Here’s the back-story: I became a Top 40 radio disc jockey when I was 16. Little did I know at the time, the guy who hired me (then at his first radio job, himself) was a budding genius of the craft. He taught me a few things about the importance of some basic systems, actions and thinking points about being a DJ and a successful radio station. At eighteen, I was promoted to program director and for the next couple of decades I moved around the USA to bigger markets, then to even larger ones where the better pay was to be had. In the course, I began to develop my own systems for how I wanted things to be done; what DJ’s were to do in each break, how much they could talk and where and what about. What the production schedule (advert recording) was going to be and that I expected level of quality coming out of our production room. Disc Jockey’s recorded a lot of commercials, commonly three to five a day and some of them were inclined to do half-assed work if they could get by with it. I listed what to do when things went wrong; like when a scheduled commercial wasn’t to be found in the control room. What to do when the next DJ was late for his shift. So, I put all of this into ring binder labeled: The General Instructions. I gave it to every DJ and News-person I hired. The G. I’s. got bigger as I learned more, experienced more and added to it. Then, when I launched my programming consulting business, the sales manager at my last station suggested I put my then-thick notebook of How-To’s into book form. I did and it paid the rent a lot of months for years to follow.
Priced at $99, it sold just this side of 4000 units before I pulled it off the market about a dozen years ago. My feeling was it really needed some updates and I couldn’t find time to do it. There were (are) things in it that seemed obsolete. Like, how many radio stations today have a full staff of DJ’s one the air 24 hours a day? And any News today’s music stations may broadcast is usually little more than a toss-off rip-and-read from some other source. There was a section about the importance of ‘cleaning the heads”. That refereed to the pick-up/playback heads on recording tape machines. With heavy use, little bits of oxide on the play-side of recording tape would scrape off and gunk-up the pick-up head. Dirty heads made anything played on the tape player sound muddy and muffled. “Man, can’t you hear how crappy that machine sounds!? Clean the damn heads, will ya!”
In the 80s and 90s, The Programming Operations Manual was one of the most purchased, shared and copied book in American broadcast radio. In the text, I encouraged the reader to copy selected parts of the Announcer section and distribute to the staff. A whole bunch of radio managers and program directors used it as their elementary textbook for How To Make Music Radio. A couple of times a year, I still hear from radio guys in scattered points around the globe who tell me they still give battered copies of it to their new hires.
I’ve got the whole thing here as a GoogleDoc and am making a few edits here and there. But most of this is the original text from another radio time, another radio place not so long ago. A lot of it is still pertinent and I hope you find some helpful things as you skim through it.
One final thing, there are two Steve Warren’s in the radio business. The Ops/Manual was published in 1984. A couple of years later, the “other Steve” also wrote and published one of his own, entitled “Radio, The Book”. Since then, we each get credit for both.