If you have been in sports radio for a day, you have been told how important it is to embrace your market. Go out and enjoy whatever nightlife the city has to offer. Know who the most popular TV anchors are. Be versed in the sports history and superstitions of local fans.
Your listeners may have a favorite national host. Those relationships are built on shared opinions and entertainment value. Those same elements will build your audience’s relationship with you too, but the ability to give a strong opinion on where to get the best pizza in town will expedite that process.
Hosts come and go from markets for all kinds of reasons. Some of them are good. If we’re being honest, most of them aren’t. In a business this volatile and with a workforce that is so well-traveled, it makes sense that a lot of hosts will build this type of understanding of multiple markets.
Those kinds of relationships are never a bad thing, but sometimes your old haunts can stand in the way of being embraced by a new market. I can’t tell you how many hosts I have heard that are hung up on a market they used to work in. Sometimes this is apparent on air. Sometimes it shows up as a theme on their Twitter posts.
For instance, on Saturday I was looking at Twitter as college football games were going on. A host friend of mine that moved to a new market within the last year was live tweeting a game from the market he had recently left. His new market is inside SEC country and is obsessed with college football. The game he was live tweeting featured two teams from the MAC. It is a conference that is far away from his new listeners both physically and in terms of interest.
How many times have you heard a producer or co-host bust a guy’s balls for saying something like “When I used to work in Atlanta” or “Back when I was in Chicago”? That ribbing can sound playful, but hopefully it also hammers home the idea that obsessing on these memories and stories are not serving the station and market that are your home now.
The world is smaller than ever. We can follow breaking news from Europe or the Middle East as it happens. We can understand the mood of a stadium on the opposite end of the country as a reliever blows a lead in a playoff game. Paying attention to and creating content for Twitter has become a must in our business and audiences eat it up.
What is your new audience seeing when you are Tweeting obsessively about a story or a team in your old market? Not everyone will jump to the conclusion that you’d rather be there than here, but some will. That is especially true if you’re tweeting about a team you’ve never discussed having an emotional connection to.
JB and I talk all the time about the right audience seeing what we are doing, whether that is buying tickets to the Summit (GET YOURS TODAY!) or reading what we post on the site. Your tweets about a kid transferring to your old market’s hometown team may spur a lot of interaction, but is the right audience your old friends and listeners? How much of that kind of interaction is helping you right now in your current job?
I don’t know if you consider it a blessing or a curse that your chosen career has provided you the opportunity to experience so many different parts of the country. I am certainly not telling you to forget what has happened in the past. Embrace it. It is a part of who you are.
Ours is a business better served by keeping one eye on today and the other eye on tomorrow. Keep what happened at past jobs in old markets in your heart and mind. It can come on air when appropriate, but if you aren’t physically living there anymore, your current audience isn’t benefitting by you still living there in your mind.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
