WGLT is saying farewell to longtime local Morning Edition host and program director Jon Norton.
Norton is retiring at the end of the month after nearly 23 years with Bloomington-Normal’s Public Media. Norton said he’d like to be remembered as someone who works hard and is a nice person.
Listen to WGLT's Radio Retirement Party for Jon Norton, airing 7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 30, on 89.1 FM. You can also stream the one-hour special on WGLT.org or the NPR App.
Radio the way it used to be
Among the things he is proud of, Norton said, is some of the creative work done for the blues radio format. He created a blues music tournament for the month of March called “Mojo Madness.” It mimicked the March Madness NCAA basketball tournament by pairing blues artists against each other and asking listeners to call in and vote on their favorites in various hours of the weekend.
“The cool part was they would tell us why they were voting for that person. Often it was a concert they were at or an album they bought. It became very personal to them about why they were voting for that person,” said Norton.
The blues host involved in the promotion was Frank “Delta Frank” Black and his then-producer Danny Hajek, who now works at NPR, who helped keep Black focused.
“And Frank ended up having a ball with that,” said Norton. “It was fun to watch Frank get excited.”
Radio has changed a lot over Norton’s career. At the dawn of it there was no automation system or computers.
“It was staffed 24/7 and that's how a lot of us got our start in radio. We literally did the overnight shift on the weekend, and that's what I did on an AM Top 40 station. I was playing some music for three or four hours in the overnight, and then the syndicated shows would come on, whether they're religious shows or Speaking of Sports with Howard Cosell or something like that,” said Norton.
Automation systems proliferated in the late 1990s, and Norton said the midday person on one station in a chain could voice track the overnight shift on another station in the same chain.
“All of a sudden, you didn't need quite as many people on the air. And the entry to being on the air and radio became more and more difficult,” said Norton. “And of course, that telecommunications bill, which came out in ‘96, changed a lot of different aspects of radio,” said Norton.
That law promoted competition, deregulated the industry and enabled technological changes. It led to ownership consolidation and made it economically difficult for new stations and owners to enter the field.
Automation also changed the craft of radio for hosts who prided themselves on matching rhythms and tempos between songs and coming up with perfect segues.
“When I got into radio, we were taught how to manually schedule music. We had the rules. We broke them sometimes. We had index cards on how we were rotating songs. Even as a part timer, we learned the rules of programming music, how to flow one song into another, or, you know, how a 15- or 20-minute segment should sound compared to another. I was very fortunate to learn that from the ground up. And I don't think that's really being taught anymore. It's just all being done by music scheduling systems now,” said Norton.
A War of the Worlds Moment
Norton said his most fun moment in radio happened when he was working at a classic rock station in Bismarck, North Dakota. He and other staff came up with an idea to mock up a fake live rock concert to lead into a syndicated live satellite broadcast of a KISS concert.
It took place at the fictitious Buffalo Commons Coliseum by the river, which putatively seated 80,000 people. The name Buffalo Commons, Norton said, came from the title of a book by two East Coast professors who proposed de-populating the Dakotas and giving it back to the Buffalo.
“And of course, you can imagine how people in Dakotas took that suggestion,” said Norton.
They used live concert CDs from various rock artists such as Bruce Springsteen, George Thorogood and Led Zeppelin. They played three songs from each artist.
“In between, three of us would act as kind of the host and color commentators in between the sets. I was the straight guy. Two other people were very creative and funny. They would do the color commentary and talk about things as if we were actually there,” said Norton.
They spliced together material from recorded interviews of musicians with background crowd noise.
“This guy, he went by Danger Boy. His real name is Chad,” said Norton. “So, all right, Danger Boy is with Brett Michaels now, [Poison]. ‘Yeah, yeah, I'm here backstage.’ And the way he produced it, he dulled the music or the crowd, so it sounded like he was backstage. The sound effects don't go away. And so, he's asking some funny questions and some serious questions and that continues to play.
Before the "event," Norton said they had listeners record lines when they came in to pick up prizes from on-air contests giving fake enthusiastic reactions to the musicians, and saying things like, "I can’t wait for George Thorogood."
He said it was all about tying the sounds together. You could hear a muted crowd roar during a backstage interview. And the crowd noise went up as they started each song.
“I'm sitting in the chair, and the phone calls, oh, my God! Where is this stadium? I was dumbfounded. I really didn't think people would think this is a real thing. The phone calls kept coming in. I can't find this stadium. You say it's down by the river. I'm like, It's an 80,000 person stadium, people! [in Bismarck] How can you not know there's nothing? But that's how well we put this thing together,” said Norton.
Evolving WGLT
When Norton arrived at WGLT in 2003, the station had a mixed news-and-music format with the tag line "News, Blues, And All That Jazz."
“Then in 2014-ish we got rid of our jazz and went to an all-news format in the middle of the day. The mission became more of a news station, even though we didn't get rid of our music altogether. Then we brought in the digital aspect of that. Not only were you on air, but we were getting it out there on social media, newsletters—and our news was becoming more omnipresent,” said Norton.
The station gradually added news staff, from two people pre-2014 to five now, plus additional correspondents. The station added a newsmagazine show, Sound Ideas, and numerous podcasts.
"Ultimately, it made us a much better news operation,” said Norton.
Education
This station has also significantly increased efforts to train ISU students to be the next generation of journalists.
“We made a huge commitment to that. It wasn't just a couple of interns fetching coffee, so to speak,” said Norton. “We were able to not only give these students a real-world opportunity at a well-respected radio station. They do real work for us.”
WGLT's current afternoon hosts are both students. Some serve as newscasters.
“We've become a little bit of a teaching operation as well. That requires more work for the reporters and for others in here, but it's so incredibly rewarding. Some of those students have actually moved into professional positions, here or elsewhere, because of what they did at WGLT,” said Norton.
As WGLT moves through its 60th year in the community, Norton said the institution has become more respected for its news.
“We've upped the ante of what we do on news.” said Norton. “We've also done our own outreach, forums here in the community and many at the Bone Student Center at ISU, attending events in town, parades or the Sweet Corn Circus, or whatever it might be to get our footprint into the community. And I think that's vitally important, that we show ourselves in the community that way.”
