The art of growing an audience is not based on a wide variety of people who have no common life experiences, values, and socioeconomic backgrounds. One of the challenges of the news/talk radio format is that it is sometimes tough to define who the target audience member is.
The program director may have a strong definition of that person, but unlike a music format, the content is generated by a group of people who may have diverse understandings of what the audience is.
Conservative people is not a target demographic if you really want a large audience. Certainly, over 50% of the people who voted for Donald Trump came from a wide swath of Americans. There were men, women, differing ages, differing races, diverse economic and educational backgrounds as well. Being the station of people who voted for Trump is not a winning strategy. How do I know? It is very simple, there are radio stations and radio shows built on this concept, and nobody has a 50 share.
Most news/talk stations that are focused on current events have 60% to 65% male listenership. I have heard hosts, general managers and sales managers lament this fact. I once had a host who was damned determined to change that narrative. He had a female news anchor and sidekick and was going to show me that I was wrong. The market manager didn’t want me to coach the show otherwise because of some issues in that cluster.
So, I let this experiment run the course of the book. When I received the results from the spring book, I asked the host how he felt the show did? Did he think that the new direction was working with listeners? The host went on and on about how much chemistry he had with the news anchor and sidekick. He said that he knew that the audience was growing.
Sadly, I told him that the audience hated it. He had a show that was 50/50 between men and women, but the male listeners disappeared, and the number of women didn’t grow at all. This host was shocked. I had to basically produce the show for the fall ratings period. By the way, I don’t like doing that. I want hosts to be creative and have fun.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t move on from the show and the host’s instincts were terrible. The Fall Book arrived and that very same host was just a decimal point away from a bonus. Lesson learned for that host.
What is your listener doing with their lives? What do they do for a living? Are they homeowners? Are they married? Kids? Hobbies? Your specific community has certain activities that may be endemic just to your area. What about the college or professional football teams? What about a baseball team? I don’t know. I do know that for my specific market Mizzou football, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the St. Louis Cardinals are a big honking deal. I also know that deer hunting is big. What is your audience up to? What are the kids up to? The spouse? Do you have a design for your person?
Radio is one one-on-one communication. It is about speaking to a specific individual. If you are speaking to a specific person, is it exclusionary? I certainly hope not. If you are a professional 50-year-old man who loves country music, that is great, but that format is not built to appeal to you. Country music is designed to appeal to younger, working-class women. News/talk radio is built to appeal to men. Certainly, there are women and all age groups that love news/talk radio, but the largest part of the audience belongs to men. If you are not focused on your ideal listener, you are dead.
Why is focusing on a specific listener so important? It comes down to this: the market is completely fragmented. There are so many choices that are not radio that your listeners can choose from at any moment in our connected car world. Visit YouTube. There is a channel focusing on tropical fish with 1.66 million subscribers. Photography channel with a half million subscribers. You can go down the line in your personal interests and find channels like that. Hugely successful and tightly targeted. The fish channel isn’t breaking down anything but aquarium stuff. Well, your focus should be on your station’s target listener only. This philosophy isn’t exclusionary at all.
A strong focus allows you to succeed. If your station speaks to multiple demographics, the station will not be speaking with anyone. Music stations have certain advantages because the music is the star. The content between songs is tightly controlled and is brief.
Your show or radio station must be very focused for traction with an audience in 2025. There are too many options that are too easy to access. If the radio station does not interest or entertain me, I have thousands of podcasts to choose from and personal playlists, not just other radio stations.
Focus delivers a consistent message in content that creates uniformity. Just like a rock station isn’t tossing in a Whitney Houston song to appeal to a different demographic that could be listening to their station, don’t do the same thing while discussing something totally out of demo.
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Peter Thiele is a weekly news/talk radio columnist for Barrett Media, and an experienced news/talk radio programmer. He currently serves as News/Talk Format Captain for Zimmer Communications. Prior to joining Zimmer, Peter held programming positions in New York City, San Francisco, Des Moines, 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.
