onds before the feed. This is the input right here. Everything is labeled. What you need to do is make sure your last song ends just before the net comes in. A little dumb math is required. If the song is 3 minutes long, you get it rolling at 56:45 so you can do the lead in––a time and temp check and intro. You’ll get the hang of it quickly.” Hitting the net feed was the one thing that caused Jake concern. It was not something he had practiced at school, since they had no setup to do so. “So you have to back time the other songs, too, in order to start the last song so you’re not cutting into it?” asked Jake. “Yup, you have to work it a little. You don’t want to run a vocal into the news. That sounds like crap. At the same time, you don’t want to run out of record before the tone, because you end up with dead air. And that’s the worst. I’ve never ever had dead air on my show. That’s radio’s mortal sin. Here, watch me,” said Will, as he spun the last record and hit the network feed perfectly. “That’s how you do it, Jake. Nice and tight. You want to keep it clean. Sounds shitty when you miss it.”
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*
Ten minutes before Jake was scheduled to take over the broadcast, he gathered his records and stacked the commercial carts for the first hour of his shift. I’m ready for this, he told himself, as Stein brought in the network news at precisely 10 o’clock. “Okay, it’s all yours. I’ll be in my office listening if you need me. Good luck,” said Stein, on his way out of the control room. Jake took his seat before the console and put on his headset. By now, the first record was fading and he segued to the next. Just after it ended, he read his first 30 second commercial ever over-the-air. All went well as he released the back-timed record before the incoming network news feed. He put the network input on cue to await the 10-second prompt, but when it sounded he discovered his record was still not about to come to an end. Did I miss-count the length of the cut? he wondered, feeling panic sweep over him. He prayed that the song would end before the network news theme came in, but it did not. With no other options, he was forced to cutaway from the record. Shit! shit! shit! A few seconds later, Stein entered the control room. “What happened, man? You got to hit it clean. That was a freaking mess,” grumbled the program director. “Sorry, Will. I must have miscalculated.” “Okay . . . okay. No sweat. We all make mistakes our first day on the air. But, really . . . try to nail the feed the next time.” Stein’s sudden appearance had rattled Jake, and he flubbed up the wire copy during the local news he was scheduled to read after the network feed. When he went to the next record, he fully expected Stein to reappear, but to his relief, he did not. As the clock moved toward the top of the hour, Jake’s anxiety about hitting the network feed without screwing up grew. He carefully calculated the back time necessary to go national and began to feel confident he could do it. As his record faded, the 10-second network cue-tone sounded and he opened the mic and gave the time and temperature and introduced the ABC News. Perfect, he sighed, as the network feed promptly followed his last word. 44