Memorial Day Parade in Newton, NJ
The beginning of the week started with Memorial Day so since
it is a national holiday the office was officially closed for the entire day. However
the station as a whole decided to participate in a Memorial Day parade that was
located in Newton, NJ not too far from where the station is located.
Technically this was
my second event in which I was working even though it was a parade. When we
arrived at the parade start I was instructed to help Ricky set up the vehicles
in a patriotic theme.
We had three separate vehicles two company cars that sported
the logos of two of the three radio stations broadcasted from the Franklin
station. The other vehicle was a large commercial flatbed truck that the
veterans sat on.
For the parade the station was able to get listeners that
are veterans who have served or currently serve in our armed forces to ride
along in the parade. They did this along with the rest of us who included Ricky,
Gary Cee, Borasio, Steve Allen and myself.
There were supposed to be four veterans to show up to this
parade but unfortunately only three veterans arrived for the parade. With the
unfortunate miscommunications they needed four people in total still to fill
the seats in the back of the truck.
With this problem it was going to look totally awkward with
three guys and one empty chair. To fix this problem they all decided to put me
on the back of the truck with the veterans.
Personally this felt really awkward for me because there was
no way, for one that I looked like a veteran. Also I could tell that some
people in the crowd felt it was weird too when they looked at me strangely.
Nonetheless I did what I was told and sat on back of the
truck and acted as best I could that I belonged. The great thing however about
being on top of the back of the truck, was that it was a great vantage point to
take the pictures that I was asked to take.
As the week progressed and I went back into the office Ricky
had me sit on the front reception desk. This could have been another one of
those opportunities like clearing the office out to not learn anything.
However this was far from the actual case and in fact it was
a great opportunity for me. I was able to interact with the listeners that came
in to the office looking to redeem their prize that they perhaps won on air.
Also I answered phone calls that came in and answered
questions to the best of my knowledge. If I had no idea or they needed further
help I then transferred their call to someone that could help them achieve this.
When there was nothing for me to do and instead of doing
nothing I decided to research jobs. The jobs I researched on the computer were
available in the entire Clear Channel company business all over the United
States.
Since Clear Channel is speared across the entire nation in
radio and television it was great to see how many jobs were in fact out there
to do. When people say there are not jobs in radio I can tell them that they
are in fact wrong.
Also during the week I worked on the computer by helping set
up a promotions calendar that the whole office could look at and refer to for guidance.
I used a program called promo-suite to
help filter out what was prudent information for each event.
For every event there was information to put in such as, where
the event is located, when the event is, what was necessary to bring, who was
going to be there, how we were getting there, and what the event was about or
for.
It helped me further my knowledge on what goes into the planning
process of an event and that the planning process could start at least a month
ahead of time.
To finish off the week, I probably had one of the most
rewarding things about the internship thus far. I was able to go see the
Charlie Daniels band at Fox and Friends in New York City.
I had to get up at 2:30 in the morning just to arrive at the
station by 3:30 a.m. Ricky and I waited till 3:50 to gather all the listeners
that won the trip to go to New York and see the Charlie Daniels Band perform.
It took us about an hour to get to New York City and the Fox
and Friends studio. While there we got the listeners that came with us, which was
about nine of them, inside the outside concert fences.
Inside the fences Ricky and I took a bunch of pictures with different
listeners and people working there. We had each one of them hold up the 103.7 radio
logo. Ricky took one of these pictures and put them on the radio’s twitter page.
We also decided to take a lot of the pictures of Charlie
Daniels Band when they performed to help post later on the twitter page as well.
Even though it was a lot of fun and exciting we did wind up running
into one problem however. When I was holding the sign of the 103.7 logo a man
from Fox got angry with both me and Ricky.
He sternly told us that we either had to leave or throw out our
signs. To not cause a scene we both inclined to just throw the signs away unfortunately.
Charlie Daniels at the Fox and Friends Summer Concert Series
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