In the early 1960s, radio automation—the term for programmable systems that sequence audio recordings for broadcast—completed its emergent phase in the postwar magnetic tape boom and began to stabilize as an impactful sub-industry in commercial (mostly music) broadcasting. Automation systems were significant capital investments for radio stations, and their vendors acknowledged that personnel reduction was a shaky goal at best due to the complexity of maintaining and programming them. With help from station owners, vendors instead centered their pitches on problems of labor and liability. By allowing disc jockeys to broadcast live on the air, the reasoning went, station owners exposed themselves to risks of deviation from the carefully engineered formats they promised advertisers. Extending that pitch to the staffers whose work would now be mediated by pre-recording and managerial review, they characterized live broadcasting as stressful and drudgerous—and insisted that automation promised true creativity through control of sophisticated machines.
Drawing on annual convention transcripts in the National Association of Broadcasters Collection, as well as editorials in broadcast industry literature, this paper analyzes how engineers and managers worked together in the 1960s and 1970s to articulate a new meaning of creative work for the radio medium. Historians of technology including David Noble, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Fred Turner have argued that automation, more than reducing labor needs, fundamentally served business interests by separating control from production—a change that conferred thrilling creative power on the new programmers even as it alienated them from the processes they controlled. Radio history presents a particularly clear view of this process, in a domain where automation and its effects have rarely been studied at a granular level.