Speaker 1: Well, what do you know? We're all the way to Module 5 now, which is FCC regulations and station rules. They're all very important. Your reading assignment for this module says go play around and look at those FCC regulations. You might be surprised what you find there. The station rules I'm going to cover a little more in depth, because those are different for every station everywhere, and you still need to be aware of them. So the first FCC regulation you'll have to deal with on an hourly basis, I might add, is the legal ID. That is a requirement of the FCC at the first normal break in every hour at the top of the hour. Now that's an interesting sort of phrase. It essentially means that when one song stops before you play the next one, air a legal ID. It doesn't have to be right at the top of the hour. It just has to be that first normal break nearest the top of the hour. The format is actually very simple. You have the call letters, in this case KRTV, and the city of your service community. It's actually on the broadcast license, so it's sometimes called the City of License. In this case, it's Los Angeles. Therefore, the standard legal ID for that station would be KRTV Los Angeles. Not KRTV in Los Angeles, or serving Los Angeles, or anything like that. KRTV Los Angeles. There are some exceptions to this format, although they aren't industry standard. We'll get to that a little bit later. You can insert things like frequency, 88.9 MHz for an FM station. Or you can insert the ownership and some other things between the call letters and city. Therefore, KRTV 88.9 Los Angeles is technically a legal ID, but it isn't industry standard. A more common structure for a legal ID that I'm hearing more and more of is something like this. KLOS and HD1 Los Angeles. That simply means they're broadcasting digital signals along with their traditional terrestrial signal. Here's something I hear a lot of, too, and it really, I don't know, depresses me. It's just this endless list of call letters and cities. It means that one studio is producing the signal that is carried by sometimes like 10 to 12 stations at a time. This is due directly to deregulation, which means now a corporate entity could own many, many, many more broadcast outlets than they used to be able to own. So a lot of mom-and-pop stations and smaller companies went out of business, and these smaller stations were taken over by big corporate interests. So when deregulation happened, you wound up having less variety on the air, and of course the working conditions were bad because there were less jobs. So I'm not sure that deregulation actually worked very well. In fact, I'm pretty sure it hasn't worked very well. Regardless, both of these are examples of industry standard IDs, and you do that to provide more protection for your station. See, it's one thing to not do it quite exactly like the FCC regulations say, but if you're doing it exactly like all the other people in your market are doing it, the FCC has a very weak case if they just go after you. That's selective prosecution, and that could get the case thrown out of court. So if you are trying to do your ID as per FCC regulations, but it's not quite industry standard, you have to ask yourself, why would you do that? Why would you taunt the FCC like that and risk your station license? Lotteries. What do they mean by lotteries? Well, paying money to win money, or paying money to win some kind of prize. Stations cannot do that. They are banned from holding lotteries. Now, on air, it's hard to do a lottery, because if you were doing it as an on-air contest, it would go through many departments, and one of them would probably say, hey, you can't do that, that's a lottery. It's against FCC regulations. Where a station really is more likely to run into problems is during a live appearance. Because a bar and grill might say, hey, we want to pay your DJs to come here and do a little emceeing and give away prizes and get some promotion on that. Okay, fine. Station says, okay. And they promote, hey, go to Cason Smith's Bar and Grill, and that station is there, and they're going to give away prizes. Okay, so some of the listeners do that. They go there, and all of a sudden they notice there's a $10 fee just to get in. And then once you're in, there's a two-drink minimum, which at my bar and grill would probably run them about $40. That's the way I roll. But the point is, that listener paid $50 based on the strength of the promotion that the station was there and that they might win a prize. Well, they paid $50 and didn't get anything. That's a lottery, and the station could get into a lot of trouble for doing that. Before the Internet came along and all the people who like to perpetrate hoaxes moved to that medium, radio stations often broadcast hoaxes just for fun, just as a form of entertainment. They would report things that weren't true or say things that were false, usually on April 1st. Well, if you're not thinking about it too clearly or too thoroughly, you could create a panic or cause some sort of public disturbance that you didn't intend. A couple of good examples. The Bill Clinton haircut stunt. Bill Clinton was getting some heat for holding up traffic at LAX because he was having a haircut on Air Force One when the plane was on the ground, and planes aren't allowed to take off or land when the president's on Air Force One at an airport. Okay, well, that wasn't really the full story, but a couple of DJs decided to spoof on that by driving their car into the middle of a very busy bridge, I think during rush hour, stopping the car in the middle of the bridge, getting on top of the roof of the car and getting their haircut. Well, certainly that made a lot of headlines, and it got the station a lot of publicity, but not in a good way. Of course, they inconvenienced thousands of commuters and probably violated a lot of vehicle codes by doing that. So I can't say that that stunt ended particularly well for either the station or the DJs who pulled it off. Space shuttle landing was a little more clever. A smaller market had said that due to weather conditions, the space shuttle couldn't land in California or in Florida, so it was going to land in their little municipal airstrip runway, right? And hundreds of people showed up to watch the space shuttle land. Well, you can't blame the audience for not knowing that the municipal runway probably isn't anywhere near long enough to land the space shuttle, nor is it wide enough. You couldn't really blame them on that, but what was really funny was that there was no space shuttle in orbit at the time, so that was a great joke, but I don't think the local authorities and the police who had to tell hundreds of people, listen, I think, you know, someone played a joke on you because it's not going to land here. That must have ticked off a lot of that radio station's audience. So even though it was kind of a funny hoax, a funny joke, I'm not sure if the audience thought it was all that funny. Your reading assignment for this module includes a very famous radio hoax. Be sure you read all about it. Do some extra studying on the internet if you want. It's fascinating. Okay, I'm tired of talking about the feds. Let's talk about the rules your station makes up, that if you don't follow them, you're still going to get fired. Arriving at the station early is a common one, especially if you're on the air. They want to make sure that everything is running smoothly. They also don't want the DJ on before you to panic, even a little bit. They also don't want that DJ to promo that you're coming up next, only for a substitute to show up, and the DJ just plugged that you're coming up next when in actuality, someone else showed up. It makes us look like fools when we do stuff like that. So yeah, the programming department wants you there early, so everybody's okay, they know you're there, we don't have to go looking for you, you may have to re-record something or have a meeting with programming or a salesperson, etc. You're also not supposed to be hanging out in the air studio, entertaining or chatting with the jock who's on the air. Even if the mic's off, even if they're doing a couple of songs, sweeping through a couple of songs, we don't want you in there distracting the DJ. DJs often have to do very monotonous things, and when a live person comes in and starts up a conversation, the focus has a tendency to go to the live person in the studio, not the thousands that are listening to the show. It's that audience that should have the attention of the DJ, not the live person in the studio. Professionals, although they'll be polite about it, will throw you out of the air studio because you're distracting them from their job. Here's a tough one. There's an on-air light usually by the air studio, and it goes on when the DJ's about to talk, but over and over again I see people accidentally walking into that studio right as the light goes on. Well, you need to go through the procedure that prevents that from happening. You'll learn about that procedure in the next module. There's a thing called plugola. It's like payola, but plugola is something that local stations pay a lot of attention to. It's when you mention a business or a service or a product over the air that the station didn't get paid for. Remember, the station makes money off of saying, hey, buy Pepsi, buy Toyota, go to Del Taco, things like that. If you're saying, wow, I just love that Del Taco meal deal that I had, well, it doesn't matter if you paid for that meal deal. It doesn't matter if they gave it to you, because if they gave it to you, that would be more like payola. But you mentioned it, and that's like giving away free advertising. So yeah, that can get you fired. Execute format as prescribed. Yes, yes, formats are a real thing at radio stations, and if you veer from it, you can be fired. I remember a jock who worked at a station I did. He played one song in the middle of the night, one song in the middle of the night that wasn't on the playlist. Program director found out he was fired. Program director's thinking is that it was incredible self-indulgence, and he's right. That DJ is not on the air to pretend like it's his own big boombox to play whatever he wants. He's involved in the business, and he decided instead to make it his own personal plaything. Incredible self-indulgence. Reliability. Sometimes we call that being bulletproof. If you've got a little bit of a sniffle, you're still going to the station. If you get into a car accident, can you still walk? Go into the station. I mean it. It's really kind of crazy. And there's a certain bit of paranoia on the part of the DJ, because the DJ doesn't want to go on vacation and then get fired, or doesn't want to call in sick and be fired. And that happens. It really does. It can be a very difficult business to be in, because you might have the flu, but if you call in a little too early to your airtime, even though they'll find someone to fill in for you, people really get mad at you. People get sick, but wow. Radio stations don't want their DJs to get sick. And I mean it. Other things which are kind of silly. I've received memos about how to do things like this. Not so much me personally, but everybody else. Where to put the coffee cup? Because someone put it too close to the equipment, it spilled, and well, you know what happens from there. Don't read in the air studio. That was an odd one. DJs are supposed to be able to say things, so if you're reading a newspaper, back when we had newspapers, or skimming through the internet, you're coming up with things to say on the air, but some program directors feel that's distracting you from taking phone calls and interacting with the audience. Hey, here's a good one. This is my favorite. What to flush and what not to flush down the toilet. Oh, and that memo didn't stop there. They gave us very explicit instructions of how we were supposed to conduct ourselves in that private stall in the bathroom. I'm not kidding you. Wow. And we own your likeness. This is a good one. It may be true that when you sign an employment contract with a radio station that says, hey, we need to use your likeness to promote the station and its programming. I gotcha. But if you haven't signed that, the idea that they just automatically own it is kind of a grab. And you may have some legal authority to push back on that, except for one thing. Do you have the money? Do you have the time? Do you have the career? By having to say to any future employers, yeah, I've sued the radio stations I've worked with. It's a tough life being a DJ sometimes. So all you gotta do is not break any FCC regulations or break any station rules and you'll be fine. It's just that simple. Thanks for listening.