Stewart Byars, Production Director/Mornings, WCMT-AM/FM, WCDZ-FM, Martin, Tennessee
Stewart Byars made RAP Awards history by being the first person to tie himself for the 1st Place trophy in a category. In his case, he took home two trophies for Best Small Market Promo. (He also walked off with 1st Runner-up and Finalist awards in the same category!) No question… we had to check this guy out. And a pleasant visit it was. We’ve stopped at small market radio many times before in these pages, but Martin, Tennessee might be one of the smallest markets on the tour. Total population? Around 12,000... maybe. Thunderbolt Broadcasting has three stations in this market where numerous stations penetrate the airwaves from other towns and cities miles away. Stewart is their Production Director. In this month’s RAP Interview, Stewart tells us the creative stories behind his award winning promos, gives us a glimpse of small market radio that’s fun, and shares some of the reasons why small market can be a “destination” for some rather than a stepping stone or training ground.
JV: Tell us about your beginnings in radio.
Stewart: Actually, I wanted to be in radio ever since I was a little kid. As long as I can remember I always wanted to be in radio, but I was twenty-six before I actually got into the business. My best friend, Owen, got me a part-time job at a small, rundown radio station in Dyersburg, Tennessee that doesn’t even exist anymore. I started there doing weekend nights and have been in the business ever since. It’s been nineteen years now.
JV: Were there many stops along the way between Dyersburg and Martin?
Stewart: I went from Dyersburg to Trenton, and then from Trenton to Union City. I stayed in Union City for about nine years. Then eleven years ago I came over here, and I’ve been in Martin ever since. They were all small market stations right around this area where I’ve spent most of my life. I moved down here to Tennessee when I was eleven. I’m originally from Michigan.
JV: What positions were you holding at all these stations during this time?
Stewart: Well, at the first one it was just weekend nights, and in a matter of months I went to fulltime nights, and then I went to afternoons. From that station I went over to Trenton and worked nights, moved up to afternoons, and then went to mornings. I’ve been a morning man pretty much ever since. When I went to Union City, I started there nights, but I only worked there for a few weeks before they moved me straight to mornings, right after they got rid of their morning guy. I did a really fun radio show over there for about eight or nine years.
And you know, through all of those stations, I really did very little production. At the first couple of stations they told me that they didn’t think I had the stuff to do commercials. It was at the third station I went to, the one in Union City, where finally somebody let me get into production and learn how to do some of the basics. A fellow by the name of Scott Reeves kind of taught me the ropes years ago. When I came over here, we had a Production Manager already. I was hired to mornings on our country station — it was country at the time; it’s oldies now. So really I’ve been a morning man through most of my career. Then about six years ago they made me Production Director here, and I’ve been off and running since.
JV: Judging from your RAP Awards trophies, you handle the promos for the stations. Do your responsibilities also include knocking out commercials as well?
Stewart: Yes. I’d say probably about 80% of the commercials come through me. It may not be my voice on each of those, but I’m producing them.
JV: How many stations are you dealing with?
Stewart: As Production Director, I’m dealing with three stations: WCMT-AM/FM, and Oldies 95.1 WCDZ in Dresden.
JV: Do you have any assistants?
Stewart: No, this is a small market. I do a morning show here, and then I do production and remotes — you know, small market radio; you kind of have to learn how to do it all. However, some of the jocks also do production. Misty Menees does a lot of production here. She does it in the afternoon after I’ve gone. And Jordan Tinkle, who’s actually the boss’s son, he does some later at night. He’ll do a lot of the little programs and promos and stuff like that.
JV: But you’re cutting the majority of the spots and promos, and I’ll bet you’re cutting quite a few of them every day.
Stewart: Yeah, and you know, sometimes you don’t have time to be creative. And I think anybody in radio knows that. Your handed the script, and you do it as fast as you can; and luckily if you get a little free time, that’s when you try to throw in as much creativity as you can. And fortunately, with the promos, they don’t even hand me a script. They just tell me how much the amount is for the give-away that we’re doing that week and just let me do whatever I want. So it’s much easier for me to get creative on the promos.
JV: Well, congratulations on making Radio And Production Awards history with two first place entries in the same category. One was the BS “Bumper Sticker” promo, and the other was titled “Out of Ideas,” which was about a production guy who runs out of ideas for a promo. I was going to ask if you ever run out of ideas, and apparently you did on that one!
Stewart: Well, that was in fact kind of how I got the idea for that. I can’t count the number of days that I’ve got an hour left to go and the promo’s about to start, and I’m just sitting here thinking, where am I going to come up with the next idea? And usually I can’t even tell you where it comes from. Something will just pop in my head and I kind of work it out. I’ll put something on Cool Edit Pro and listen to it, and then I start editing. Then I kind of get more ideas from what I’ve started with. It’s kind of a patchwork way of doing it. A lot of it is in the editing. But with that one promo in particular, I didn’t have an idea, and I thought, boy I wish there was just somebody I could call. And that’s where the whole idea on that one came from.
JV: This was the first year we’ve seen any entries from you. Have you entered any awards competitions in the past?
Stewart: No. Nineteen years and I’ve never entered anything like that before.
JV: What made you decide to enter this time?
Stewart: Well, we’re getting Radio And Production magazine here, and it happened to be one of the issues with the entry form. I think it was Misty who actually said to me, “You should enter some of your bumper sticker promos.” I hemmed and hawed and, you know, didn’t have a lot of confidence in what I was doing actually, and she said “Oh no, they’re great. You should do it.” So I talked to the boss, and he said, “Why don’t you find some of the ones that you think are your best ones, and submit them?” He even said he’d be willing to pay for it, which I thought was great. So we spent a few days listening to promos. I’m doing two promos a week for our bumper sticker contest — one that announces what the winning license plate number is, and another one that says either that we had a winner or we didn’t, and to be prepared for the next week’s bumper sticker promo and contest. And so we listened to a lot of the bumper sticker promos, and it just kind of worked out like that. I probably have a hundred of them here at the radio station, and I just let people listen and decide which ones they thought were the best. They spent a couple of days nominating the ones they thought I should enter. Finally we came up with, I think it was about five or six of them, and sent those in, and four of them ended up being finalists.
JV: The other winning promo, the “BS Promo,” tell us about the creative journey on that one.
Stewart: That one actually is pretty self-explanatory. Originally the idea was that I was going to try to come up with some stupid name for myself. You know, instead of Stew Byars, it was going to be S. Biddy or something — just trying to make fun of myself, like J. Lo and P. Diddy. I actually cut a version of that, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. But I still wanted to go with the theme of using initials instead of people’s full names. So then I thought, well maybe instead of saying bumper sticker promo, I’ll just say BS promo. Once we got that idea, then we just kind of had a lot of fun playing with it.
JV: It sounds like a lot of your ideas just come to you rather than having to go to some resource to spark an idea.
Stewart: Yes, this stuff just kind of pops in my head. I think a lot of it comes from my standup comedy days. I did standup comedy for about six years. And when you do standup comedy, you kind of have a habit of seeing everyday things and trying to derive the humor from it. Sometimes it’s just something as simple as somebody calling in and complaining because they didn’t win a contest. That’s an idea for a bumper sticker contest promo right there. The idea for the “Out of Ideas” promo was from true inspiration. So it’s hard to tell where it comes from. Since my standup comedy days, it’s just something that kind of pops in my head, whether I’m doing promos or not.
JV: It sounds like you stretch your creativity more on promos than on the commercial work you do.
Stewart: Oh, definitely. There really is no script for the promos. It’s not like I write this stuff down and then cut the promo. You’d be surprised how few of these promos I’ve ever actually written out. I just kind of hear it in my head, and I’ll lay down my voice track. Then, if I need another voice, I just pull somebody in, whoever it is walking down the hallway at the time. I’ll bring them in and say, come in here and say this. Come in here and say that. You get total freedom doing the promos around here, which sometimes is rare in this business. I’ve got to give my boss credit for that.
As far as commercials go, there’s a certain amount of information that just has to be in there – the address or phone number or what they do. Sometimes you’re kind of limited on the time you’re allowed to be creative. Sometimes the customer doesn’t want a whole lot of creativity if it takes away from what the commercial is suppose to be about.
JV: Your entries were in the Small Market Category, which includes markets with populations close to a half-million. But you’re on the other end of that spectrum. Tell us about your “small market.”
Stewart: Our population here is about 12,000 in the city and 30,000 in the county. It’s a real rural area. But with the 25,000-watt signal, we cover a big portion of west Tennessee, into the southern part of western Kentucky, and we even get into southeast Missouri some. So we’ve got quite a few counties around the area that pick us up, pretty much from the Tennessee River to the Mississippi River, and from Kentucky down to probably Jackson, Tennessee. So it’s a pretty good coverage area.
JV: No Arbitron ratings I bet.
Stewart: No, not really. We’ve got Jackson, Tennessee about 40 miles south of us, and they have ratings there. And Paducah is about 50 north of us, and that’s a rated market. So we do get 100,000-watt stations blowing into this county from those two markets. They kind of overlap us right here.
But you know, I think right here in Weakley County, in our immediate area, I think we’d do pretty well in our ratings. One thing my boss, Paul Tinkle, told me when I came to work here, he said, “You know, we’re a small market. It’s not about ratings. It’s about quality.” And that’s kind of a theme that he’s had the whole time I’ve been here.
JV: That’s rare.
Stewart: I agree. It definitely is.
JV: Tell us about your studio. You mentioned Cool Edit Pro. Any other toys in there?
Stewart: Well, for a small market radio station, my boss has been very good about getting us some pretty good equipment, as far as what we can afford in small market. Of course, we were on old reel-to-reels for years, and then we went to an Akai digital editor, which was like going from the dark ages to modern times. Then we moved on to Cool Edit Pro and now Adobe Audition. Of course, we’ve got a big music and sound effects library back here. We have a couple from TM Century. We’re using Mega Music and The Winning Score. It’s actually a pretty simple setup. We have mini-discs and CD players and all that, but for the most part, as far as editing is concerned, it’s Adobe Audition. Our microphone is an EV RE-20.
JV: What’s a typical day like for you?
Stewart: Well, from 5:00 to 9:00 I’m on the air, and then at 9:00 I get off the air and come into the production room and work from about 9:00 to 2:00 doing production. It’s pretty busy, but thank goodness for the digital technology; editing is so much faster nowadays. Otherwise, I simply wouldn’t be able to get a lot this stuff done. Digital editors can do a hundred edits in the time it would have taken you to do two in the old days. And of course, being small market, you have to do so much other stuff. We’ve got little two and three-minute programs that run, and we have to put those in the system. We have to do liners for the other stations. I do a live show, but I also have pre-recorded show on WCMT-FM, so I’m voice-tracking that. I have to do that when I get in here, and of course whatever commercials have to be done. We have to do promos for the Atlanta Braves and Tennessee Titans and all that stuff, too. It’s a busy job back here, a lot busier than it was when I first got this job.
JV: What’s the typical routine with a client that you’re going to produce a spot for? Does the salesperson write the copy?
Stewart: For the most part, the salespeople write their own copy here. If they wanted something on the more creative side, it used to be they would sit down and talk to me and say, “Stew, we want you to try to come up with something funny,” or “Blast them out of the windows,” like with a truck pull ad or whatever. Nowadays, after doing this as long as I have, they just write, “Stew, do your thing/comedy.” Or, “Stew, do your thing; really sell it hard” or something like that. Plus there’s the direction I get for the copy that the ad people do. Luckily they all trust me here, so it’s been a good relationship that I’ve had with them.
JV: Are there a lot of last-minute orders coming through, or do get a little time to turn around the amount of work you’re doing?
Stewart: Probably the average turnaround I get is about two days. I don’t know how that compares with everybody else, but you get a certain amount that have to start that afternoon, and you get a certain amount that may not start for a week. So I’d say it averages out to about a two-day turnaround.
JV: Well, you sound reasonably calm for a Production Director in a small market handling three stations. I’m guessing it’s not too stressful for you.
Stewart: No. The best part is, I like it. I mean, how many people get to wake up every day and do the job that they dreamed they were going to do when they were four years old? Not too many people. When they’re little kids, they all say they want to be firemen and cowboys. I was saying I wanted to be a disc jockey and be on the radio. That’s exactly what I’m doing, and I truly love my job.
JV: Many people strive to leave small markets to move to the larger ones. What’s kept you in the small markets for so long?
Stewart: Well, to tell the truth, the main reason I stayed in small market is because I was raised around here, and I liked the area. It’s a relaxed atmosphere. I like the people here in the mid-south. And when we adopted a couple of kids years back, we wanted to raise them in the same situation. Now my son Mike is in the Air Force, and my daughter is married, living in Kentucky. So I really don’t have as much holding me here except for the fact that I just kind of like where I am. They give me the freedom to do my job, and I still have some fun with it. I mean, if something ever came up in a bigger market, I would definitely consider it, but it’s not like I’ve been really actively looking for anything.
Like I said, I’ve been here for eleven years, and I think we all dream of working in some big monster station, but to tell the truth, I wouldn’t even know how to go about doing my job if I was working at some big organization and I only had one thing to concentrate on — it’d be interesting to think, okay, I’m the guy in charge of just promos. Everybody here in this radio station does a lot of things. I mentioned Misty earlier. She does traffic part of the day. She’s News Director part of the day. She does production back here part of the day. And our morning man over on WCMT-FM is Chris Brinkley. He does the morning show on one station. He does sports. He’s the voice of the local college football team here. We all just kind of do a little bit of everything when you’re in small market.
JV: Have other staff members been there for a significant amount of time such as you, or is the station a revolving door like many small market stations?
Stewart: For the most part it’s been pretty steady here. We have certain positions that seem to revolve a little faster than others. It’s hard to keep a Program Director, and it’s hard to keep a newsperson here. I’ve been here eleven years. Chris Brinkley, the other morning man, has been here for fifteen years, I believe. Misty Menees has been here for about ten or eleven years. And our office manager, Cindy, has been here for over twenty-five years. It’s a relatively small staff. Our part-timers are usually college kids or high school kids, and they tend to come and go as they grow up and move on to other things. But the main core staff here has been pretty steady over the years, very little turnover.
JV: One perception of small market radio is that it’s a training ground, but it sounds like you’ve got a core of some professionals that have stayed in the small market rather than trying to move on.
Stewart: You can call small market a training ground, but I think that depends on what you’re wanting. For some people, small market is a destination. I mean, I’d be thrilled if Tampa, Florida, or Chicago, or New York, or wherever called me, but I’ve never really considered this as a training area. I’ve lived in the area and wanted to be on the radio, and this was home. So it wasn’t like I got into this business or came over to this station just so I could go somewhere else later on. I actually came over here so I could have fun doing radio.
I remember listening and loving radio my whole life. Unlike most people that listen to just the music, I remember loving the really funny commercials when I was a kid as well. There were old K-Mart commercials, and a couple of years ago, commercials for Boston Market. The people that came up with those commercials are so amazing to me. Today, it’s a company called the Radio Ranch that really impresses me. We are still running some “Radio Advertising Project” PSA’s from there that are my favorites. Working to make people laugh would be a dream come true.
JV: A lot of our readers have been in medium and large market radio for years, decades, and haven’t breathed any fresh air in a long time. Tell us a couple of things about living and working in a small town.
Stewart: Well, like we mentioned earlier, there’s no big ratings race in small market. In really small market radio — especially now with XM, Sirius, and the Internet -- you have to decide what your station’s going to be, and this station has always been real service-oriented. So it’s not so much about a ratings battle and who can be the most outrageous. It’s about letting people know if there’s going to be school today, if there’s going to be a thunderstorm coming through the area, who won the local football game, the local baseball game.
You get to go out and actually meet people. It’s not a rat race. Competing radio stations? They’re buddies that you’ve worked with. If people do move around here, a lot of times in small market they may move from one town to the other. That’s maybe ten miles apart. But everybody still knows each other. There may be some friendly competition, but for the most part, it’s just a real relaxed atmosphere. You come in and it’s family. It’s especially a family atmosphere here. You know people’s kids. You become a fixture in a community, and there are a whole lot of people that know what my wife’s nickname is. Sometimes they give me a free Coke if I go into a restaurant. We tell people what’s going on when storms are coming in, and the firemen fight their fires. It’s just all a part of one community.