Archive for category: Audio

You can tell someone else’s story, or get them to tell it themselves – which one is better to you?  Obviously, it’s the latter.  When you hear a great story, make the effort to get the person who experienced the story to come on your show and explore it with them.  Doing so brings you a deeper level of honest storytelling, you find out more details which makes the story come to life, and there’s much more emotion to it.  You might have seen the viral video of Chris Swanson, the Flint, MI cop who took off his riot gear to be with protestors.  Instead of just talking about it, John and Tammy, KSON, San Diego convinced him to come on the show to tell his story.  Hearing his voice made all the difference because he lived it and it ended up being pro-cop, a lost perspective with all the protests.  This changed the break from C-level to A-level.  We all must be better at this kind of prep.  Doing this makes the break much more memorable and gives you something around the topic to totally own.

You cannot ignore the protests.  Some shows fear tackling a topic as big as this, but to build a brand in 2020, you must take a stand.  Don’t conflate taking a stand against racism or for the Black Lives Matter movement with politics.  You can easily wade into the former with your honest feelings without ever touching Trump.  After all, who’d call to say they would no longer listen because they were for racism?  Part of connection around a topic of this size is first being honest with the audience, and then understanding the tone with which you deliver your perspective moderates any “stop listening moment” your audience could have.  John and Tammy, KSON, San Diego handled this perfectly last week when they admitted to listeners that as white people, they truly don’t understand what it’s like to be African American.  So they found a black pastor to come on the show to teach them what they did not get in their everyday American experience.  This never became about politics – it was affirming, uplifting, positive, and, at its end, might even move you to cry.  This is relevance – not fearing the topic, but thinking through how to present it so the audience leaves understanding your values as someone they wish to wake up with everyday on the radio.

You might be doing lots of interviews with the Covid issue.  Compelling and interesting story-telling with experts and listeners really resonate with the audience.  But, you don’t get there by accident and certainly cannot make it happen without prep.  There is a very compelling TV commercial featuring a nurse at a Hartford-area hospital (here).  It is immensely powerful and paints the picture of a day in her life for viewers.  Christine and Salt, 965, TIC-FM, Hartford decided they wanted to talk with Nurse Sophia, considering how moved they were by the commercial.  A good first step in doing an interview is that you must be moved.  What aids this interview is that they are curious people – not on the surface (i.e. tell us what time you wake up, what time do you get to work – these are the kinds of questions that signal you never prepped to figure out how you’d explore her story – so Nurse Sophie could expose her true life past what we see in the spot).  As you will hear in this interview, the team probed about what it was like to be in a room with a Covid patient and what her life was like when she went home after experiencing that each day.  They went deep and you must, too, if you will do an interview that will be impactful, emotional, memorable, and lasting for the audience.

There are stories all over the place of the odd things happening to people around the coronavirus topic.  While you should start transitioning to other kinds of content now, this topic is still relevant, especially if you’re telling a story and having fun.  Charles Calvin got what he thought was an $8-million stimulus check from the federal government instead of his expected $1600.  David, Sue, and Kendra, Magic 106.7, Boston had to hear the story.  What makes this break great is that they let him tell them the story.  Knowing all the details because of prep, they helped him move the narrative forward to its conclusion.  When interviewing anyone, I am listening for many things (is it a well-told, interesting story?  Will the audience laugh at it?  Has it been edited well?).  Chief among the things I am also listening for is how much the talent talk and how much the person being interviewed talks.  I hope for more of the latter than the former.

One quick way to get phones is to ask the audience to help you solve a dilemma.  That’s reflected in this week’s Free Idea.  The TJ Show, AMP 103.3, Boston gets this, too.  Loren from the show enjoyed a delicious cupcake given to her by a listener.  This wasn’t your ordinary, average cupcake.  It was a cupcake a cut above anything else she’d every had.  One thing this show does quite well is find these quirky content items and, instead of them just being one on-air break where they talk about it, they make it something much bigger.  Like Loren giving out all the details, then asking listeners to help find the person who made the cupcake so they could have more, even moving this to talk with that person once they figure out who it is.  This is a narrative in real time, across a period of the show, with the payoff of the conversation.  Setup-details-payoff (beginning-middle-end), which is the perfect structure for all breaks.  Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David understood the power of taking something small and turning it into unique content.  This show does, too.