You run a sports talk radio station and it’s this past Saturday evening. Did you talk about the Doncic-AD trade right away, or at least as soon as the play-by-play you might have been airing was over? Of course you did. Whether it was a local show or, more likely, a show on one of the national sports radio networks, it was, with few exceptions, live, and everybody in sports talk recognized a bombshell story when it happened.
Listeners expect to hear talk about massive stories like that and hear it right away while they scroll through social media posts about it and keep checking Shams Charania’s feed. (That resounding silence you saw on MY social media feeds was of the “I can’t believe this is happening and I have no words” variety.)
Meanwhile, big stories were breaking in the news. The plane crash on Cottman Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia happened on Friday night. Trump imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico over the weekend, and Trudeau and Sheinbaum responded on Saturday. Add to that the continuing shock over the D.C. crash, Elon Musk and his lieutenants getting control of the Treasury Department’s payment system (and the personal, previously protected information on tens of millions of government funding recipients), an approaching meteor that could (unlikely, but could) be the answer to all of our problems by wiping us out… the weekend was packed with things to talk about.
Was your average political talk radio talking about that or sticking with infomercials, “best of’s,” and taped syndicated fare? Because if your audience expects you to be talking about the news, and you’re not, the listeners will learn that they won’t always get what they come to you to get. That is not what you want your reputation to be.
This is not a new problem. Talk radio, with a few exceptions, has been doing nothing with weekends for years. It’s when General Managers and GSMs get to pad the revenue figures with some of that sweet, sweet gold bars and boner pills money. It’s where they can dump “specialty programming” in an attempt to widen the range of potential sponsors. It’s when everyone assumes that people want a respite from the news of the day, and they’re probably right – no, they’re definitely right – unless there’s very big news. Then, they want news talk, not the garden show or a half-hour commercial for vitamins.
The solution is not to get rid of the specialty programming or even the infomercials, but to be ready with live voices when big news breaks. It can be local or network, but it has to be there and someone has to have the authority to yank regular programming and immediately go with news coverage and/or taking calls.
People don’t expect talk stations to be talking about the news on weekends – that ship sailed many decades ago, and good riddance – but you need to be ready to go live 24/7. Emergencies don’t follow a calendar or the clock. Big stories no longer get limited to weekdays. The “Friday afternoon news dump” has been supplanted by around-the-clock social media, where stories will break and get noticed at any time. Talk radio stations should be ready for that.
Remember, podcasts can’t do live coverage, but radio can. Take advantage of that, even if you have to spend a little more money than you want to in order to have a live body in the building, just in case.
And, see? Didn’t have to mention Minot once.
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Perry Michael Simon is a weekly news media columnist for Barrett Media. He previously served as VP and Editor/News-Talk-Sports/Podcast for AllAccess.com. Prior to joining the industry trade publication, Perry spent years in radio working as a Program Director and Operations Manager for KLSX and KLYY in Los Angeles and New Jersey 101.5 in Trenton. He can be found on X (formerly Twitter) @PMSimon.
