So imagine my surprise when controversy hit the afternoon drive time job at Virginia's big AM station, and I got to thinking about what a great job it would be.

    ***

    Content, to use the web term, can come in lots of flavors. Production-wise, this radio job is a bear -- three hours a day five days a week is a lot of work and, worse still, radio is a notoriously cheap industry. Counting up WRVA's show, after news and traffic and canned content, there's 26 minutes per hour that's up to the host. At 200 words a minute, that's 5,600 words an hour or roughly 16,000 words a day, or even more roughly, it's like writing a novel every week.

    Which sure explains why it's a job for two.

    Now there's one other thing about radio in general before getting into the content questions in specific -- if you buy a $500 stereo, you're paying $2 for the AM. AM stereo has been possible for more than a decade, and it's never caught on. It's not too much hyperbole to say the entire AM band might have withered and died if there hadn't been a grassroots phenomena named Limbaugh.

    Jim Jacobs, the WRVA afternoon fella canned Kremlin-style, took a very lackadaisical approach to his work -- open up the phone lines and let the callers chart the course. This works, of course, as long as you have interesting callers.

    Now realize, of course, what you consider interesting must be filtered by the fact that WRVA is the legacy station in town, if I have the radio buzzword correct. It means the biggest danger with the audience is it literally dying off.

    Stations in this situation need to follow the Jay Leno example -- have stuff that's funny to both you and your mom. That's especially true in this town. This is a radio market that saw an effective advertiser boycott drive out Howard Stern. This is a market where soft-shock Don and Mike (a marvelous show syndicated from Washington, D.C.) lasted two weeks. In what was one of the best afternoons of radio I ever heard, Don and Mike called up the Richmond station managers and demanded -- on the air, live -- to be canned from the station. It was an absolute riot.

    So why would anyone want to get into that miserable radio market situation? Because it's a goddamned great job. To sum it up in a sentence: We pay attention because you don't have time to.

    ***

    Time for both a disclaimer and an explanation. Half of the new WRVA afternoon team is Pam Overstreet, a long-time buddy of mine. We worked together at UPI, and as years have gone by, we've tried to get together monthly or so to swap laughs and blow our brains out on cheap champagne.

    We haven't had much time for story swapping since her promotion to afternoon drive. She's been both sick and swamped, always a bad combination, but her predicament -- the other guy is canned and she and Tim Farley were on the next day -- got me to thinking. What would I want to listen to? How would I fill the air? What kind of content mix do you need to attract young and old alike? And most of all, how do you pull it off when you have absolutely no preparation time?

    Or to put it in a sentence -- the same sentence I use to open web development meetings -- what do you want to say and how do you want to say it?

    ***

    I should say upfront, that this is more of an academic exercise than a plea for a job. I have a face for radio and a voice for silent movies, I have no experience at running a board, and I have a nice web consulting business going when I'm not wasting time on this hobby magazine. But I think for a hobby, and there's some thinking somebody should apply to AM talk.

    To no one's surprise, I'd cross-polinate the afternoon show and the station's web site. Advertisers would like the extra exposure, and you could sell all kinds of stuff, from mugs to bumper stickers, cheaply via the web. I'd do all kinds of content and promotion geared toward getting geezers wired. The web is inviting and fun, but introducing elderly newbies must be handled with great respect and care. WRVA, as a brand, is what needs to be sold. And its product is news you can use. That most certainly translates to the web as a way to grow the audience.

    More directly, however, on the radio side, I'd want to steal tape snippets from everywhere. That would be a huge component of filling the sheer 5,600-word-per hour quotient -- snippets from Politically Incorrect, sitcoms, newscasts. Pop a topic, work the phones for instant input, move on to something else. Keep it snappy.

    I'd be pounding home the point -- "here's what you missed on ..." and outpointing articles from every magazine under the sun. Every Tuesday would be the tabloid update. World War Two bomber found on moon.

    I'd try to be interesting so listeners can be interesting. Everything you need to know to be urbane around the water cooler. And I wouldn't be afraid of music. The fidelity thing is overrated. AM isn't competing with FM for sound quality. It's competing against the web, and the technology there is still relatively crude.

    Finally, I'd encourage the station to think beyond keeping an existing audience and find ways to entice new listeners. There are plenty of ways of packaging information, from the web to newspapers to radio shows, and the trick is designing the mix. Everything else -- like once you make it good, how to make it interesting and funny -- everything else is just a detail. And hard work.

   ***