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One of
the quickest ways to focus your radio station and give your air
talent an objective way of discerning what to talk about on the air
is the simple rule of
RELEVANT then INTERESTING.
By choosing only content that is relevant to your listener forces
the talent to put the listener ahead of themselves. This profound
realignment of priorities changes the paradigm from what is
interesting to the talent to what is relevant to the listener. In
other words, this puts you in the position of serving your
listener’s interests and expectations, quite an appropriate mindset,
I’d say, for a Christian radio station.
Hearing irrelevant content on the air is the result of air talent
first looking for things that are “interesting” and then trying to
make them relevant (if at all). That is how one ends up hearing
things like Shirley Temple’s birthday, National Pickle Week, and
what I did on my summer vacation. Without an objective filter of
relevance to the listener, the talent resorts to becoming sort of a
content assembly line, paying little attention to whether what they
say enhances the listener’s experience or fulfills their
expectations of the station. Ego rears its ugly head when we assume
that the listener will care about anything we decide to talk about.
It’s not true in life and it’s certainly not true in radio
listening with a push button an arm’s length away. Ask anyone who
has watched kids squirm during a children’s sermon, or adults squirm
as it gets dangerously close to lunch and kick off time. Or
consider how quickly you change the TV channels with remote in hand
as you scan pass programs that aren’t relevant to your specific
interests.
As a budding 23 year old disc jockey I was hired at my first “big”
station where everyone on the air was better than me. Frankly,
they were all so much better that my insecurities, all air talent
have them, had me convinced that when I showed up in my U-Haul
trailer with my bean bag chair and albums I would be greeted at the
station door with the news that they had me confused with someone
else and had actually hired me by mistake. I’m not making this up,
as Dave Barry would say. After the ink on my deal was securely
dried, I got up the courage to ask my new PD, “Why in the world did
you hire me?” He smiled and responded, “It was one break you did on
your audition tape.” He had heard me give a phone number on a
throwaway PSA followed by, “you might want to write that down on the
dust on your dashboard.” That one unassuming break told my soon to
be first programming mentor what he needed to know about this young
air talent: that anyone who thinks about what his listener is doing
while on the air is someone who was ready to learn all the other
stuff he was ready to teach me. I heard that refrain repeated
decades later in Chris Rice’s “Other Side of the Radio.”
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John is a partner in Goodratings
Strategic Services, and has been a successful major market disc
jockey and program director for such companies as CBS, Cap Cities,
Westinghouse, Sandusky, Gannett, and Alliance during his 38 year
broadcast career. John joined Goodratings’ partner Alan Mason in
1999.
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