Hello and Happy New Year. Over the next week I'll be sending out some suggested "Radio Resolutions" for our stations. Even though they will be marked 1-5, no single one is meant to be more important than the others. Let's start with......

RESOLUTION #5: Improve weekends and holidays

It became apparent over Christmas and New Years that we have a bit of a "set it and forget it" approach to our weekends and stats. We need to change that. Here are a few ideas...

• While I agree that we need to trust the technology we need to do a much better job of managing what the technology does for us. That means making sure things run when they are suppose to. Not 20 minutes late or 15 minutes early. Who is in charge of this at your center?
• I would suggest that programming needs to compare the schedule against the TOC in merge to make sure all weekend/holiday elements are loaded.
  
• We need to make sure all dispatches are correct. Hearing an overnight weather at 6:30 in the morning makes us sound very out of touch.
  
• We need to support our weekend announcers with air-checks and coaching. These folks work in some of our most listened to day parts and often get the least attention of any announcers. We need to fix this right away.
• Some of our web portals were pretty much ignored over Christmas and the results were a little embarrassing. We need to have plans in place to keep them fresh. That is what our viewers expect.

Perhaps most important, we all pay attention to what is happening at the station on the weekend and stat holidays. If many hands make light work, many ears do the same. This point may be especially critical for the center leaders.

Tomorrow......frequency.