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Larry Gifford Has Experienced Great Radio in the U.S. and Canada

Gifford’s radio career includes stints as a news and sports producer, reporter, anchor, program director, and radio consultant.

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I’m willing to bet there aren’t a ton of radio talkers that got their start informing students about Salisbury steak and Tater Tots. 

“I used to deliver the morning public announcements in school,” said Larry Gifford. “I’d say, ‘Good morning Westerville North, this is Larry Gifford with your lunch menu.” He’d also travel around with his high school band and serve as their announcer.

Gifford’s radio career includes stints as a news and sports producer, reporter, anchor, program director, and radio consultant. These jobs took him across the United States and into Canada. He worked in Dayton, Philadelphia, Los Angeles (twice), Columbus, Bristol, CT, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC. 

As a kid, Gifford’s mom or dad would be there for every baseball, basketball, or football game, swim meet, and soccer match. “They got to see me as I rode the bench, threw a wild pitch, or stood alone on the soccer pitch picking daisies,” Gifford jokes. 

“I think I wrestled for three days in school, was on the swim team. I played baseball for seven years. I think I was hurt more times than I played. In soccer, we were like the Bad News Bears. My big move was to always find a corner and stand there. The best part about playing soccer was the orange slices at halftime.”

Currently living with his family in Canada, Gifford says the work climate is vastly different from the United States. If you’re concerned about your longevity in the crazy radio business, move to Canada. Your career will be golden. “You’re pretty much a lifetime presence in Canada. People don’t move around too much,” said Gifford. 

Newstalk in Canada doesn’t live solely on the right and left politics. Not everything is radical or extreme, and some of it would be considered fluff on U.S. Talk Stations. Gifford calls it lifestyle content. “Canadians are nice people, apologizing for everything,” Gifford said. 

“That said, they’re passionate about their radio and want their stations to be good. There’s no room for yelling, just conversation. They know there are three sides to every story, and they don’t mind if the host has a differing opinion than theirs, as long as they listen to or acknowledge the other positions.”

He hasn’t moved at all since moving to Vancouver, B.C., six years ago. “Folks in radio don’t give much thought to moving market-to-market to climb the ladder as many radio veterans have done in the U.S.” Gifford also notes it is easier to be a ‘star’ in Canada, “Canada is 25 times the size of California, but the country has three million fewer citizens than the state. 

Additionally, Canada has fewer than 1,000 radio stations while there are more than 15,000 in the United States.” That makes it easier to become recognized as a Canadian or National personality than in the U.S.

Gifford says there is a limited appeal in Canada when it comes to sports and sports talk radio. “We have some CFL fans and old-timers like their baseball. The NHL is king, and the NFL does well.” Gifford has worked in markets where there were simultaneously four sports talk show stations. 

“That’s the maximum number, and Los Angeles found that. We try to do multiple stations in Toronto and Vancouver, but there’s just not enough listening to go around.”

He said sports listeners are far more fanatical in the United States than north of the border. “They’re listening all the time,” Gifford explained. “We’ve got a lot of fair-weather fans in Canada. Then again, you always have some people that live and die with the Blue Jays and Raptors.

Before Canada, Gifford was raised in Westerville, Ohio, and is the youngest of four siblings. Gifford admits he was the less coordinated one of the bunch. He intended to major in theater at college, but that didn’t last more than a week.

“They wanted me to buy a dance belt,” Gifford said. A dance belt is basically a jock strap for guys who aren’t playing sports. Goodbye theater, hello radio. “I walked around the corner and discovered the radio station. It was a perfect fit; it was for me.” 

He believes that radio is a ‘theater of the mind.’ “I spent a lot of time in the audio rooms, mostly listening to sound effects, chopping audio on multi-track reel to reel machines with grease pencils and razor blades. I just wanted to see what worlds I could create with audio.”

As a kid, he started listening to a ton of talk radio, which was not always something he enjoyed. “I’d be in the backseat asking my father to turn on some music, but he was deaf in one ear and listening to 610 WTVN or 700 WLW with the other.”

Why are some talk shows more successful than others?

Gifford said respect and chemistry between hosts and the off-air support team are vital. Success depends on it. “When I worked with Mike and Mike in the Morning at ESPN, they probably had the most popular sports radio show in the country,” Gifford said. 

“The key was clearly defining their roles. We helped them to identify distinguishing character traits they could leverage through the show. All hosts should be aware of what makes them unique and find ways to authentically insert themselves into the conversation. We are always getting new listeners, so these traits become quick reference points to explain to the audience what their role is in the show.”

“I like it when both of the hosts believe the same thing and end up “crusading” or pushing against the audience,” Gifford said. 

“I also like hosts that debate each other, add some friction or alternative perspectives. It prompts listeners to share their own opinions too. The best way to get an opinion is to give an opinion. It’s your show; let them react to what you believe to be true. As Colin Cowherd would say, ‘I don’t have to be right. I just need to be interesting.’”

Coaching talent is a bit different from being a Programmer. Gifford believes everybody needs coaching. There are a lot of ways you can get that coaching. “One thing I believe in is improv training for hosts and producers. It’s so important, I factor talent development into my budgets. I’ll bring in a professional improv comedian to do a three-hour workshop.”

“They will create situations that require the talent to think differently and provide tools on how to set up your partner to succeed and how to ‘Yes, and…’ as you build your show collectively. As a host, success isn’t ‘winning the segment,’ it’s when you set up your co-host to be successful.” 

Gifford believes radio is show business. Talkers need structure, tools, or “plays’ they can use to approach topics with intention. It’s ‘planned spontaneity.’ You are still unscripted, but you start the discussion with a vision of how it will end. The conversation will always be more interesting when the whole show unit knows the goal of the segment.

Gifford believes forethought and intention are key for great producers and hosts. “Most believe their first thought on something is totally original,” he said. “It’s not. I teach producers and hosts to write down their first two ideas and throw them away. The third thought will be much more interesting and original.” 

As it relates to interviews, most hosts interject too much. Listeners don’t get as much from the guest as they do with the interviewer. “If the host talks too much, they will take the oxygen out of the room. You must leave room for the guest to share stories and insights by asking lean, neutral, and open-ended questions.”

Sometimes you’re fired; other times, you have to seek change for your own growth. “If you are fired, it doesn’t mean you suck,” assures Gifford. The P.D. is building a lineup. You may be great at what you do, but it doesn’t fit the needs of the station. Each stop on your journey is a learning experience. That’s how I approach it,” Gifford said.  

Gifford was sports director in Philadelphia at an F.M. News Talker, where nobody else knew anything about sports. “I approached everything I did from a fan’s perspective. I was never degrading casual fans. I figured I had sixty seconds to get one nugget, one bit of analysis that people will take with them to lunch to tell their friends.”

He’d go to professional sports training camps all the time. Most of his interviews were before the game. “I’d ask questions that were away from the game, like, “What did you do this summer? How do relax after a loss?” It’s about being entertaining, making it feel like I’m hanging out with them.

There are times when you feel the need for change.

“I went on vacation with my wife and told her something didn’t feel right about my current job. She interviewed and got a job in public relations while we were in Los Angeles. It just happened. I called the station and gave them two weeks’ notice.” Six months later, Gifford was Sports Director at Fox Sports Radio in L.A., and the station he left behind imploded, and everyone was fired. 

Coaching talent was and continues to be a huge part of his job. In keeping with that, Gifford found ways to lure them into the office to chat.

“I’d keep a candy jar on my desk to get them to interact,” Gifford said. 

“I’d find out their favorite candies and fill it up. Guys would come in to grab candy before, during, and after shows. That was a good thing. Over time, I moved the candy further and further from the door. They take a piece of candy, say hello. And we begin talking about their show.

Gifford said he always tries to offer coaching and criticism in private, away from the office. If we were on the road, I’d talk with Dan Patrick about some issues we were having. With Colin Cowherd, I’d meet up with him for dinner and go over the show.”

Gifford thinks former athletes are easy to coach as they’re used to following directions, “They’ve been told what to do their whole life. They’ve watched game tapes, practiced plays, and studied film.” 

“Usually, if you explain why you want them to do something, they apply it almost immediately. They just want to know what’s working and how they can get better,” Gifford also says higher-profile talent are typically easier to coach because it’s a conversation about maximizing their talent and strengths and less about development. 

Of course, some talents are resistant and don’t like it, and some programmers over-analyze everything. “My first P.D. gig, I butted heads with my afternoon host,” Gifford said. “I regret it. Looking back, I was kind of a jerk. I thought my job was to “manage” and “direct,” and I should have been a coach building a championship team.”

In smaller markets, some of the talents are new and feel embarrassed or intimidated when faced with feedback, especially when it is critical of their on-air performance. 

“There’s something hosts need to know when they think about radio P.D.s. Our opinions are just that, our opinions. Right or wrong, our job is to make decisions on what’s going to help the station win and what’s impeding its success. While you’re working for a particular P.D., you either have to adhere to their way of doing business or find another situation.”

When Gifford was a consultant, many talents would hire him directly because they weren’t getting any constructive feedback from their manager. “There weren’t a whole lot of programmers that had time or even had the training to coach talent. At one point, I was coaching five top radio morning shows in the U.S.”

Gifford’s superpower is his networking ability. “If I see someone that might thrive in another market, I’ll bring it up to a friend in the business. I like to observe and fit puzzles together.”

Part of that superpower includes being a good judge of talent and potential. “Tony Romo is very good at what he does. When I watch him, I learn things. I love when he predicts things. I like that he’s taking chances on the air; he sees the whole field. He makes me a better fan.”

You may consider Romo a modern-day John Madden. Gifford doesn’t see it that way. “I think Romo has more substance than Madden. Don’t get me wrong, in Madden’s prime, he was the best, but towards the end, there was a lot of blusters and filling time.”

“He became a bit of a caricature of himself. We liked listening to Madden because there are certain announcers from our youth that get us excited about the game and remind us of how thrilling it was when we first discovered the joy of sports. I was lucky to be in L.A. while we still had Chick Hearn doing the Lakers and Vin Scully doing the Dodgers. It was the best. It couldn’t have been any better.”

Those guys could make reading the hot lunch menu sound pretty good too. 

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1 Comment

  1. Jim Cutler

    June 6, 2022 at 7:07 pm

    Larry is one of the very best.

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BNM Writers

It’s Time for News Radio to Clean Its Clock

With radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already.

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News radio is an interruptive format that swiftly moves listeners from one informative topic to
the next but over the years we’ve gotten bogged down with an insufferable amount of clutter: too many commercials, endless promos and teases, and pointless production pieces. All of it
interrupts the flow and cuts into the interesting information you promise to provide.

Let’s clean the clutter, starting with the anachronistic basis for it all: your hourly format clock.

I’ve never understood why radio stations root themselves to the clock. The show starts at the top of the hour and you bury your boring features at the end. Why? Why should the top of the hour be considered the beginning of anything? It’s not how people live their lives. Radio isn’t like TV where shows start at specific times. Hell, TV isn’t that way anymore.

But with news radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already. This is especially true with morning shows, where simple logic would suggest that people trying to get to work by the top of an hour begin listening at various times before then.

Who even owns a clock radio anymore?

The 21st century is nonstop. There is no daily news cycle, no beginning or end to anything but
news radio programmers still think of time in divisions of hours, minutes, and seconds. We still draw empty circles depicting analog clocks to plot hourly radio formats.

On news and talk stations, the top of the hour almost always begins with the hourly network
report. It’s the biggest of big-time radio, steeped in tradition, professionally detached, global. In other words, it sounds nothing like your radio station in your unique market and it contains the least interesting content you have to offer.

We cling to the networks at the top of the hour for their prestige, because that’s just how we’ve always done it. Any national or international stories of real interest to Americans, the latest Trump-Biden court decisions, for example, will be well covered in talk shows and you’ll probably want to drop it into your local programming, too. How about a one-minute segment twice an hour, 60 seconds of just the big national and world stuff, in 10-15-second boil-in-the-bag headline segments? I’m just spitballing here. You’re the programmer.

In my heretical news radio mind, the networks do great journalism but they still sound flat,
stuffy, and old-fashioned. They don’t sound like anything else on my station. I’ll dump the top-of-the-hour five minutes and cherry-pick the network sound bites. We’ll deliver them ourselves.

While I’m carving up your format and trying to get you thinking outside the box, do you need
traffic reports every ten minutes? Or, at all? Heresy, I know. Catch your breath and read on.

When we had real-time airborne local reporters telling us what they were looking at it had a gee-whiz factor and the information mattered because it was live, local first-hand reporting. I could imagine the scene as it was being described. Now we have reporters in booths looking at
computer feeds and doing shotgun-style traffic reports for multiple cities. Words without
pictures.

I knew an L.A.-based traffic reporter who did reports for Salt Lake City though she had never even been there. These so-called “real-time traffic” reports are nearly always recorded and delayed for playback. Does this practice serve any purpose at all except to deceive listeners?

Not incidentally, traffic reports are a prime target for AI exploitation. How difficult can it be to
attach state and local transportation agency traffic data to AI voice-to-speech generators? For all I know this is already being done. You can argue it’s cost-efficient but as a longtime morning news host/anchor/personality, I despise it. One of the greatest assets to any morning news team is the interaction between news and traffic people.

When Amy Chodroff and I started working together at KLIF a dozen years ago we had that human contact with remarkable radio veteran Bill Jackson doing traffic from an adjoining studio. Bill wasn’t just a voice, he was a talented news radio veteran and a valued part of our show. He was so good the company, Cumulus, put two more stations on his plate, ripping a valued team member away from us.

As hosts, Amy and I had to assume Bill wasn’t able to listen to the show anymore because he
was too busy gathering and preparing his reports for the other stations. Then he was shipped out of the building to do his work from home which made his insights and witty exchanges
impossible. We couldn’t talk to each other off the air. We couldn’t exchange glances, smiles, and hand signals or bump into each other in the hall. Our show suffered and our audience became a bit more detached.

Bill Jackson, real name Dale Kuckelburg, was also significantly detached from his career.

But I digress. The biggest problem with traffic reports is the shotgun approach I mentioned,
telling everybody in our listening area driving to their unique destinations how traffic is snarled thirty miles away. Good god, we have apps in our cars that do a much better job in real time.

How about the weather? What the hell, we’re swinging the ax here. Let’s be realistic.

There isn’t a day in my life that I don’t wake up with a fair idea of what weather I should expect. I don’t need someone on the radio telling me to carry an umbrella. If it’s iffy the immediate and highly local details are now available at the touch of an app. When the weather becomes of critical and life-threatening importance it’s a major news story and that’s when local radio news shines, making it the center of our continuous attention, not just a regular feature at scheduled times.

It’s your radio station, do what you think is best. I’m only suggesting that you might want to
reevaluate all the things we’ve all taken for granted for far too long.

News radio has always been an interruptive format. We promise listeners “the news you need” in the time it takes them to drive to work. They understand that they’ll receive useful and
interesting content in exchange for frequent subject switching and sponsorships. The great news stations know how to capitalize on that agreement but too many have sold their souls to
commercial clutter that chokes a news team’s ability to serve the promised meal.

As if 22 minutes of inane and repetitive commercials per hour aren’t bad enough programmers, struggling to do their work in a hurricane of increasing spotloads, add to the clutter with recorded promos that simply beseech listeners to keep listening while offering nothing of substance. Meanwhile, the same programmers tell talent to tease, tease, tease the subjects they’ll talk about six, twelve, and twenty minutes from now.

I know the business reality. Radio — especially news radio — is struggling to meet the profit insistence of corporate boards and the overhead needs of staying afloat locally. But at some point, we must answer the question, who do we have to serve first, our clients or our audience?

Station managers and their corporate masters have to stop issuing profit mandates without
offering programmers the opportunity to do their jobs, to provide more valuable content while
limiting commercial minutes, sponsorship rhetoric, and eliminating distracting bells and
whistles.

Clean your clock. Stop filling empty circles with stuff that made sense 50 years ago but is merely clutter today.

The only way to think outside the box is to get rid of the box.

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BNM Writers

AM 680 WCBM Leapt Into Action As the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapsed

Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners.

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As Americans woke up to a cargo ship hitting Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge Tuesday morning, the crew at AM 680 WCBM was already hard at work gathering the facts.

Just before 1:30 AM, a cargo ship lost power exiting the Baltimore harbor, striking a support beam that toppled the 47-year-old structure. In the wreckage, six people working on the bridge died, while drivers were rescued from the rubble in the chilly waters of the Curtis Bay.

The AM news/talk station — which celebrated its 100th anniversary Thursday — went wall-to-wall breaking coverage, something most outlets now avoid because of budget concerns. 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director Sean Casey told BNM in an email exchange how his crews handled the breaking news.


BNM: When did you guys hit the air with breaking news coverage?

Sean Casey: We first broke in with updates at 3:30 AM, approximately two hours after the bridge collapsed. Breaking news updates continued every half hour until 6 AM.”

BNM: How did you coordinate coverage in those moments?

SC: Full wall-to-wall coverage started at 6 AM and included full newscasts as well as interviews with state and local law enforcement agencies, eyewitness call-ins, and our national news partners. Our producer made call-outs and our news department shifted to full-blown local coverage.

BNM: How much experience did you have in putting together coverage of an event like that on the fly?

SC: Having been on the air during 9/11, I used the same formula that listeners want to know: Who, What, When, and Where? The why will come later.

BNM: How does your coverage show the importance of both local radio and AM radio?

SC: In times of breaking news events that impact our listeners, local AM radio stations are more in tune with the local listening audience. Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners. We also know the local players and officials and can get immediate reaction.

The talk component of our news/talk format offers listeners a chance to vent, share, and communicate with each other in good and bad times. This is why AM radio is still relevant. In some emergencies you can lose your cell service or have too weak of a signal, AM radio remains viable for in-car listening and at home with battery backup.

The AM 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director concluded his thoughts by noting the importance of a team effort, not only in coverage of breaking news events but also in operating a successful station and business as a whole.

“One of the biggest concerns we have is budgetary. More and more AM stations are abandoning the format because of its expense. Very few can afford a live and local news staff and show hosts,” Casey told Barrett News Media.

“Now more than ever, it’s vital that there be synergy between ownership, sales, and programming to maximize ratings and revenue so that we can continue to deliver vital information to listeners in our market.”

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BNM Writers

News is the Only Thing Missing From Election Coverage

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected?

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The first thought I had when I heard NBC had hired Ronna McDaniel as a commentator for $300,000 a year was to wonder how many actual journalists they could have hired for that money. Then, I recalled that NBC had laid off dozens of news staffers just a few months ago. Then, I remembered that I had just recently written a column decrying news organizations throwing pretty much anybody on the air as a “pundit” and this….

This was worse. It’s one thing to grab some rando who happened to be a minor functionary for the Executive Branch. It’s another to hire someone whose job was to promote election denialism and pretend that her opinion is something valuable for viewers. And, yes, it’s just as ridiculous when news organizations hire former presidential press secretaries (that’s you, Jen Psaki and Sean Spicer), their very jobs were to spin everything in their bosses’ favor and now you’re going to pay them big salaries for, um, what? Because they “have a name” or you’re afraid someone else will snap them up? Why them?

The McDaniel deal lasted five days, one completely unilluminating interview, and one unexpected Chuck Todd spine-growing outburst, so it’ll all blow over soon enough. The problem is, though, the part about having fired several news staffers, and what it means in an election year on both the national and local levels. If you have the money to hire an alleged pundit – any alleged pundit – you have the money to hire reporters, and I don’t mean anchors or opinion show hosts.

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected? Who’s probing Project 2025 and why isn’t it front-page, first-segment news? Who’s pressing the Biden administration on Gaza? Is anyone reporting on the candidates’ record on climate change?

Beyond prescription drug prices, is anyone digging into the broken healthcare system and demanding answers from the candidates about what they’ll do to fix it (and not letting Trump get away with “I’ll have a better plan, a beautiful plan” without a single specific detail, like they did in 2016)? Why didn’t anyone focus on, for example, the GOP candidate for governor of North Carolina and his incendiary past comments well before the primary?

Pundits are not going to do the legwork on the issues; they’ll just talk about swing states while John King and Steve Kornacki point at their touchscreen maps. We need reporting on the things that matter (and can affect that horse race, even if most people have made up their minds). It shouldn’t just be Pro Publica and scattered independent journalists doing the dirty work.

Honestly, I don’t want to hear the complaints about the quality of the candidates or how this is a rerun or any of that. (We’ll leave that to The New York Times.) We are a horribly underinformed electorate and we got the horse race we deserve. It might just be idealists like me who think that, just maybe, the news media can play a role in educating the public and bursting the bubbles and echo chambers. This country has survived and prospered for a few centuries with the press shining a light on injustice and corruption.

Now, when we need that most, they’re more concerned with what they think will bring them ratings and money (although someone will have to explain to me who thought having Ronna McDaniel as a paid commentator would draw a single viewer to NBC).

Here’s a thought: Don’t lay off reporters, especially in an election year.  Assign them to dig deep on issues that matter to the voters.

Let the pundits talk about that.

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