[BC] Hard To Pronounce City Of Licenses..

[Rich Wood]

------ At 10:25 PM 1/13/2008, Paul B. Walker, Jr. wrote: -------

>Can anyone think of radio statuions who have hard City of Licenses' to
>pronounce?

There are many, some of which aren't hard to pronounce just not 
pronounced as they're spelled. There's a Groton, MA and a Groton, CT. 
Both pronounced differently. Worcester, MA is pronounced wooster, not 
wor-chester. There's Haverhill, MA. It's pronounced have-rill (as in 
wave) not haver-hill. New England has a lot of Indian, French and 
Polish names. Other areas of the country were settled by different 
immigrant cultures and the hard to pronounce names remain.

>Has anyone ever heard of a station changing it's COL just to avoid having to
>try to pronounce some far flung hard to spell/say city/town name?

Why would you change the COL of the city where you're located? 
Unless, of course, your programming is voicetracked. In that case, 
you'd have to change street names, as well. Have you ever heard New 
Orleans streets mispronounced from someone hundreds of miles away? 
Such ignorance of local pronunciations is the clearest flag there is 
that "we're not local."

It's not only syndicated programming that mispronounces. Today we can 
import talent via ISDN from anywhere. At WOR we originally had Gene 
Burns originating at WRKO, Boston. As hard as we tried we couldn't 
make him sound like a New Yorker from 200 miles away. We had to move 
him to New York. One of my former Talk hosts at WOR, at my 
suggestion, equipped his home on Long Island with a home studio so he 
could do fill-in work. He was hired by a Boston station. He sounded 
out of place in a city with many unusual customs, history and 
pronunciations. Finally, he had to move to Boston and use the 
immersion technique to sound local.

There's very little a local listener hates more than to hear a 
location or local historical figure's name mispronounced. Changing 
the COL is a small (expensive) band-aid to cure a constantly recurring problem.

As the Director of a couple of national Talk networks I had to deal 
with pronunciation complaints constantly. It's an important issue for 
local residents.

Rich