Radio's Finest Hour

Wow. An actual historical reference. Perhaps I'm a tad more erudite then first appearances would indicate.

No, not really. Tomorrow I'm shooting out "Suck And Win," a gas promotion of historic proportions.

For the U.S. stations (the Canadians, Australians, Romanians and Namibians can snicker quietly to themselves), our economy is obviously in turmoil. On Saturday myself, Mrs. Paige and The Paigettes went to a Booya.

This is a decidedly Minnesota thing. Usually at a church or a VFW or legion hall, it's a mass making-of-the-soup with families and individuals adding their own batches to an enormous steaming cauldron of the stuff. Usually concocted from stuff you have from your summer garden. And it's amazing. People bring ice cream buckets and other receptacles and take home gallons and gallons to freeze for the winter. The event was supposed to go until 6 p. They were cleaned out by 11 a. We then went to a church where they were doing a sale of used winter clothing for kids. Jackets and stuff for a couple of bucks. We were dropping off some of the girls' old baby snow gear.

The tables were bare. Picked clean. With people waiting for donations to be dropped off.

My point? There are going to be dozens and dozens of opportunities for your station to so do something tangible, compelling and local. These opportunities will not be brought to you on a plate by some monstrous national charity. They'll be buried in the local section of the daily paper.

In fact, that's a great exercise that I usually do with the morning shows when I'm on the road. Everyone gets a copy of that day's paper and has 10 minutes to find something that they could have done something with. We're so trained to only do things that are brought to us, that it stifles our journalistic instincts to hunt, find and help.

Kate at Mix in Boise spotted something in the paper a couple of months ago; the local food shelf was facing unprecedented use and unprecedented shortages. The station jumped on it the next day and collected tens of thousands of pounds of canned food.

Clients can always be a part of your campaigns. Cities 97 in the Twin Cities does an annual coat drive with Subway.

Following 9/11 and Katrina, a lot of young programmers realized that radio can be more then "The Secret Sound" and "The Incredible Free Money Birthday Game." It really revitalized and invigorated them. But then everyone went back to pabulum-spewing jukeboxes and most totally missed Ike.

We can do so much more then just do "Family Four-Packs." We can serve the community. And your community needs you. Now. Desperately. An iPod can't do that. The guy with the cheekbones from L.A. can't do it. When times get better, and they will, you will have created ... wait for it ... fans.

Radio used to have fans. Now we're content to have increasingly fickle listeners. This can be a second Golden Era for us. Truly. Look for things and ways to help your listeners. And a reminder: that's the reason you're licensed. Not to bury a program at 6 a on Sunday morning.

Once you find your causes, then what?

A campaign should fit the personality of the station. If running a PSA and telling people to drop cans in barrels is your stationality ... yeesh. The Dogs at Wild in SFO once spotted a story in the paper about a kid whose family needed $10,000 to get to Houston for cancer treatment. In three hours they'd raised the pledges and at 11 a, JV swam to Alcatraz.

As they say in Minnesota, "Seize The Carp."