think that, just maybe, the news media can play a role in educating the public and bursting the bubbles and echo chambers. This country has survived and prospered for a few centuries with the press shining a light on injustice and corruption.

Now, when we need that most, they’re more concerned with what they think will bring them ratings and money (although someone will have to explain to me who thought having Ronna McDaniel as a paid commentator would draw a single viewer to NBC).

Here’s a thought: Don’t lay off reporters, especially in an election year.  Assign them to dig deep on issues that matter to the voters.

Let the pundits talk about that.

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