‘Uncoachable’ is one of the worst possible labels you can get as an on-air personality. Once someone gets that stain on them, despite former ratings success or how amazing their aircheck sounds, it’s very hard to shake. That’s because during…

If we want all of our on-air talent to consistently produce original digital content for station websites and social feeds, we have to create an environment that encourages that content creation. That’s why I believe all on-air studios, and some…

When I’m building a format for somebody from scratch, regardless of what kind of format, one thing they always bring up is tempo. Some will say they don’t want any slow songs out of stopsets, most will tell me they…

Airchecking on air talent seems to be a bit of a lost artform. It’s not rare to meet veteran on air personalities who haven’t been airchecked in years. That’s partly because people convince themselves that they aren’t really necessary for…

As we bounce back from the pandemic, we’re all being asked to do more with less. Budgets are tight, new personnel are hard to come by and in the midst of that we’re all trying to transition our business models…

Regardless of how long we’ve been on air on a particular station, but especially when we’re new to a station/market, the average listener doesn’t care about what kind of day we’re having. They don’t care whether there are technical issues…

It’s critically important to the successful operation of a music-based radio station over long periods of time that we program the music externally instead of internally. However, choosing the music we’re going to play is only one of the many…

Talk to virtually any radio group owner or operator and they’ll say the same thing, ‘We’re not doing near enough with digital.’ Have a conversation with anyone on the programming side and they’ll tell you how they need to be…

Typically, I coach on-air personalities to only choose content they can add to and, for the most part, I believe that advice holds up. After all, it’s not like any of our listeners are tuning in to our entire shows…

The challenge when building clocks for the hours a music station has live and local on-air talent is balancing their entertainment elements (music, contests, features, benchmarks and content breaks) with all of the service elements, stationality stuff and of course…

As soon as it started to dawn on everyone that radio is going to have to get on board with embracing the emerging digital side of our business, radio groups across the country started dabbling in digital and calling themselves…

I’ve spent the majority of my radio career as the guy tasked with setting the parameters that help build and protect station brands. As a creative person that wasn’t an easy role for me to adapt to. I much prefer…

When we’re coaching team shows one of the big things we talk about are derails and detours, those little off-topic comments that on air talent can either choose to follow down a rabbit hole or stay the course. But there’s…

For many years there seemed to be a widely held theory within our industry that it was relatively easy to fill certain open positions at radio groups. Mainly because it had been that way for quite a while thanks to…

Since becoming a full-time consultant a few years ago, I’ve been asked to do market reviews for a wide range of markets across the country. While analyzing all that data you can’t help but see patterns emerge. Back in 2019…

We all have those TV shows that we watch when we get around to it or when we can’t find anything else to watch. But, on the flip side, there are those other TV shows that we can’t help but…

Anyone who watched the NFL playoffs this year got to see first-hand the importance of clock management. In a highly competitive professional sport, where everybody is incredibly talented, often mere seconds determine who hits the beach early and who gets…

There’s a longstanding tradition in radio of being somewhat protective and private about how we price our advertising products. Sure, virtually every station has a rate card. But, we all know that the actual rates the station gets vary wildly…

When we’re tasked with doing a live shift on a radio station, our main goal is simple, keep a portion of the audience tuned in a little longer than they intended. If we can do that we bring real, tangible…

One of the first lessons we have to learn as a programmer is to set aside our personal views and make decisions based on what our target audience is most likely to want to hear. That’s especially important if we…

Anyone who’s ever played sports on a really good team, or a really bad one, knows that it takes successes or failures in all areas to become either consistently dominant or consistently lousy. That’s why coaches across all sports are…

Today’s radio stations aren’t just graded on what’s coming out of the speakers. Although on-air is still the most important, it’s no longer enough to just win in that one phase of the business, we have to be competitive in…

When I’m working with brand new air talent, one of the first questions I get is ‘How long should I talk?” It’s an understandable question. After all, they’ve no doubt listened to on-air personalities across formats and dayparts that do…

Whenever I’m consulting a station on digital content the conversation generally starts with everyone throwing out a bunch of zany stunt-like ideas for silly things the on-air talent can go out and do to turn into video content. All of…