Part of the appeal of radio is immediacy. We are speaking of what is happening at that very moment in our neighborhood, community, state, nation, and world. Radio’s advantage over a playlist, podcast, or audiobook is we are now. While social media may have happenings as they develop, sometimes finding accurate information is problematic.
Are you living in the moment on your radio show?
Read me out here… When there is a huge news story — for instance, a blizzard — do you have the news guy standing outside to do a live report? Are you taking calls from listeners? Did you drop your guests who are not discussing snow? Whatever that breaking news story is, news/talk radio stations must go full-on with the coverage.
What is “Topic A?” Many hosts have benchmarked segments or guests, and I strongly recommend having these. But you must break the format for big happenings. I worked with an amazing host who insisted on keeping a regular guest on the show while several huge traffic issues caused total gridlock in the community. I generally never interrupt a show unless something is earth-shattering. I went into the studio during the break and told the host to focus on the actual audience. You see kids, if there is a huge traffic event or a weather warning affecting your community, people are stuck in their vehicles trying to figure out what is going on. This is our moment to shine! This is a free marketing campaign for your station.
The music stations in your market are likely voice-tracked and the 30-second, twice-an-hour traffic report will not reflect the frustration and worry of your listeners. If the traffic event is in the morning, people are trying to get into the office. If the traffic mess is in the afternoon, a parent may be rushing to pick up their child or dog at daycare.
Your listeners are exceptionally busy. An unanticipated delay is very worrying. Your radio station is there to reflect their concerns. Oh, this is a perfect definition of a Listener-Focused Experience! The people in your community can’t read a blog to find out about traffic while driving. The listeners should not be surfing the web looking for the reason behind the traffic problem. You are the lifeline for your community. Never forget this.
I get it. You are hosting a drivetime show and there are a lot of moving parts. Sometimes, these things are a judgment call. You don’t want to be the kid who cries wolf. We must be responsible with these service elements and situations. I am all in on making radio fun and poking fun at ourselves on the show. But there are three things that you should never ever minimize: news, traffic, and weather.
Spoken word radio in most markets has cume issues. The news, traffic, and weather are cume-building ingredients for your show and radio station. We must always be thinking about adding more listeners. This must be an intentional strategy.
I often will push back on shows that have an inside language all their own. The reason is that these language devices may make your show or station less accessible to people trying your broadcast. Have you ever been invited to a party where everyone attending has known each other since high school? You arrive and are greeted and then introduced to the people. The conversation sometimes reverts to something that happened in the group’s junior year in high school. The anecdotes and stories are loved by this group of friends. Since you don’t have any personal reference to these relationships, you are unintentionally frozen out of the conversation. This is death to a radio show or station.
Does your station have a playbook for breaking news? Music stations have it so much simpler. It is so easy to focus on playing the right songs at the proper time. The human responsible for scheduling the music is easy to address if things go off the rails. A talk show is like a morning show on a music station. Depending on the spoken word station, there may be one to five local shows. If you are a programmer, the goal is to allow these artists to be as free from interference as possible. Unfortunately, hosts lose focus from time to time.
Does your radio station have a target listener profile? Hey Program Director, when was the listener profile last updated? Does this listener profile reflect the actual data for your market? When was the last time that you dug into the census data? You should know the average age of a person in your community, how many people are in the average household, and how long the average commute is
Does your staff know these data points? Everything needs to be well-defined. This is all a part of providing a Listener-Focused experience.
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Peter Thiele is a weekly news/talk radio columnist for Barrett Media, and an experienced news/talk radio programmer. He recently served as program director for WHO/KXNO in Des Moines, IA. Prior to that role he held programming positions in New York City, San Francisco, Little Rock, Greenville, Hunstville, and Joplin. Peter has also worked as a host, account executive and producer in Minneapolis, and San Antonio. He can be found on Twitter at @PeterThiele.
