KRMG, U R Busted

This morning on the News-Talk 740 KRMG Morning News with Joe Kelley, the more alert listeners realized something unusual happened... around 7:47 AM, Denver Foxx was filling in for Joe for “a few minutes” and when it came time for weather, it wasn't Denver who introduced News on Six meteorologist Alan Crone ... no, it was Joe. Then it was Denver again right after the weather, with a comment along the lines of “thanks, Joe, for popping back in to do that” -- and then traffic guy John Filbeck said, “that was cool” ... then they carried on with the program, both of them seeming to hold back a chuckle.

What’s up with that?

It initially backed up the suspicion I have had for a while — they reuse segments of the program throughout the morning that you wouldn’t expect them to reuse. Obviously, some things like news stories would get reused, but things that fall more into the “banter” category ... well, you don’t expect that quite as much.

But the weather — that one has always been kind of obvious to a loyal and attentive listener such as myself, because the same joke is made, using the same words, timing, inflection... more than once in a morning.

The show is great, and very fast-paced ... which is another reason I suspected they may do some prerecording (other than when they specifically say “live”) since a show with a pace like this would seem to be very hard to pull off as smoothly as they do.

But it's not like this is some kind of secret. At least, I don’t think it is. When I used to host a syndicated 4-hour morning news show, we were the masters of reuse — the theory being that (a) nobody listens that long, and (b) the stations typically didn’t carry the entire four hours. A lot of times, if we were satisfied with the first two hours, we'd recycle the whole thing during the last two hours, go to the coffee shop, and listen to ourselves do the morning news on the radio. Our show was national, and if anything did come up in the news, we could always either jump in after a sound bite, or after the next commercial.

But as I contemplated this, I realized it’s not what I thought... there’s banter between the person doing the weather and Joe, but it's not that the 6:47 AM weather is being reused at 7:47 AM... realizing that the weather guy is usually the same weather guy who was on TV the night before, what are the odds that he's waking up that early to be on the radio? The weather guy never gives current conditions — just the forecast. So here goes: the weather for the morning show is recorded the day before. So they played the tape of the weather guy, and, of course, Joe was on the tape with him.

Come to think of it, the banter segments between Joe and Rick may well be recorded earlier — not that much earlier, but earlier in the morning — because of the need for tight timing.

Speaking of “live,” and these guys are by no means the only ones who do this, I utterly love it when someone is “reporting live” ... from the studio.

I still love ’em.

By the way, I said “tape” earlier. I know it’s not really “tape,” it’s digital. We call it “tape.”

2008-07-18 07:30 ETA: They’re too clever! This morning, A. C. (as Joe calls Alan) mentioned looking at the “radar skip” (did I hear that term right?) and storms in Kansas... had me going for a minute that maybe he recorded it this morning, but I’m going to have to go out on a limb and speculate that the storms in Kansas were such a foregone conclusion that he still could have done this yesterday. Incidentally, Tulsa’s high in 1936 on this date was 113°, whereas today’s forecast says 94°. Global warming? Not.