Douglas L. Barton - Oral History Project

Douglas L. Barton Oral History Project
Interview with Doug Barton
Date of Interview: December 7, 2010; Phone Interview
Interviewer: Jordan Kesler
Transcriber: Jordan Kesler

Kesler:          This is the Douglas L. Barton Oral History Project and I am here with Doug Barton, owner and operator of Sanpete County Broadcasting Company and Mid-Utah Radio. Due to certain circumstances, this interview is being held over the phone. The interviewer is Jordan Kesler, Brigham Young University.

Kesler:          I wondered if we could start talking a little bit about your background, maybe a little bit about yourself, where you’re from, where you were born and maybe a little bit about how you grew up with mass media as a child and what you remember.

Barton:         I was born and raised in Manti, Utah, just a small agricultural community in central Utah. I grew up as a farm boy and spent a lot of time as a sheep herder when I was a boy. I always had an interest in engineering and radio broadcasting. Our nearest radio station was in Richfield, Utah. I remember as a boy listening to it and getting excited about the prospect of visiting the station someday and being a broadcaster. I was about 50 miles away and I had that opportunity a couple of times, but not real often in those days because we didn’t travel much. In my spare time, I taught myself electronics and hooked up a radio station, a carrier current radio station, in the basement of my house when I age 14, and operated that station as a carrier current station for my middle-school and high school years. After I graduated from high school, I left for an LDS mission and I donated the radio station to the high school, which they operated for a couple of years as a training ground for broadcasters. After my mission, I returned and attended Snow College and there I built a radio station for the college, KPPH, and interestingly enough, we were the first FM station for a college in the state of Utah. We donated our transmitter in 1950 to BYU for K-BYU, and they in turn donated it back to us and I used that transmitter to put that station back on the air again after my mission. After Snow College, I attended BYU and did some graduate work there. I got a BA degree and then did some graduate work. While I was there I was on the faculty and I taught broadcast communications and worked for several radio stations in the Provo/Orem area. So that’s kind of a brief history. After I left BYU, I built KMTI in Manti in 1976 and we’ve added six stations to the company now. So we have six radio stations, one television station and we operate all of South Central Utah in our coverage area. We have 26 communication sites that we own and operate, and that’s the size of our company right now.

Kesler:          So from the sounds of it, you’ve grown up with radio.

Barton:         Yes. I was self-taught. I never did take any training in electronics. I just kind of taught myself and built my own transmitters, some audio-mixing consoles and all of that. The only formal education I have in the communications aspect is what I got at BYU.

Kesler:          Right. Well, looking back on your childhood and growing up, what was it that made you so interested in electronics and radio? Was there an experience you had that got you interested or was it just kind of something that came about?

Barton:         I was always fascinated with the fact that you could speak into a microphone and you could hear it hundreds of miles away. So I think my first interest in broadcasting was from an engineering point of view. I was intrigued by that, but then I also really got excited about being on the air. I worked as an announcer for many years on the stations and I also got some training as some other stations. I worked at K-BYU TV and K-BYU FM and KUTD Channel 2, and KOBO of Provo and couple of other stations. Just a fascination at first with electronics and then the ability to be on the air. I always felt it was important for a radio station to make a difference in the community where they were located. So we are very community service oriented. We do a lot of public service, which has really helped us to be successful as well.

Kesler:          That’s really great. Again going back to your growing up years, what was consumption of media like? What was available to consumers as far as mass media, whether it be radio or television? What were you using at that time?

Barton:         At the time, there was no cable television. Of course satellite television had not been invented yet. We received television from Salt Lake City. We picked up three channels. It was off-air. We were 125 miles away so the signals were very poor. Some days  you couldn’t even receive them, they were quite snowy. As far as radio goes, we could pick up basically two radio stations in the day time. One was the KSBC in Richfield, which was about 50 miles away. Then we could pick KOBO out of Provo. So we basically had two choices for radio listening. Of course things have changed drastically since then with satellite radio and satellite TV and cable and translators for television and also for FM translators that are now available to extend the FM signals. There was not a lot of choice in those days.

Kesler:          Did you mostly listen to the radio in your home?

Barton:         I listened to it whenever I had a chance—when I was in the truck working or driving in the car, I was always tuning in to stations. I was fascinated by the different programing, by the announcers, the music and all of that. I’ve also had a real interest in television. I spent a lot of time teaching TV at BYU, but I started out basically with radio, and now we’re actually in the television business too with a TV station.

Kesler:          Looking back on when you first entered the industry, what was the radio industry like?

Barton:         Well, it’s totally different now than it was then. I actually got into the business before they had any form of automation. So you’d have live announcers operating the controls, playing the commercials, playing the music, and so if the station was on the air for 18 hours a day, you had someone in the building, in front of the console for 18 hours. In those past 35 years, automation systems have come along. When I started in the business, we played commercials on reel-to-reel tape. Many of the programs were on reel-to-reel tape. I even remember long form radio programs that were on electrical transcription or long-playing LP records. Of course all of our music was on records. They hadn’t invented cassette yet, and of course the CD didn’t come for 20 years after that. It was basically live radio and I think that radio was actually better in those days because they didn’t rely on automation, they didn’t have it. There was always someone at the radio station and it sounded live. Since that time, the CD was invented which changed things quite a bit. Reel-to-reel tapes were the first automation and then they went to CD, and now all the radio stations don’t really even have a tape machine in the building other than just for display and everything plays off a hard-drive of a computer. In fact, we don’t even have a turn-table in any of our radio studios anymore.

Kesler:          Along those lines, in your time in radio and maybe television as well, what do you see as the biggest change? What contributed to the biggest change in those two industries?

Barton:         I think when they changed the ownership rules allowing companies to own more radio stations in the same market, I think it had quite an impact on the local feelings of those stations. Then with the advent of automation I think radio and television has lost a lot of its local flavor. Even though we own six stations and those rules made it possible for us to own them, I don’t think radio is as personable or as local as it was when there were more restrictions.

Kesler:          Going back to when you started with radio, and maybe even now, what was or is your ultimate goal with radio and television, and what did you or do you want to accomplish with that?

Barton:         Well, I’m kind of a builder. I like building things and growing companies and that type of thing. That’s just kind of inherent in me. Above and beyond that, the reason I got into the business originally other than my fascination with it was the fact that I think the media can make a lot of difference in peoples’ lives and make communities a better place to live and can have a lot of positive impact. We do an awful lot of local things, a lot of public service things. For instance, on our stations we broadcast over 350 local sporting events a year, which is probably more than any radio station in the country. These are local games, not nationally fed games—they’re high school games and college games, for the local college. I think that’s one of the main reasons other than my love and fascination for it is the fact that I could see that it had a great potential to improve the community where the media is located. It bonds people together; it gives them an advertising venue and also passes along information. As long as people are informed as to what is going on, it’s a better place.

Kesler:          Obviously with any business or organization there are ups and downs throughout the years. When and what were the ups and downs with radio throughout your career and do you have any examples?

Barton:         Well, I could tell you something really quite interesting. Because I taught at BYU and was on the faculty there for about three or four years, a lot of my co-workers on the faculty had a lot of experience with broadcasting and when I told them about my ambition to build a radio station in central Utah, just about every one of them told me that it was a great ambition, but felt that I would fail financially. I had done the market research and I’m a hard worker and I proved them wrong. I didn’t go into it to prove them wrong, I just felt confident that we could be successful, so that was a little scary because they certainly had a lot more knowledge and background than I had, but we were successful. For a number of years it was a real struggle because as my saying goes, “I had more watts than people.” I guess the success we had was just our local involvement in the community and the fact that South/Central Utah really didn’t have a strong local radio voice. So we built out our stations. They are high-power stations. They are big stations with a lot of translators. They reach into little communities. For example, we’re the only local radio station that Escalante, Utah has. We go into all these little communities all the way down Highway-89, and provide them with some local service—we carry their ballgames and that type of thing. I think that’s led to our success, but you know financially it’s interesting because the amount of money we can charge for advertising is considerably less than the Salt Lake stations, but I have the same translator that KSL has, I have the same automation equipment that they have, I have the same audio console that they have. So our costs are the same, but our revenue opportunities are considerably less. We have to run it pretty lean and mean. I’m the custodian, I’m the manager, I record the commercials, I’m the salesman, I’m the engineer. We have a staff of 22 now, but still. I enjoy doing a lot of different things, but we’ve also had to wear a lot of different hats to be successful. The 80s were particularly hard for us because the economy was a little slow and the last two years have been really hard on radio and television…well, it’s been hard on the whole country. So we’ve had to tighten our belts and be a little more resourceful in the things that we’ve done.

Kesler:          To wrap this up, where do you see the future of radio and where do you think it’s going?

Barton:         Well, you know it’s interesting. Radio owned everything and then television came along and everyone said that would be the end of radio, but actually, radio has maintained and has continued to be very strong and it’s still as strong as it once was. A concern that I do have, and I think most of the broadcasters have, is that with the social media like iPhones and iTunes and all of these different avenues where people can get entertainment, we’re concerned because a lot of the youth that are coming out of school now…they’re not traditional radio listeners. They’re plugged in with their ear buds and so we’re trying to get radio into that equipment so that we’re a part of that. One concern that we have is that the young people are so tied up with this type of technology that they really don’t know what’s going on in the world and a lot of them don’t really care. They don’t listen to the news, they don’t watch the news…they just plug in their tunes or communicate on the computer. That’s a big concern that we have. I think that radio can help with that, but I don’t know…it’s a big challenge with satellite radio and everything else. Our numbers are still holding strong. I think rural Utah and rural markets have been less-impacted than the city. But still, it is a concern.

Kesler:          I really appreciate you talking to me. This has been fascinating for me. I’ve really enjoyed this class and learning about the history of radio and TV so to talk to someone who has actually been through it is really interesting for me.

Barton:         Another interesting thing is that right after I graduated from BYU, I tried buying the radio station that I grew up listening to. They had just barely sold it so I couldn’t buy it, but it was KSBC in Richfield, and in the mid-90s they came to us and we had the opportunity to buy it. It’s one of the early historical stations in Utah. It’s over 65 years old and so we have a lot of the old equipment, old programs and the early history of Utah broadcasting. We have a museum studio which displays all of the old technology and the old scripts. I also have a World Series game from 1947 that played on the air that was recorded on an electrical transcription—a disk—and then mailed to the radio station and they played it three days later since they didn’t have the networks in those days.

Kesler:          That is fascinating. So you now own the radio station that you listened to as a young boy?

Barton:         Yes, I do.

Kesler:          That’s really neat. Thanks so much, Mr. Barton. I really appreciate your time.