How to Become a Radio Disc Jockey

Video Transcript

"I'm Bruce Edwards, and I'm the business reporter for the Rutland Herald, and I also did some radio work before I got into newspapers, was a disk jockey, and I was a a; later on I evolved into a a newscaster and hosted a public affairs show. Each each station would have its own format. There could be adult contemporary. It could be top forty, country and western; it could be classical, oldies, and we had kind of a a top forty format, and the program director would from the any number of records he'd get in, sample records he'd get in each week he would select which records he'd want to play, and he'd also look at what were the top songs were on the Billboard or the Cash Box top forty or top one hundred, and which were the up and coming songs. And that would, that would tell you, or that would tell him what songs should be played the most often. The songs that were just new; they would be played less often. And within a, kind of a selection of; depending on how you you mark the records, you would have a a a selection of which records to play in a certain category during the course of the day, or during the course of your shift. Now, most air shifts were probably around four hours. When I first started I actually had a split shift. I had a morning shift and I had an evening shift, so that made things kind of interesting. Didn't get a lot of sleep, but it was, it made things interesting. There's a, there's a difference between print and radio news. I went from from radio news to print. I remember when I was a little little nervous about taking the job here at the Rutland Herald, and at the time it was as the City Hall reporter, and I'd been doing radio news for several years. But radio news is different cause' its' a lot more concise. You're you're splicing in interviews with your own written words; usually in a in a thirty, forty second, maybe maybe a one minute news story on air. As opposed to, you know, you pick up a newspaper, and you know, you could spend five minutes reading a a story. So, I was used to brevity. Radio news is brief, it's to the point. Print journalism is also supposed to be to the point, and it is. Good good journalists, good reporters rice write concisely; the fewer words the better, but the stories in in in the print are obviously a lot longer, and one of the advantages of newspaper or magazines for that matter, like Time magazine, or U.S. News and World Report, or Newsweek is that the print media, print journalism gives you the consumer, the public, the consuming public a lot more information, a lot more detail, much more detail, much more information than you can in in either either radio or or television news. And with that information, with that additional information hopefully; especially in an election year like we're we're in now, you're more informed and you can make better choices. But certainly, there is a difference between radio and and print journalism."