Organizations may have some obvious or well-known procedures while other practices are more hidden. Some of the formal policies of radio stations might be obvious. You have to air a station ID around the top of the hour. You have to air emergency alert tests every so often. Not following through with these policies comes with consequences.

Here is one example of a less well-known policy. According to the FCC, certain information had to be kept in a file. Radio is a federally regulated industry with licenses coming with requirements. I always wondered who might stop by and look at such files. Do most people even know were radio stations are located?

Some practices are less formal or more open to interpretation across stations. Two examples stand out. One was the way we organized music during a typical hour. We had certain categories for songs, such as heavy rotation, medium rotation, and power gold. How many slots each hour had for these categories plus the number of songs in that category determined how often those songs would play. With some other rules for songs (such as there had to be a certain amount of time between two songs from the same artist playing), this meant the heavy rotation songs would play about 40 times a week. And the heavy rotation category led off every hour. Why do people listen to music on the radio? They want to hear the popular songs. With our system the would not hear them every hour but every few hours. And those songs would tend to play at the beginning of the 15 minute increments that make up radio hours (and that are tied to ratings). As a college radio station, we did not always follow this format – we had other parts of the day that were structured in the same ways.

A second example involved how we referred to ourselves. Radio stations have options, that typically include their FM or AM frequency number or their call letters (typically 4). We were WETN on FM 88.1. We would often call ourselves “WETN – Wheaton College Radio.” Sometimes we would refer to our frequency: “FM88, Wheaton College Radio.” Or “WETN, FM88.” WETN is a good shorthand for “Wheaton,” a name both our college and community shared (traced back to the same Wheaton brothers who were early settlers). And not a lot of stations can boast that they are in the 88s.

Once I knew these practices, they seemed obvious. The station ID was built into our on-air scheduling software. How many ways are there to refer to our call letters and frequency? Perhaps this is true in all settings but with no previous experience in radio, it took time to learn these official and informal policies.