My thanks to Don Kennedy, a famous Atlanta broadcaster for sharing these comments from his blog.
You can find him at:
www.bigbandjump.com
RADIO’S TALENT PINCH
Edison Media Research came up with a prediction not surprising to veteran radio people. They said the most serious obstacle radio faces in the next decade is not satellite or internet or iPods but lack of talent. When that prediction was published some personal experiences came to mind.
Not long ago I was a guest on a British radio program hosted by a most talented ‘presenter’ and in the course of our pre-broadcast planning she mentioned her program was voice-tracked. She was surprised when I told her we still did the program on a ‘real-time’ basis. Therein lies one of the problems in development of new talent; nothing to do with the already talented British broadcaster, but certainly at the heart of the predicted lack of radio’s future talent.
There’s no way to learn radio without identifying with your listeners, and that’s best accomplished when a program is ‘live.’ Of course it’s more efficient to have an announcer voice-track using a set group of recordings, the so-called ‘play-list,’ but there’s no connection between the talent and the music or the audience. It’s much quicker and certainly a more sure way of appealing to a certain demographic to ‘rip-in’ a proven list of vetted hits, but there’s no personal involvement between music and host. The music is selected by a program director or some music service on the basis of what has already succeeded on the air, not a program of tunes the announcer likes and can talk about with feeling and enthusiasm. This pre-selected list inputted to the computer doesn’t lend itself to true personality radio or personality development.
The second experience germane to the talent problem (and related to the above) was the discovery that a key station in a major market selected their music content by playing excerpts of recordings on the phone to a random list of listeners. The listeners, as might be expected, picked the tunes they already heard leading to repetition and a downward spiral into a morass of mediocrity. Again, no connection between the announcer and the content.
Technology has allowed radio stations to operate virtually without a staff, particularly on the weekends and overnight, the very times many budding announcers in the past honed their talent. They were able to experiment before a ‘live’ listening audience as they tried different approaches. There is, as one sage expressed it, “No place to be bad anymore.”
It is your personality that attracts you to others, a personality developed in contact with others over a period of time. By the same token a personality attractive to radio listeners must have a chance to develop with listener interaction over a period of time. There’s little opportunity to do that in today’s automated, click-snap-pop computerized radio.
