Operations Manager Spotlight

I’ve been asked to talk about a “typical day” in my position as Operations Manager of 90.5 WERG.

There’s no such thing!

Every day brings something new, something different. Some events are planned; others, I work with as they come up.

Let’s look at last Tuesday.

First, it’s a check of my e-mail (I average about 120 e-mails a day... Many are spam, but I don’t want to miss anything important!).

Then, I spent about an hour looking at new equipment we’d like to purchase for the radio station. Our engineer, Mike Kobylka, is returning from Las Vegas where he was attending the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention. We’ll compare notes and prices.

At 11am, we had our Weekly Rundown staff meeting. Molly Cooke, our General Manager, runs the meeting in the 3rd floor conference room with all of the station managers so we can map out the next week, do some strategic planning, and discuss any issues over the previous week that need addressed. Open House is coming up, so Justin Karns (our Promotions Director) ran down the checklist of what we will need for a live broadcast at Nash Library that Saturday morning: our remote broadcast unit, station logo gear, talent to run the live broadcast…we don’t want to miss anything! Veronica Kowalski took notes for her posts on our social media accounts.

After lunch, I traded e-mails with a prospective student who wishes to come by for a tour. I spent about 40 minutes looking over the national music charts to prepare for Wednesday’s meeting with our music director, Allan Collins... There’s a new Snow Patrol song we need to start playing!

I am on the board of directors for the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System. We recently had our annual media conference in New York City, and a few of the stations that won awards had their trophies damaged during shipping. I made a few calls to double check that their replacements arrived safely.

I teach Intro to Electronic Media (COMM 111), and I am reviewing the new edition of the textbook and preparing my lecture notes for this fall’s class.

Our seniors are in the midst of their thesis presentations, and I am on several of those panels, so I am reading over their final papers.

Paige Groff, our News Director, stopped by my office at 4pm for our weekly meeting. We discussed the week’s current events, what we likely would need to cover and took notes on pronunciations for the staff. We archive all station audio, so we listened to a few of the past week’s newscasts, looking for strengths and areas where we need to improve.

On my way out, I took a thesis paper with me to read over at home, and logged in to update our website at some point in the evening.

Tomorrow is and always will be different than today!