Z100's Elvis Duran Talks Radio, Snark, & Pop In The Internet Age

Elvis and his cohosts in the studio.

Traditional radio is on the decline, thanks to Internet-era mediums like podcasts and Sirius XM. But somehow, Z100's Elvis Duran has managed to keep the station's signature morning show going for the last 20 years, expanding from NYC to (for better or for worse) over 80 stations nationwide.

We stopped by Z100's studio (which, it turns out, is not at the top of the Empire State Building, but in Tribeca) to sit in on the show with Duran co-hosts Danielle Monaro, Bethany Watson and Skeery Jones, to name a few, and to chat about surviving on air in the age of the Internet.

How have you managed to keep the show going for the last 20 years? I think, believe it or not, we all genuinely love hanging out with each other. Several people on the show have been here for all 20 years, and along the way some people have come, like Dorothy skipping down the yellow brick road—like, "Here’s the Tin Man, let’s bring him along." We have a list of employees that’s close to 20...how have we kept it together? I think we all have that interest in pop culture, and the need to discuss it with each other, and that desire to connect with people out there who are listening to us with different opinions than us.

If you’re a loudmouth like us, and you love to get things off your chest, and have that microphone as your mouthpiece, you get addicted to it. I can’t imagine a day I couldn't do that. So we kept it going. It stays interesting for me, I guess.

What have you done to incorporate changing technology—the explosion of the Internet and social media, etc—within the show? Well, first and foremost, if I have access to things like Gothamist or any great, rich website I can take from and get ideas from, we pull from those. The more available the merrier! Social media has given us the world at our fingertips every morning. And we watch it change, live. In the morning, in the old days, we’d read the Post and that was what we had. That was great, the Post is fabulous, but now we have the news changing at NYPost.com every hour. I’m watching people’s attitudes change while they’re sitting in traffic and texting us. I’m including text as “social media” in this—we’ve had guests on, and in the middle of the interview, i’ll look up at the texts and people are saying, “This guest is an idiot, get him off there.” And I’ll say thank you for coming in, and I’ll politely end the interview because I can feel the human condition of what’s happening out there in traffic. It’s great, it’s like having a live producer in the studio with us.

(Scott Heins / Gothamist)

So if you’re getting a lot of texts and Tweets that something’s not quite right with the broadcast, you’ll alter it? Yeah we’ll change it, most of the time. You’re never going to make everyone happy all the time, but if you see an overwhelming response to something, saying, "No, you should change that," I’ll sometimes apologize and say something like, “I’m so sorry, a lot of texts coming in, a lot of stuff online, people really hate what we’re talking about,” and we’ll do something else.

Can you think of any specific examples? Why would I bring those up? I’m embarrassed about them!

Well, politics, for instance. Now, in this heated political environment, I’m very careful to remain very neutral. The only thing about politics I do discuss is, be into them. Read what’s online, read what the candidates are talking about, try to understand why people are fighting over what the candidates are standing for. But if anyone hears even a tinge of what they think is a lean to the left or the right they’ll attack me, “How dare you say vote for them, how dare you." And I will go back and bring it up as part of the conversation, like, “Look, people are texting saying they heard me saying something about Hillary. I wasn’t complimenting her as a candidate, I was complimenting something that was said in an interview. That doesn’t mean I’m voting for her.” So we interact and respond to social media, swiftly. We know people typically are listening for 20 minutes at a time, so we got to get to it fast.

I remember during the 2000 election you were having people call in, telling you who they were voting for—is that not done anymore? No, especially not this election season, because I personally feel that this election is pissing people off. So our job on this morning show, even though we probably all have an opinion and a side, is to keep it off the air. People aren’t turning to us for our political opinion, they don’t want to hear us talk about anything except something to get them through the morning, make them happy, make them laugh, maybe make think a little. But I don’t want to pit people against each other.

How do you put a show together? We don’t. That’s kind of the magic of our show. A lot of industry experts look at how we do our show and just shake their head. We don’t really have a plan, we don’t have a grid. I’ll come in in the morning, I have writers send me things overnight from the news or they’ll see stories online, they’ll go to Gothamist, go to other sources, and say, hey here’s an idea, put it in your own spin and put it out there.

I've found in the past that if we planned the show a night before, once we slept and woke up we weren’t in that mood anymore. Because I really think doing a live show means you should be exploring your live feelings and planning is not good.

What are some of the hardest shows you've done? It’s so easy to go back to 9/11—or really, 9/12. It was the hardest show we had to do, but in hindsight it was also the most fulfilling, because we actually relearned the importance of what this communication is all about. Which is helping people, being there for them, no matter how huge the circumstance, no matter how minimal. If people are going into work and they just dread seeing that shitty boss, we’re there to make them laugh, you know, hang on.

What were some of your favorite show moments? When there's feeling. This show, we try to keep it fun. But when we do an about face and we talk about feelings... this morning I got emotional about the music business. Here at Z100, we’re kind of famous for breaking new artists and watching their careers bloom. I got emotional about it because we’ve seen some artists at the beginning, and they became big superstars. We’ve seen the whole thing. I started tearing up, and that was real, that was what I was feeling, and that’s what I try to do with our team—go with it, if you have something on your mind, even if it’s a sad something or a moving something. Go with it. Some of my favorite shows have been the shows of honesty.

Elvis and Bieber. (Courtesy of Elvis Duran)

I remember when Lady Gaga was on in 2010, and she said something about how she'd been listening to Z100 her whole life—have you had a lot of artists who are like, “I’ve been listening to you from the beginning, and now my music's on your show"? This is New York, we have something like 20 million people or so, and obviously some of them are going to become artists and musicians and get hits. Listening to Z100, they all had dreams of hearing their songs on this radio station. Being able to bring Lady Gaga in ,and being able to play her song for the first time on the radio, even though she’s heard this song a million times in the studio, to watch her listen to it as it’s played on Z100, you can see in her eyes. It’s like you’re looking into a snowglobe, two snowglobes of happiness. It’s really great to be on the 50 yard line where we are to see this game in action.

You’re syndicated all over the country now, but I still feel that the show is very New York. How do you keep it feeling so local? A lot of syndicated shows try to pretend to be in the city where they’re playing, which makes no sense. So we incorporate New York in our show, we fold it in.

Elvis with Billy Idol, back in the day. (Courtesy of Elvis Duran)

How has radio changed now that everything is so visual? It’s great. Now we can paint pictures with words and back them up online. It’s still first and foremost an audio medium, but to be able to explain things online, to be able to say, "Hey, go to ElvisDuran.com right now and you’ll see this story, and you’ll see this video, and we can talk about it, it gives us much more to talk about. The visual part makes it much more interesting. I love it more than ever.

The show feels very positive in a so-called age of snark. Do you guys intentionally keep it friendly? I think there is intention there, yeah. Everywhere you turn there’s negativity, people making fun of each other. It’s just too easy to find the negative and it’s too easy to transmit the negative. It takes a little more thought to stay positive, we try to stay positive as much as possible even if we’re in the shittiest of shitty moods.

And you guys talk about your personal lives a lot on the show. Was that a conscious shift, or have you always felt that the personality plus the personal life fit together? I’m not too familiar with the landscape as far as other shows go—I don’t know what they’re talking about over there, but I do know from hearsay that a lot of other shows aren’t about the personal lives of the people presenting them. Because they’re blocking; they don’t think it’s anyone’s business; they’re concerned about privacy, whatever. Our show is supposed to be about open, honest dialogue, and how can I expect people to believe we’re open and honest unless we’re being open and honest? So we draw a lot of our conversations from our personal lives as well.

And you came out on air in 2010. This comes up a lot, about me coming out on air. I was always out, I just never talked about it. Is there a difference? I guess. I guess I did come out, to our audience, anyway. I was in the dating world, and realized, "You know what? There are stories here that could be relatable." So I started talking about my personal life. I was always, in the past, the emcee of the show and would just talk about the personal lives of the other people on the show. I felt like, I was the one who keeps things moving, you know, who wants to get bogged down with my bullshit? But it’s very freeing. It’s great to get things off your chest about what’s going on in your personal life.

(Scott Heins / Gothamist)

What would you tell a kid who’s trying to start out in radio now, in the age of the Internet? Well first of all, I would say, don’t think about it as radio anymore, even if that is still our home base. You look at a map and you see 80-something stations that play our show. But let’s face it, you know those transmitters are going to fall by the wayside someday, and we’re all going to be just online, which is where we wanted to be. And we have a huge portion of listeners listening online. I would say, get involved with a show like ours, and to intern is the best way to do it. 3 or 4 of the people on our show right now who have been here for 20 years started as interns, they’re still here. They won’t leave.

The downside is, in this business, we are downsizing. That’s why you see our show on more and more markets, because they’re eliminating local shows and putting our show on. I’m not a big fan of that, but I’d rather our show be on there than someone else’s so I’ll take it. So, get in there, timing, luck, studying radio and mass communications is a great thing, because the discipline of college, I love. But interning is the best thing, without a doubt.

What are you going to do next? I don’t know. I know I’m going to keep doing this, I’m just not sure where. I’ve been doing the morning show on Z100 for 20 years, so, you know, I’m not quite sure where I am in the Z100 timeline. I’m just the keeper of the Z100 morning show, someone will eventually come along and take my place. But I will continue doing what I’m doing somehow, somewhere, some place.

N.B. No one does Fridays better than Elvis Duran. Here's your 5 o'clock whistle!