A New Breed Changes Radio

"Did you lose your virginity during the Mid-Autumn Festival?" asks Taipei's most popular radio show host of her callers, from school girl to policeman, one after another.

With all the competition, new radio stations are using promotions to attract attention.

On a Saturday evening, people have crowded into a glass-walled recording studio in a building on fashionable Chung-hsiao Road in Eastern Taipei to watch a radio show host sing and dance as she interviews Hong Kong pop star Jackey Chang. The host's gesticulations are as much a focus of attention as the star she is interviewing.

Shows used to be almost entirely pre-recorded, but today they make the most out of being live. When musical guests bring their instruments, shows become concerts.

Sensational appearances and sensationalism in subject matter are both trademarks of the new generation of radio people. Are the old hands on the radio, who prefer to hide behind their microphones, going the way of the dinosaurs? And how exactly is this changing of the guard changing radio?

For more than 40 years there were just 31 radio stations in Taiwan. Then the repeal of martial law in 1987 marked the beginning of a new era of freedom. Amid the growing voices of opposition widespread attacks on the government's monopoly of radio broadcasting were heard. After much discussioon about broadcast policies, the government began in 1993 to turn over radio bands that were originally reserved for military use, and nearly 120 new mid- and low-range local stations were granted licenses.

The clouds of war

With the ranks of stations swelling from 31 to over 100 during this transition from monopoly to free market, the broadcasting sky has become a broad expanse of twinkling stars. But the new channels have disturbed the original market order.

Kuan Shang-jen, a professor at National Chengchih University, argues that competition is an inevitable result of privatization. With the release of new bandwidths, there are several times more stations now, and one might assume that such a concentration of stations is insupportable, but "the real question isn't whether there's a high or low concentration," Kuan says, "but rather whether the market has reached the point of saturation yet."

He stresses that past media-use surveys in Taiwan revealed that the radio listening public was dropping, reaching its nadir in 1990, with only about 10 percent of the population tuning in. This compared with about 50 percent in Japan and America.

Kuan Shang-jen believes that the most obvious difference between the old and new stations is that the new stations make great use of market surveys, sifting their numbers to find "points of commonalty" in audiences and plan their shows' content.

Old stations, old listeners

But is there really that much difference in the product?

"Of those who are on radio every day, I'm the eldest," asserts Li Chi-chun, who has 30 years of experience broadcasting with his own production company. Growing excited as he discusses his old shows, he leaves the room to come back with a reel of old tape that is about the shape and size of a record.

Several years ago, when underground radio was flourishing, Hsu Jung-chi, a radio host for the "Voice of Taiwan," got cab drivers to surround the Ministry of Finance to protest its decision to raise their auto insurance rates.

In Li's view, there is nothing new in radio's ability to shake things up.

More than 20 years ago, when Taiwan's economy was just taking off, a Cathay Insurance salesman came to sell Li insurance. Since few people in Taiwan really understood what insurance was, he invited the salesman to come to his show once a week and explain the concept.

Back then, the Broadcasting Corporation of China (BCC) was on Kungyuan Street in front of the Presidential Palace. One day passersby saw a line of taxis parked in front of the station and wondered what was going on. "We heard Li Chi-chun's show introducing insurance, and thought that it made a lot of sense," said a taxi driver. "And since we were in the neighborhood, we figured we'd come by to get an even clearer understanding."

"The tapes recording all my shows fill an entire room," Li says. "As time goes by, my feelings about things change. I'm older and so is my audience." And the truth is that his feelings about time passing are even more acute when confronted with the new listening audience.

When old members of his audience see him, they often ask, "Why aren't you hosting a radio show? I always thought you had the best voice."

That deep, magnetic voice has poured out of the radio week after week at set times. It's just that as bandwidths have been freed up, and lively shows have filled the air waves, the audience and media's attention have shifted to the new generation of broadcasters, and Li's fame has fallen.

Beautiful voices no more

Is time totally unsentimental? Should we cherish the memory of the past?

"The truth of the matter is that God made us to love the new and reject the old," says Ni Pei-pei, host of the late night show on BCC. "Broadcasting is a profession where we cast aside today what we held dear yesterday."

A soft-voiced Pisces, Ni, who is 39, entered the field of broadcasting when she was just 19. She says that she owes all of her success to using her feelings. In making a program, she holds that the "greatest liability is habit."

In the past, "pronunciation was clear with every syllable fully sounded. The speech was slow, and the pace was slow." But that model has almost entirely been rejected. Pai Yin, who has been working in radio for more than 40 years, once spoke about how he used to carry around a Chinese dictionary and constantly flipped through it to determine the proper pronunciation of words.

Back then Mandarin was granted a higher status, and thus it should be no surprise that someone like Tao Hsiao-ching, whose proper Mandarin is truly a joy to hear, could have entered the field some 30 years ago, starting as a DJ of a Western pop music show. Always at the cutting edge of the times, she observes that today young people show a great acceptance for other languages, sprinkling their Mandarin with English, Japanese and Taiwanese. Language is something living and constantly evolving, she argues, noting that standard Mandarin is "definitely no longer a necessary requirement."

Li Ming-jou, host of a show at Voice of Taipei (VOT), says that some people criticize her voice for lacking energy and her speech for its sentence fragments, and believe that "Mandarin is taking a big step backward." But she is one of the most popular radio hosts among young people.

"A beautiful-sounding voice is less and less given paramount consideration in hires," says Su Lai, assistant manager of programming at UFO. Beautiful voices and standard Mandarin are out because audiences find them "pretentious and lacking in feeling," Su says. "There will be greater and greater stress placed on voices with personality."

If it's not live, it's no fun

Just as now there has to be character in a voice, programming is also changing with the times.

Tao Hsiao-ching recalls that when she entered BCC 30 years ago, apart from radio dramas and readings of fiction, which were by necessity pre-recorded, the vast majority of shows were done live. But then when stations could no longer count on the government to provide funding, they started relying on commercial sponsors, which wanted to listen to shows before they were aired and thus requested that programs be pre-recorded.

For a period, up until call-in shows came into vogue, most radio shows were pre-recorded. Radio people have widely divergent opinions on the relative merits of live versus pre-recorded shows.

Li Chi-chun dislikes the way the live shows sound: "These live shows make us all people without yesterdays. Our talk is as fleeting as the wind." The demands he makes of himself include speaking clearly, using the right words, and avoiding stammering and filling sentences with "zhe ge" (this thing) and "na ge" (that thing) [the way some Americans will fill theirs with "like" and "you know"].

But for Su Lai, a singing star who entered broadcasting and who left an old station for one of the new ones, "If it's not live, it's not moving."

Fifteen years ago, when friends discovered that Su Lai's descriptions of food were more mouthwatering than the actual dishes set in front of them, and his descriptions of events more vivid than the happenings themselves, friends said it "would be a shame" for him not to become a radio host, and that is how he got into the world of broadcasting.

Although he didn't originally intend to do so, when he was hosting shows at BCC and the Public Radio System (PRS), he wondered about how he could go beyond merely playing a lot of good songs and talking about stuff that touched upon people's daily lives to "playing" with radio to make it better.

"If I read the wrong song title, I'll fudge it to sound like it's right." He tells his sound engineers that even if he makes mistakes, he doesn't want to do retakes, but rather hosts the shows as if they were live in a manner that is natural and true to his character.

He says that most radio hosts who don't go live use the following method: In two days they record an entire week of shows. For shows produced outside the station, they might even turn in the tapes for a month's worth of shows. They are reluctant to do live shows because they feel they are simply too much trouble.

Nothing off limits

With trained voices and pre-planned dialogues, programs that do retakes when mistakes are made sound slick and polished. "How is radio different now from ten years ago?" "During a typhoon, listeners want to hear about the direction of the storm, but for pre-taped shows, where do the changing concerns of the audience come in?" People constantly bring up such questions.

There will always be some who want to change the status quo and others who oppose change. The biggest change in radio is in the interaction with the audience.

In the old days, when the audience had opinions, they would write or call the station, and their opinions would only be aired if the shows' hosts mentioned them. The audience couldn't express their opinions directly on air, and couldn't make song requests.

The end of martial law was like a general amnesty. Suddenly, nothing was prohibited, nothing suppressed. Society opened up, and radio call-in talk shows served as immediate tests of the listening public's reactions. And once their mouths were opened, there was no way to zip them back up.

In fact, PRS had already been making live traffic updates. "We started playing with the possibilities of live broadcasts and call-ins a long time ago," says Su Lai.

Su Lai wants to go a step farther. "When someone calls in who sounds sad," Su Lai says, "I like to change the music right away to suit the caller's mood. Music is my tool; it provides background." But some show hosts don't seem to have been trained to use music as background sound.

When Su brought up the idea of giving total control to one person in a combined role of show host, sound engineer and phone-call screener, he was surprised to find that the station turned him down because of fears that "people would speak inappropriately, pick inappropriate songs, or perhaps make song requests on behalf of record companies."

Not playing by the rules

While doubts persist, the changes to radio seem to have reached a point of no return.

The unlicensed "underground radio stations" stirred up criticism about public affairs, providing a release for dissatisfaction about society and government. As new radio stations have appeared, they have gone to sensational lengths to attract listeners. On the air, young show hosts talk about sexual topics: incest, gigolos, oral sex.

Parents who listen in jump out of their seats, and the authorities are nervous. Senior broadcasters find it difficult to accept. Where are the lines drawn between what is acceptable and unacceptable for broadcast? Does radio still have the educational function upon which many senior broadcasters insist?

With so many new radio stations employing so many new hosts, some people say that there are only two ways to be heard above the din of the crowd: shout louder or "break the rules, toppling the old order."

One listener says, "The 'Taipei Black Eyes Show' that Tsai Kang-jung hosts is really hilarious. They discuss things like where to put boogers of snot or how to treat cockroaches humanely. It keeps you up so you can study. But if you listen too intently, you can't concentrate on your books."

Li Chi-chun describes the current crop of young radio hosts as "big mouths, who are both noisy and uninformative." They just come in and get on the air with no preparation. "Like comets," he says, "with one streak they're gone." "It's embarrassing just to mention morality," says Luo Yi-fen, a senior broadcaster. "And you're always wondering if you're out of date."

Tao Hsiao-ching holds, "Young people aren't that blind, and it's not as if the shows are really going to lead them astray. It's like getting addicted to coffee. Sure, the shows aren't very enlightening, and the kids are aware the shows aren't any good, but their emotions need a release. Sometimes they feel that the discussion today was really satisfying." She doesn't believe that topics should be taboo, but she does acknowledge that some hosts seem to be "walking on the edge, and if they go a few steps farther they'll be illegal." She says, "In particular, they aren't respectful enough of people, and sometimes just seem to be manipulating people's voyeuristic tendencies."

Audio omnipresence

Today you can hear radio broadcasts wherever you go, and listening to them has evolved from family groups gathering around the radio at home in the 1950s to individuals listening to Walkmans today.

"The old media haven't died; they've just changed," says Kuan Shang-jen.

Radio has had different statuses at different times. Its golden age was in the era before the rise of television. Mussolini claimed that radio was what enabled him to turn Italy fascist; FDR's "fireside chats" comforted and cheered up who-knows-how-many Americans during wartime.

In the old days programs competed with other programs, but Kuan Shang-jen believes that the trend is more and more toward competition between stations. In order to reduce the dangers associated with changing stations while driving, in the United States they have already invented a voice-activated channel changer; some radio stations even sell radios that are set to their station and cannot be adjusted. Leaving listeners with a distinct impression about a station is also very important.

New programs, new audience

"Radio stations produce two products: one is programming; the other is an audience," says Kuan Shang-jen. Advertisers spend money to buy listeners, "and everything is created according to analyses of audience surveys."

He points out that old stations such as BCC and PRS that can be heard island wide have large markets and are generalists; they build up a large audience from small bits of many different audiences. Mid-range stations, like those that can be heard only in the Taipei or Kaohsiung metropolitan areas, must have a clear strategy if they are to survive.

"None of the successful stations try to steal the 10% of people who are long-time radio listeners from other stations, but rather they try to develop their own new listening audience."

"The contribution of the new stations is in expanding the listening public," says Hsia Ti, the general manager of Philharmonic Radio Taipei (PRT). He says that market surveys reveal that two-thirds of the station's listeners weren't regular radio listeners before.

Hsia Ti points out that the station doesn't have any call-in shows, doesn't talk about politics and isn't just a chip off the same old block, but as people select stations that suit their own tastes, it has found a natural market niche. In the past, classical music shows weren't "promoting the music to the general public, but were promoting it as something for the elite," giving people the impression that it was the exclusive province of the upper crust, something above the reach of common people. Now PRT brings classical music down from the clouds to make it a part of people's lives. They put a new spin on classical music. "Musicians are also people," one PRT host says on air. "Why did Bach write so much religious music? Because he was afraid of dying."

PRT believes in using new people. The vast majority of its shows' hosts have had no prior broadcasting experience. It's a strategy that other new stations have adopted, too.

One radio person says that when she hears a senior broadcaster on the Voice of Taipei read a passage a Chinese author wrote in the 1930s, it really seems anachronistic.

Some radio people mince no words in noting that three of the bigger new stations in the Taipei area-VOT, PRT, and UFO-rarely use hosts who have worked at old stations. This is because the senior broadcaster style "doesn't fit in with the overall plan and atmosphere at the new stations."

Swapping elders for youngsters?

Tao Hsiao-ching is one of the few older show hosts at VOT. After retiring as general director of youth music programming at BCC, she came to VOT where she went through a period of mental adjustment.

First she had a show every day, but then she was cut to Saturday and Sunday only. The station thought that her shows were "too heavy and serious, and there wasn't enough music."

"I didn't think I was doing a bad job, but frankly speaking I was being demoted," Tao says. At the time she thought that the show's main thrust wasn't music but personal development. She was concerned about child abuse and giving voice to modern people's emotions.

"But just as triangles are three sided, there are three sides to consider about everything," she says. "I've wondered if I'm not too idealistic and culturally oriented, and if my programming isn't a bit too deep. Perhaps I haven't paid enough attention to what sells, and the overall station plan."

Of course, she could have simply up and left; but after thinking things over, she sorted through her feelings and put aside self-pity. "I still care about providing an outlet that will help me and the listening public to grow and be nourished," she says. "But if this is a commercial radio station, I can only survive if it does."

A new generation is replacing the old one, a truth that sounds cruel. But the audience can be very picky about what it wants to hear.

Kuan Shang-jen believes that the successful stations such as PRT or Kaohsiung's Kiss Radio have special styles or find a niche for themselves through their music. Other successful stations, such as VOT and UFO, which stress the charms of their shows' hosts, find success through their marketing strategy. Now that more and more show hosts are flying solo, without any other on-air personnel, "hosts who aren't flashy enough" may find themselves left out in the cold.

In his view the older generation looks like it's clearly on the way out. This, however, doesn't mean that no one listens to their programs, but rather that they've got to find the right niche for themselves.

He cites the example of nostalgic "easy-listening" channels clustered in areas of America where there are many retirees. The pace of their programs doesn't "make the heart beat too quickly, and they don't make the ears work too hard. They play calm, familiar tunes to accompany old folk as they pass their days."

Picky and sentimental

Both radio stations and show hosts have to make their own way. But in this era when the rules of radio are being rewritten, Tao Hsiao-ching has also seen that "those who really love radio can't necessarily get jobs in the new stations" because some stations put too much stock in famous people, so that newspaper reporters, writers, singers and politicians can all have a go at hosting a show.

She believes that any famous person can host a show, but there should be the precondition that "they must be conscious of the fact that as opposed to cable television, where customers pay to watch, radio stations are using the public airwaves, and shows shouldn't be hosted to serve a private purpose."

For instance, there is one host who is very popular among young people who plugs her own books on the air, even telling listeners who call in about special promotions for her books. "Two volumes for NT$399," she'll say. "When they're so cheap, why not buy them?"

Kuan Shang-jen says that today when the meaning of advertising is constantly expanding, commercials are turning into programming and programming is turning into commercials. It has become very hard to draw a line between the two.

Still, the public isn't so easy to cheat. On the Internet, listeners can publicly criticize radio whenever they feel like it. Some recommend better programming; others offer lists of the most disgusting show hosts. They write all sorts of stuff.

"Do other listeners have the same sense that I do, that the stations are swarming like hornets in all choosing call-in?"

"I think that the DJ [so and so] is disgusting. When I am flipping around the dial, and I come across him singing and playing his own songs, it really makes me sick."

Commuters have two hours a day to burn on the road, and those who burn the midnight oil want late-night companionship. Like it or not, you're bound to hear radio sometimes. Do you prefer old or new? You can make the decision with a flick of the dial.

p.45

The public gathers outside a radio studio by a busy intersection, viewing with their own eyes a singing star and radio host. This transformation from "audio" to "visual" exemplifies the great changes to radio in the recent era.

p.47

Modern radio people are a diverse group: senior broadcaster Luo Hsiao-yun often hosts press conferences for pop stars (top left); Su Lai, who was originally a pop star himself, likes radio work because he gets to play music and talk about his emotions (bottom left); Li Ming-jou, a hot young radio show host, makes a commercial endorsement (above).

p.48

With all the competition, new radio stations are using promotions to attract attention.

p.51

Shows used to be almost entirely pre-recorded, but today they make the most out of being live. When musical guests bring their instruments, shows become concerts.

p.52

Amid the columns of automobiles at dusk, radio provides a little joy by taking people's minds off the traffic. The rush hours before and after work are prime time for radio.

p.53

Through all the change in this new era of radio, Li Chi-chuan's voice-steady and magnetic-has remained many people's choice for late-night companionship.

Amid the columns of automobiles at dusk, radio provides a little joy by taking people's minds off the traffic. The rush hours before and after work are prime time for radio.

Through all the change in this new era of radio, Li Chi-chuan's voice--steady and magnetic--has remained many people's choice for late-night companionship.