Maybe you know his voice, or maybe you don’t. Either way, Joe Patti has been vital to our 24/7 broadcast services at WRTI. From engineer to host, Joe understands every facet of radio operation, and has always been someone who gets the job done. His versatility and commitment to broadcasting have propelled him from the beginning of his career, back in 1977, through his tenure at WRTI, which spans more than 25 years.
Joe is retiring at the end of this month, and we couldn’t miss the opportunity to check in with him about his storied career in radio broadcasting, the changes he’s seen in this industry, and the thing that drives him the most — a connection with the listener. As WRTI’s incoming Director of Operations and Production, I’ve been fortunate to learn under Joe Patti since I started at WRTI in 2017. He’s been a pivotal figure in my broadcasting and production career and I plan to continue his tradition of “getting the job done.”
How did you discover the radio? What were your earliest memories of radio as a listener?
My earliest memory is as a baby. Because either the radio or the television was always on. I distinctly remember watching television. Television, remembering when The Flintstones premiered in prime time, which they used to do with cartoon shows back then. But radio — it would have been in the car driving somewhere with my parents, and hearing the music that they listened to.
There's the great story of you at six years old, taking your radio to school, and tuning in.
That didn't happen when I was six. That happened quite a few years after.
So the question is: What radio station were you listening to at school?
Oh, WFIL. I mean, once they turned into a Top 40 station from a sleepy little adult station, back in 1966. That was the station to listen to. There was also WIBG, but I grew up in South Jersey where WIBG didn't really have a great signal.
What appeals to you about the man in the box? What do you love about working in radio?
The connection. The connection with the listener and being able to talk to the listener like a friend and like a human being. That was one of the things I learned from listening to the radio very early on. I was attracted to stations that had personality. They talked to me in my language, in my style, as a human being and not as an object to be talked at.
You've been referenced as “the everything bagel of radio,” because you do it all. Could you explain your job in layman's terms?
Which one?
Operations Manager.
I just keep an eye on things. Anything technical, just keep an eye on it. Make sure everything is running properly, taking care of issues and problems as they come up. As operations manager for the last three years, I was the liaison between the programming staff and the technical staff.
So I was reading about your work study in high school in Camden. What station was that?
That was a small station that operated through a cable system that was based in Audubon, New Jersey. At the time, there was a guy in Camden, Preston Tolliver, who put together a private broadcasting program for teens and young adults. He accepted me as a disc jockey. He was quite good to me, very instrumental in teaching me a lot about radio. We just used to do shows for the cable system on an electronic public service channel with all kinds of rotating announcements, visually. And we would be the audio to that. It was great fun, especially since I wasn't going to school for half the day. I went to Pennsauken High, which was on Hylton Road and Route 130, and I'd walk up to Route 130 after lunch, which was a couple of blocks, and take the bus. And I'd take the bus from 130 in Pennsauken all the way down into Camden.
Anything to get outta class.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Then in ‘79, you went to Trenton. You were working multiple jobs trying to string something together to pursue your radio career. How would you describe your work ethic during that time?
That's where I learned to do everything. The station now is quite big. It's New Jersey 101.5, which is a major radio station.
One of the biggest.
Yeah. At the time that I was there, it was owned by the original owners, who sort of ran it into the ground. To the point that one person ran both their AM station and their FM station at the same time. Luckily, there wasn't any announcing involved because it was just button pushing work. On the FM, you were playing these old tapes that they used to use on an automation system that they had that they could no longer get parts for. So we would just play the tapes for 15 minutes on the FM. On the AM, you had one turntable, and you played a side of an album for 15 minutes. You ran both radio stations. This is how bad these stations were. Usually, when you work in a radio station, you’ve got all this monitoring equipment to make sure that the signal is great and everything. At that station, for the AM, you had a clock radio on this side. And for the FM, you had a clock radio on this side. And whatever you were paying attention to at the time, whatever you were doing, you had to turn down the one radio, turn up the other radio. So it was weird. It was not what radio was supposed to be, but it was great fun. It really was.
Sounds like a challenge that you had the opportunity to, like you said, learn everything in those moments.
That was my first commercial job. And the station grew after they sold it. I actually went back there three or four times to work for most of all the subsequent owners. In fact, the last time I was there was at the very beginning of New Jersey 101.5. That's where I got to see how you grew a radio station from a little dust bunny place, as I like to call them — something that was not taken care of, something that really needed some love to make it work — to something as big as that station is today.
What are the pros and cons that you've seen and you've noticed from this analog to digital transition?
So as far as the business is concerned, it's helped a lot in that it made it much easier to do a lot of things. For instance, let's take The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert program. If I were putting that together in the analog days, I would be in a room like this, with a console like this, with all these tracks, and three or four different tape machines, and having to run the tape machines and balance things, and get things right, and maybe even take a razor blade to do the tape editing on maybe two or three different reels. It would take maybe four to five weeks to put a single show together.
With digital, I don't have to leave my office. I do it on my computer and it takes me about three hours to put together a two-hour program. So that's one of the benefits of digital. One of the cons of digital is that when things go wrong, they go very wrong. With analog, you could recover in some way. If something happens in digital, unless you've got backups, and backups of backups, something could go wrong really badly that you have nothing to do with. All of a sudden, your computer crashes. And the hard drive goes. And you're dead in the water — not just for that particular thing, but for anything you were working on. Not to mention that you probably can't get any other work done, because everything is so computer-based now whether you're doing office stuff with spreadsheets and such. I mean, you could lose an awful lot just with a power outage. So that's one of the cons of digital. It has helped in the broadcast realm in that we're able to actually put two broadcasts on the air in the space of one. We have the FM and we have the HD-2. So that's helped as well, especially for a station like WRTI, where you're one format half the day and one format the other half of the day, and people are screaming “I want to listen to this music all day. How do I do that?” We were able to do that because of digital technology.
That's really great perspective because it points to the vulnerability of it, but also points to getting things done in a short amount of time.
But again, when things go wrong, they really go wrong. Especially with digital broadcasting. Analog broadcasting is different because you could still listen to the station. It might get a little fuzzy. It might get a little scratchy-sounding, especially the further away you get from the radio station. But when you're listening in digital, it's either there or it's not. There's no middle ground. If you're listening to HD and you're in the car and you get to a certain distance away, it just goes dead.
Talking about RTI, What are you going to miss about this place?
The people.
You were here for the format change in ‘97.
No, I came about a year and a half after it happened.
What was that experience like for you behind the scenes? Handling that technically and also from the community?
It was confusing, because I had come from a radio station where we only played one type of music. And I was the boss at that station. And I had been there 10 years, so I was used to running the show and making things work the way they should to get an audience. Coming here was very confusing because of the dual format, and at the time, there were a whole lot of people working here who didn't trust the classical people. There were people who said they thought RTI would eventually go all classical. I knew that would never be the case. I've been here 26 years, so it's been, what, 28 years since the actual format change.
How did you know that was the case? Like you knew it would never change?
I knew it would never change because we were committed to both.
That was more like a public speculation.
Oh yeah. It was definitely a public speculation.
Do you prefer to be a host or behind the scenes, if you could choose?
Host.
Why?
Again, it goes back to making that connection. Making that connection with the listener and trying to be a companion, trying to be a friend. Lord knows, I was never the best host here, because I was never a full time host. I never had the chance to really work on it as much. I had some experience doing classical radio from the ‘80s, but not a whole lot. So I wasn't the best person for the job, but I got a chance to be a host a lot here, and I enjoyed it greatly.
What's your favorite interaction with a listener?
I've always enjoyed talking to listeners. Whether they had anything good or bad to say. But that's one of the things about radio: you make that connection, but you don't necessarily know that connection is there. So you have to trust yourself. You have to assume the connection is there. And you have to be trusting that the listener is there and you're making that connection. I've gotten some nice ones. In fact, I still have a few of them — some very nice letters and emails from listeners. But more often than not, you don't hear from a listener. And that's good, because nine times out of ten, if you're hearing from a listener, it's something they don't like.
What was the most fun radio imaging or on air promotion campaign you've ever done?
I never really worked for stations that did a lot of contests and stuff like that, promotionally. I came up during a time when a lot of that stuff was waning, and things were becoming more research-driven rather than trying to force listeners to listen through promotions and stuff like that. But I will tell you one thing that I did that was really cool. The place that I worked for before I came here was an adult contemporary station down in South Jersey that sort of mixed the softer side of today's music with oldies and that kind of thing. At the time it was Michael Bolton, Mariah Carey mixed in with Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand and that kind of thing. And a handful of ‘60s and ‘70s stuff, The Beatles, Three Dog Night. As far away from Frank Sinatra as you can get. But it was adult contemporary.
And Frank Sinatra was sort of at the forefront of adult contemporary. Because he was somebody who transcended, and he could do all kinds of things. I was programming the station as well as being its operations manager, and about five other hats that I was wearing at the time, because it was a smaller station. And I woke up one morning, a Friday morning in May, heard the news that Frank Sinatra had passed away.
Now, the station that I was working at, we used to do weekend specials, where part of each hour, we would play specific music. If it wasn't an artist's birthday or some sort of day that we could put sets of music together to commemorate, we would just play oldies during that time. We'd call it the weekend oldies, weekend specials, something like that. Super Music Weekends, what we used to call it. And when I heard that Frank Sinatra had passed away, I called the morning guy. And I said: “Start promoting a Frank Sinatra Super Music Weekend starting at 3 o'clock this afternoon.” And I heard silence. And then I heard — he was a friend of mine, so he could talk to me this way — “Are you crazy?” I said, “We'll find out.”
Luckily, I was living one town over from a place that still had a Tower Records. So on my way into the station, I stopped in, bought every Frank Sinatra's Greatest Hits that I could find, along with albums that I knew were significant Sinatra albums. Growing up with my parents, I had heard a lot of that. They had a lot of those albums in their collection. Got to the radio station, I'm getting out of my car. The general manager sees me. And I walk up to him and he says, “Are you crazy?” And I said, “I don't know, we'll see.” Went inside, programmed all the music, programmed all the sets, every hour, from 20 after to 40 after, we would play a set of Frank Sinatra songs. Real quick, I threw some imaging together to make it sound good. I was the afternoon guy, and 3 o'clock that afternoon, 3:20, I started it. And I would say within two hours, the phones started ringing. People loved it. They loved it. And the phones didn't stop ringing all weekend. We actually got three new advertising clients out of it. Not because the programming was so good, but because it created some word of mouth and people that didn't know about the station started listening. And that just snowballed that weekend.
An idea on a whim really turned into something. That speaks to what radio is to me, being able to adapt and on the fly.
Radio has always counted, as one of its main benefits, that immediacy. You could do something immediate — you don't have to wait for a paper to be printed, you don't have to wait for a television crew to get set up. As long as you've got someone with a voice, and it doesn't even have to be a professional. I mean, it could be the middle of the night, and you've got somebody sitting there just pushing buttons. I mean, back in the days when I was doing rip & read news, we had the teletype machine. If you heard 10 bells ringing from the teletype machine, you knew something was going on. You went to the machine, you ripped the copy off the machine, and you got on the air and read it immediately. Anybody could do that, even if they weren't a professional. They could be as nervous as hell. They could get on the air and read it and get the information out there because people need to know about it immediately.
Get the job done.
Get the job done. That's it. Radio gets the job done ahead of everybody else.
What wisdom would you impart on someone entering a career in radio, behind the scenes or host?
Don't. I'm totally serious. And the only reason I say that is because so many people in the business when I was growing up told me the same thing. And because they told me the same thing, it just made me want to do it more.
It's a good test.
You tell them “don't,” and some people will listen. And they'll go on with their lives. And some people, they'll decide to get in the business. The problem is, today, the business isn't the same as it was when I got into it. The business isn't the same as it was even 10 years ago. I mean, everything changed in 1996 when the new Telecom Act went into effect, and companies could own as many radio stations as they want. Back in the old days, if you were a broadcasting company, you could own 7 AMs, 7 FMs, and 7 TVs. And that was it. You weren't allowed anything else. They did it to try to keep a diversity of ideas on the air. Different companies had different ideas and different types of programming, and it was all about diversity. Not so much the diversity we talk about today, but diversity in programming. But everything changed in 1996. And then you've got iHeart and Cumulus and Audacy. They took on so much debt to buy all these radio stations, and now they're all in trouble. And that has pretty much destroyed the business.
So my last question here is more of a sign-off for you. You're not on the air now, but if you could sign off on your final break right now, how would you do it?
Thank you. Thank you for allowing me into your lives, and allowing me to entertain you, inform you, and hopefully make you laugh a couple of times. Make you feel better about your life and the way things are.
Thank you, Joe, for everything you've done for me since I've started here.
You still haven't learned your lesson.
I'm still learning some lessons…
You're welcome.
I couldn't ask for a better boss. You've looked out for me every step of the way, and taught me a lot. So I want you to know how thankful I am for you, and I'm going to miss you, but I'll be contacting you a lot. Don't worry about that.
I'm sure you will.
Thanks, Joe.