Aaron Swain

I loved the line a local dj used for a while here when he had dead air, “This moment of silence was brought to you by (insert radio station call letters), encouraging you to have a quiet moment in your day.” Unfortunately, he used the line several times during his time at that station.

One of the djs at our radio station is notorious for dead air moments. The host gets busy chatting it up with other people in the studio that he/she (won’t say which to protect my job) always misses the start of music sweeps after news or underwriter announements.

Anyhow, the way to correct problems like the one Doug mentioned (as well as stations playing music that is junk, or djs that are unbearable) is for you to pick up the phone and call station management. If that doesn’t work, try going to the ownership. A big part of the problem is that most listeners don’t leave their area often enough to realize their fav station is junk, so they never complain.

Surely you’d get more entries than I did with on my Evel Knievel ad. :o)

Since a lot of smaller stations are automated for at least several shifts of the day, it’s possible there was a glitch in the automation, leading to the dead air. If the station has an extremely small staff (and some, in the case of an AM/FM combo, may not have any actual ’staff’ on the lesser station) it’s possible no one was monitoring and the dead air continued until some bubba noticed, ran in the control room and rebooted the computer. Not excusable but it happens. The problem is compounded when you’re working in a really small station that has program feeds that automatically download and are supposed to play automatically. If there is a problem with the satellite feed (wrong transponder dialed up, sunspots, transmission error, etc.) and there’s no alert system in place to catch it (which there should be), the engineer or announcer wouldn’t know it wasn’t there - excuse the double-negative.

From your description, it sounds like that may have been the situation but it could just be that the jock was in the john or on the phone with his girlfriend and totally missed the cue. There are other possible reasons but they’re probably not appropriate for a SG blog. (Boy the stories I’d love to tell…)

In my radio career I’ve done on-air, programming, music programming and managed operations. I’ve fired people when things like that happened unless there was an absolutely clear reason why it was not their fault. But even then, someone is accountable and a system, piece of equipment or procedure would need to be examined and adjusted or replaced to prevent it from happening again.

And again, your mention that they gather the prayer requests and work up a sweat over them on the air then completely blow a simple segue only underscores the sad state of so much of SG radio today.