The report cards are coming out, and by that I mean the radio report cards, the monthly radio ratings trends. Radio ratings work like this: every week, hundreds of people in a given market forget to write down what they listen to until the day it's due, Thursday, when they panic and scribble in whatever they can remember. (Ever wonder why so many promotions take place on Thursday mornings? There's your answer) The diaries are sent back to the ratings company, which sorts and records the answers and releases them in quarterly books, but also releases 3-month rolling averages called "trends." Program directors and sales managers get the numbers and pore over them, applying formulas to extract actual one-month "extrapolations."
I used to be a program director, so I used to get those report cards, which meant that every month was another month towards developing huge, gaping ulcers. The numbers would download into a computer, taking what seemed like forever, and they'd usually be followed by the excuses- the diaries dropped into East L.A., or Compton or Pacoima or some other place where we didn't have any listeners, and no diaries made it to Orange County or the Westside, where we DID have listeners. Or there weren't enough in-tab diaries for men 18-34. Why, look, the Spanish and standards stations went way up and the alternative rock station dropped- there's your proof, boss!
Every single month. My job depended on it. You can only do that for so long before you just can't take it anymore. And, one day a few years ago, fresh off another situation where I had to leave despite adequate ratings because the General Manager really wanted a "big name" programmer (who lasted 6 months), I decided that I wasn't going to take it anymore. And, about 5 years later, I've stuck to that vow.
That's not to say I don't get measured now- I do, daily, weekly, monthly, in subscriber figures and page hits and unique visitors. But the numbers are mine, not the result of other people's work or inactivity, and they've been consistently high enough that- here's a confession- I don't really look at them much anymore. How many readers do I have at All Access and here? Don't rightly know. The salespeople tell me the number's very high. 2, 5, 10, 50 thousand? Don't know. Don't care, as long as it's enough to make a living. So far, it is.
And that's a lucky situation, I know. We all get graded in one way or another our entire lives. There are exams, IQ tests, grades, finals, class rankings, SATs. We get judged on looks, personality, the kind of car we drive, the places we live, the clothes we wear. Life is competition, and I like to compete. But life is also, if we're lucky, a long competition, and having your job depend on whether numbers- numbers you're not certain are even accurate- are favorable to you in a given month, whether this month's numbers beat last month's numbers, over and over, all year, every year, until they decide you're through, well, that, in case anybody cares, is why I don't do that anymore. Every once in a while, I get the feeler, the tentative request- would I be interested in the PD job that just opened at some big radio station? And all I need to do is remember what I felt like right about now, when the L.A. ratings lurched out of the laser printer, to find the right answer.
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