On Radio: The Next Take, Through an Old Lens

Sometimes I stumble across a story on the Internet that really takes me back in time.

It happened again a few weeks ago, when I discovered a news story that indicated powerhouse news/talk radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh would collaborate with the University of Pittsburgh to have students from the college take over the weekday overnight radio programming on KDKA.

If you know your radio history, that’s a pretty big deal.

KDKA is a station with an illustrious past – thought by many to be the first commercially licensed radio station in America, signing on the air 103 years ago.

It’s a big station with a big signal. On clear nights, you can listen to KDKA on your AM radio from as far away as St. Louis, which I often did as a kid.

The report indicated a show called KDKA Next Take, with students behind the microphone, would run from 1am-til-5am each weekday morning.

You know, the “graveyard shift.”

It sounded intriguing. But while the news stories I read about Next Take seemed to paint it as a novel, inventive approach to radio programming, it really wasn’t.

Almost 50 years ago, some young folks in St. Louis were doing it, and I must say, doing it better.

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In Summer 1978 I had just graduated high school and I had my mind all made up. I was going to be a journalist!

With neither the looks for TV nor the attention to detail for newspaper work, I decided I would pursue a career in the then-thriving world of radio news. And the acclaimed two-year journalism program at the University of Missouri-Columbia – only a two-hour drive from my hometown of St. Louis – would be just the ticket.

But before I could enroll in J School, I needed to get all of my college credits in order, and attending the University’s branch campus in St. Louis represented the perfect plan. I could stay home, save some money and build up my credits before moving to mid-Missouri.

Like all of the University of Missouri campuses, “UMSL” as we called it back then, had its own radio station. And it was a biggie, with 100,000 watts of FM power behind it.

It could be heard just about everywhere in the St. Louis area.

Nowadays it goes by the name St. Louis Public Radio – for marketing purposes, I suppose. It’s not nearly as directly linked to the University as it was in 1978 – it’s not even located on campus anymore. Back then it was simply branded by its call letters and frequency: 90.7, KWMU.

It was then, as it is now, a National Public Radio (NPR) member station. But KWMU didn’t carry much NPR programming then. It was mostly a classical music station.

Except on weekends, overnight.

Again, that “graveyard shift.”

In the early morning hours each Saturday, Sunday and Monday, university students – most of whom had limited to no broadcast training - would take over this radio station that could be heard, theoretically, by more than two million sets of ears.

We were the KWMU Student Staff, and we offered a mostly music format that mixed jazz and some rock into a genre called Fusion.

We also produced hourly news and sports casts and, on Sunday nights, a one-hour news program titled Sunday Magazine.

That’s where I enter the picture.

I’d wanted to be on the radio since I was about 12 years old.

I’d grown up listening to talented broadcasters like Dan Kelly, Jack Buck, Bob Costas and Bob Hardy on KMOX St. Louis, Perry Marshall on KDKA, Pat Sheridan on WMAQ in Chicago and Herb Jepko on KSL in Salt Lake City.

So I jumped at the chance to join the KWMU Student Staff and contribute to Sunday Magazine.

With a big broadcast signal as our foundation and a big city as our playground, we in the KWMU Student News Department had a field day.

My tenure in the Student Newsroom coincided with some major news stories of the day. Among them, the oil crisis of 1979, something that led to long lines at gas stations and gave us student reporters plenty of opportunities to fire up our microphones and tape recorders to interview frustrated motorists waiting to fill up.

We hosted a listener call-in show on a hot local topic of the day – the desegregation of the St. Louis Public Schools.

In August 1979, then-President Jimmy Carter and his family took a Mississippi River cruise to promote his energy policy. It concluded in St. Louis and we were there covering it.

I interviewed then-Congressman Dick Gephardt, getting him to admit women should be eligible for the draft. I fed the story to the AP wire service, which published it. I’m sure he wasn’t too happy about that.

We did many other newsmaker interviews too.

Our sports guys were fearless. We were broadcasting on a big station so we could easily make the case for obtaining press passes for St. Louis Blues, and baseball and football Cardinals games. Our sports guys had no hesitation as they confidently sauntered down to the field and into locker rooms to interview the top pro athletes and coaches of the day.

The end product was, in all honesty, probably a mix of programming that ran the gamut from decent, to pretty bad.

But we were experimenting, learning and improving, and the experience provided a foundation that led many of us to pursue journalism as a career. I went on to do about 20 years in radio news. Joe Holleman, the talented reporter and columnist from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, got his start on the Student Staff. So did Frank Cusumano, the sports director at KSDK-TV in St. Louis.

Romondo Davis, whose picture you see above, parlayed his Student Staff experience into professional jobs at KWMU, then in local TV and radio, before becoming a software developer and website creator.

The Student Staff experience, says Davis, “not only helped me prepare for my career, it launched it.”

Which leads me back to Pittsburgh.

A sampling of KDKA Next Take over the last few weeks would have to be classified as disappointing - to put it mildly - to anyone who cut their teeth in the world of college radio.

The program offers none of the person-on-the street features, newsmaker interviews or audio-rich production pieces we were proud to put on the air at KWMU.

Instead, in its current form, Next Take features a couple of students latching onto a wire service or newspaper story, reading it on air (in a rather monotone fashion, with lots of inexcusable stumbles), then offering their opinions on the subject for 10 minutes, before moving on to the next segment, which repeats the process.

In a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story about the effort earlier this year, the KDKA senior VP who crafted the initiative essentially said – paraphrasing here -- the aim was to give younger folks a greater opportunity to weigh in and be heard on world, national and local issues. He also pointed to the effort as a way to develop future radio talent.

I’m not so sure it does either.

I’m not blaming the students here. They’re young, as we were back in the 1970’s. Lord knows there was plenty of cringeworthy stuff that poured out of my piehole back then (and for that matter, on quite a few occasions today too.)

The problem appears to be in the format and direction – determined by the university and the radio station.

Where are the newsmaker interviews that would help these young people hone their interviewing skills? Why aren’t they going out into the field to experience the world, rather than sitting in a studio, just opining about a news story?

Where's the editing?

A three-major-league sports town, Pittsburgh hosts dozens of big-league players, coaches, writers and broadcasters over the course of the year. Wouldn’t interviews with some of them be compelling?

Why not take advantage of KDKA’s legendary brand to score a few interviews with well-known, or not-so-well-known, entertainers? Why not lean upon the youthful lens of the students themselves to bring to the table voices that might be flying under the radar in the community?

Again, this isn’t on the students. This is more about the format established by the station and the university.

Where’s the creativity? Where’s the hustle? Where’s the experimentation? Where’s the excitement?

Unfortunately, it’s not on the air during Next Take.

The good news is that the KDKA effort is still in its infancy. There’s still time to right the ship.

If anybody involved in this effort is reading this, hey, give me a call. By this time next year, I’ll be a retired dude. I’ve not spent much time in Pittsburgh, but it looks like a nice city – maybe you can bring me in to try to help.

Maybe together we can help Next Take jump back to a “previous take” – and the way we were doing it 50 years ago in St. Louis.

As always, thanks for reading.