At first, it looks like your average television news traffic report: The bright “Traffic Alert” graphic fades into a man in a suit standing in front of a map.
No accidents or slowdowns today – not unusual for a mid-sized city at 5:45 on a Friday morning.
Then the first notes of House of Pain's Jump Around squeal through the air, and traffic reporter Bob Herzog begins pogoing wildly across the set. As the map zooms in to show Interstate 71, the music switches to Van Halen, and he busts out a David Lee Roth-style scissor kick.
“Ohhhh, hamstring!” Mr. Herzog groans, before segueing to a live traffic camera.
The Cincinnati, Ohio, television reporter has elevated slow news days to high art – or at least entertainment.
Mr. Herzog and his colleagues at WKRC-TV have become stars on YouTube, where their goofy on-air tradition has attracted international attention.
The concept is simple: When there's no traffic news on Friday morning – which happens regularly in Cincinnati, population 332,000 – it's dance-party time in front of the traffic map. As reporter Jen Dalton put it on WKRC's most popular YouTube video, “No major accidents are going on, no major slowdowns, we have nothing, as you can see on the board, to report, so therefore: We Shall Dance.”
And why not? Almost everyone has the equivalent of slow news days: times when you've got to be at work even though there's little to do. Maybe it's the hours before a long weekend, or the day after your department finishes a big project. Instead of going through the motions, playing solitaire on your computer or daydreaming about your vacation, why not seize the moment and do something fun and creative with your downtime?
Fears of ridicule and career suicide are two reasons why not. But Mr. Herzog didn't let that stop him, and now he's fielding career offers from stations that otherwise would have never heard of him.
“It is just crazy,” he said in a phone interview. “I can't believe I'm talking to someone in Toronto about Dance Party Friday.” The phenomenon started last year when a friend showed Mr. Herzog a funny YouTube clip of high-school kids celebrating a “Dance Party Friday.”
“I thought, ‘I should do that once,'” Mr. Herzog said, quickly adding, “Don't get me wrong – I can't dance. At all. I'm bad – I'm really bad.”
(To be fair, what he lacks in formal training and natural rhythm he makes up for in enthusiasm.)
So he shook his groove thing in front of the traffic map one Friday, the morning news team had a laugh, and he thought that was it. But after the next week's dance-free newscast, the complaints started: What happened to the dancing? Why didn't Bob dance this morning?
And thus, Dance Party Friday was born. There are ground rules, which Mr. Herzog discussed with his boss at the start: He dances only when there are no tragic stories in the news and no accidents on the road. No one wants to watch reporters shimmying around images of a kidnapped child or a 10-car pileup.
“He said he trusted me not to cross any lines,” Mr. Herzog said.
A trusting boss is a prerequisite for this kind of thing. More companies should encourage or at least tolerate creative use of downtime, communication skills coach Carmine Gallo says, but many bosses just don't get it.
“Companies that score high for employee enthusiasm typically have stronger financial results, lower turnover and better customer-service scores than ones who don't,” says Mr. Gallo, author of Fire Them Up!, a guide to motivating people at work.
