VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[Mike Harrison]

The Baby Boomers among us who came to VO from radio will remember what "meeting the network" was. For those who don't, when your station was a network affiliate, and you were on the air, you had to time your programming so that it (hopefully) ended just before you were to join the network, most often at the top of the hour for news. And the goal was to do it without any dead air between your stuff and when the network feed began. Back-timing records was very common. Some would use an instrumental that we could just fade out at the appropriate time.

But the real art to meeting the network was usually performed by newscasters; most of whom wrote their own stories and knew exactly how much material they needed to fill their allotted time and get them to top of the hour. Back in the day, some radio (and TV) networks used a short tone burst to signal the exact top of the hour. It sounded very official, especially when immediately followed by an authoritative news sounder.

One can do all the right things when attempting to speak live right up to the net feed (which begins whether you're ready or not). But when your newscast will include a commercial that is also to be read live – by someone else – well…

Here, from August 24, 1977 (when news actualities were longer than two seconds), closing out the 8am hour of New York's Imus In The Morning show, WNBC newsman Charles McCord demonstrates how it was done. Perfectly... even despite Imus' somewhat improvised spot read. Mike Maus begins the NBC network newscast, then we go back to McCord for the local weather before he throws it back to Imus.

http://mike-harrison.com/vobb/770824-Imus-McCord-NBC.mp3
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Mike
Male Voice Over Talent
I have taken leave of my sensors.

[MBVOXX]

Yep, got my start in radio in '72. Too many network feeds to count and all options of meeting the network experienced! I was out of it by '82 when I got my first agent and went into VO work full time.