Both Communication Departments I worked with treated their radio stations as hands-on training facilities for students, allowing them the experience of working in a professional environment. As such, both had a fairly large listener radius, composing of not only the university population (students and staff) but also the city and even the county. It was to these demographic areas that we attempted to provide alternative programming, including news, information and music not available elsewhere.
Therefore students not only served as DJs but also prepared live, five-minute news and sports broadcasts. There was a taped introduction, a vocal over some sort of music, identifying the following as a news or sports update and then the student began speaking. At my undergraduate station it seemed every year that these intros were redone or recreated (again, by students) for various reasons: the station had a new nickname they wanted to incorporate into all on-air spots; the student doing the voice had graduated and someone wanted to remove all traces of him or her; the bed music didn't seem "right;" or, in the case of the semester I was in charge of production, the intros from the previous school year, those that were more or less perfect, couldn't be found. I don't recall the semester this took place but I vividly remember being told that I needed to have a sports intro before we started the full fall schedule.
Half the problem in creating one of these introductions was finding music that fit. Sports update introductions were always a chore because everyone expected them to sound like ESPN's Sportscenter – which is why I instead decided on Timbuk 3's Sample the Dog. You know, something really out of left field. And yes, I got some strange looks at that one.
News intros were the same: they were expected to sound serious and have some sort of recognizable element, like ABC or NBC's broadcasts. That made little sense to me. Since someone changed the music every semester, there was no way you could build upon a "recognizable" element outside of one school year. But then we stumbled upon a track from the Mission Impossible soundtrack called Sleeping Beauty that we thought somehow worked – it had the right urgency, it had the right pace, and had a noticeable effect at about 17 seconds into the piece. Perfect. So perfect, in fact, I was surprised to discover two of three years after I was gone that it still garnered daily airtime.
Talk about longevity.
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Sleeping Beauty
(Danny Elfman)
Danny Elfman
From the album Mission Impossible [Score]
1996
(Instrumental)
