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In a Video Era, There’s No Hiding a Face for Radio
At KLSX in Los Angeles, a segment with Danny Bonaduce, second from right, is filmed for the station's Web site.
By RICHARD SIKLOS
Ted Stryker, a D.J. at KROQ in Los Angeles, considers it a perk of the job to wear shorts and T-shirts to work. But last Sunday as he dressed for the Grammy Awards, he pulled out his best blazer and a flashy belt buckle, knowing three video cameras would stream live coverage of his show to the Web sites of 147 CBS radio stations.
“What’s great about radio is no one knows what you’re wearing,” Mr. Stryker said by telephone as he made his way through the throng at the Grammys. “I wanted to make myself a little bit more presentable.”
Mr. Stryker, who has done some TV work in the past, said that to create his best radio voice, he often must contort his face in embarrassing ways.
“It’s so different doing radio compared to TV,” he said. “Who knows what faces I make when I’m talking on the radio? I hope I’m not making the same faces today.”
The nation’s commercial radio stations have seen the future, and it is in, of all things, video. As a result, the stereotype of a silken-voiced jockey like Mr. Stryker, slumped and disheveled in the studio chair, may never be the same.
Across the country, radio stations are putting up video fare on their Web sites, ranging from a simple camera in the broadcast booth to exclusive coverage of events like the Super Bowl to music videos, news clips and Web-only musical performances.
“This is no longer the age of ‘having a face for radio,’ ” said Dianna Jason, the senior director of marketing and promotions at Power 106, a Los Angeles hip-hop radio station. “This is a visual medium now.”
Audiences in Los Angeles, for example, will be able to tune in today to Power 106 for an annual Valentine’s Day event called “Trash Your Ex,” in which jilted listeners are invited to put mementos from past loves in a giant wood chipper — and to let it whir while the disc jockey, Big Boy, urges them on. And for the first time, audiences everywhere will be able to watch streamed video of the event, to be held in a parking lot in Pasadena, on the Web site power106.com.
Whereas video was once said to have killed the radio star — according to the pop song by the Buggles that was the first video shown on MTV in 1981 — it is now emerging as an unlikely savior for an industry facing an array of challenges.
In the age of YouTube and the radio talk show hosts Howard Stern and Don Imus as television stalwarts, this might not seem all that remarkable, except that the radio industry has been singularly tardy in embracing the interactive age.
But now many of the largest radio companies are scrambling to stay relevant as their listeners’ attention is drawn in many directions — iPods, cellphones, satellite radio and various streaming and downloading musical offerings from companies like Yahoo and AOL. “A lot of our stations are starting to embrace video and generate new revenue streams,” said Joel Hollander, the chief executive of CBS Radio, the nation’s second-largest radio company, after Clear Channel Communications. “I hope video helps the radio star. Maybe radio will save the video star?”
More than 90 percent of Americans still listen to traditional radio. But the amount of time they tune in over the course of a week has fallen by 14 percent over the last decade, according to Arbitron ratings.
Industry revenues are flat, and the Bloomberg index of radio stocks is down some 40 percent over the last three years.
Reflecting the investor malaise, a group of private equity companies has proposed buying Clear Channel Communications and taking it private.
Video now makes up only a tiny fraction of the $20 billion a year that radio generates in advertising sales. But it could represent a much-needed new source of growth in a rapidly expanding online video market that everyone from Google to newspapers to broadcast television wants to be in.
Radio executives and personalities say their video efforts will be different because they capitalize on radio’s traditional strength in using on-air personalities and local events to draw in listeners.
Taking a cue from YouTube and the rise of user-generated video, a polished, TV-quality product is often not the objective. Another Power 106 video effort featured a staff member, dressed like a shrub, jumping out of a planter to surprise visitors to the station’s office on Halloween.
An alternative rock station, 94.7 FM in Portland, Ore., last fall began a “Bootleg Video” series in which a listener is lent a video camera to record a clip of a local performance by a hot band like the Killers for the Web site. “Sometimes it’s a little shaky, but we want that,” said Mark Hamilton, manager at the station, which is owned by Entercom Communications. “We don’t want it to be perfect.”
The Web site for the radio station WFLZ in Tampa, Fla., features a video series called “Naked,” on the lives of its hosts away from the microphone. “I’m not very pretty today,” one of the station’s disc jockeys, Ashlee Reid, says sheepishly on the latest installment as she arrives at work and realizes the cameras are rolling before bantering with a colleague about chest hair.
Ms. Reid, who is 26, said being videotaped was odd, but in the year that the radio station has been producing monthly installments of the show for downloading, it has not yet caused her and her colleagues to alter their hair or wardrobe. “Maybe we should, but we don’t,” she said.
Similarly, producers for Adam Carolla, the Los Angeles morning host whose program is carried on many CBS Radio stations, regularly record vérité clips featuring Mr. Carolla and a co-host, Danny Bonaduce, for posting on the Web.
The nation’s biggest radio companies are also doing slicker productions, like Mr. Stryker’s Grammy show, that try to capitalize on their size and reach.
Clear Channel, whose Internet efforts are led by Evan Harrison, an executive vice president, has elaborate video programming available on the Web sites of its 1,200 stations, including Tampa’s 933FLZ.com, where “Naked” is featured. Clear Channel has made some 6,000 music videos available for downloading online, but has also been producing original video content that individual stations can feature on their Web sites and disc jockeys can promote on the air.
These programs include “Stripped,” a series of taped performances by artists like Young Jeezy and Nelly Furtado that are often acoustic or done in small clubs. The company has also been producing “Video 6 Pack” in which bands like Fall Out Boy appear as hosts of their own program and play videos they like.
According to comScore Media Metrix, Clear Channel sites ranked sixth in December among music Web sites, behind MTV, AOL, Yahoo, MySpace and Artistdirect.
Radio industry executives stressed that, so far, their video efforts could be considered experimental and only one facet — along with blogs and audio podcasts and a nascent service called HD Radio — of how the industry is adapting for the Internet age.
“People are either going to have to get with the program or get lost,” Fatman Scoop, a disc jockey on Hot 97, an FM station in New York, said in an interview. “People don’t sit in front of a radio for three hours like they used to. If they don’t hear a song they like, they go to the Internet.”
In his case, what listeners will find on hot97.com is a weekly video show about relationships that Fatman produces with his wife, Shanda Freeman, called “Man and Wife.” Introduced in November, the shows are usually taped in the couple’s bedroom in New Jersey and run several minutes each.
Fatman, who prefers to be known by his radio name, said that the show was entirely owned by him but that his bosses at Hot 97 — owned by Emmis Communications, like Power 106 — recognize that raising the visibility of its personalities on the Internet could only be good for attracting listeners and advertisers.
“What we’re trying to do is reach the listener in any way possible,” he said. “If somebody sees that you’re on ‘Man and Wife’ on hot97.com, they will listen to your show.”
Radio and video may be a more natural fit than expected. In his book “Understanding Media,” the cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote that “the effect of radio is visual.”
Certainly, Howard Stern and Don Imus have had video extensions of their radio shows for years. Even Mr. Stern’s new employer, Sirius Satellite Radio, is planning a move in that direction. The company has said it plans to start beaming a video service of children’s programming to play on screens in the cars of Sirius subscribers sometime this year.
For now, most of the new video ventures originating from radio are just starting to generate revenue. Mr. Hollander of CBS Radio and Mr. Harrison of Clear Channel declined to say how much new revenue they were attracting.
Mr. Hollander said plans were in the works at the CBS Corporation, which is better known for its television network, to begin integrating some of its video programming into the radio division’s Web sites. The Web site for WSCR, the company’s sports radio station in Chicago, featured live video from its pregame coverage of the Super Bowl in Miami. Earlier, the station streamed coverage of its 15th-anniversary celebration.
Mitch Rosen, the station manager for WSCR, said the video efforts attracted advertisements from 8 to 10 businesses that normally thought of the station as only an audio outlet. To add some visual flair to the anniversary broadcast, Mr. Rosen put two of the station’s popular hosts in tuxedos. “They did get some ribbing from listeners,” Mr. Rosen said.
For crossover advocates like Fatman, however, audio and video will soon be interchangeable in the D.J.’s repertory. “That’s where it’s going,” he said. “It’s getting to the point where you’re going to have to be good at both.”
