This originally appeared on this site in 2011… The first radio station I was paid to work for (after several years of volunteering at non-commercial college and high school stations) was WRCN/Riverhead. It was a classic small-town station on the east end of Long Island that played “album-oriented rock” to an audience that tripled in […]
Longtime radio programmer Darryl Parks has been saying for several years that conservative talk stations will have a big problem on the day after the election: their audience will still be shrinking, old, male, and basically dying off — and they have no one to blame but themselves. The truth is that those stations and […]
In my four decades as a broadcaster, there have been a few times when a guest or a caller has said something insane on my show. I try not to let them get away with it. I always make it a point to challenge them, to insist they provide evidence of their claims (just as […]
A recent story about the town of Hell, Michigan, being up for sale brought back a flood of memories from the late 1980s. I was doing the morning show at WCXR/Washington, where the heat and humidity become oppressive in July and August (just like in St. Louis). One day, I read an article about a town […]
Veteran radio programmer Darryl Parks thinks this year’s presidential election will mark the end of right-wing talk radio: Conservative talk radio and the Republican party are connected, once again trying to energize their common “base.” Each are equally disconnected to generational changes, ethnic and demographic changes and generally the world around them. Each comfortably exists […]
I punched around to various radio stations yesterday to hear which were doing tributes to George Martin by playing Beatles songs and telling stories about him. The answer: very, very few. For rock stations (or classic rock, classic hits, oldies, etc.), this would have been a good time to drop the previously-formatted music and connect […]