Anytime I’m coaching a show that is lucky enough to still be live and local every weekday I ask them this question: What can you do live that tracked shows can’t do? Partly because I want them to keep their jobs and continue to be live. The quickest way to get replaced by voicetracking is to not do anything in your live show that couldn’t be voicetracked ahead of time since that costs the station less money. But mainly because it makes for much better radio that also happens to translate better to digital platforms. The two big things voicetracked shows can’t do is interact with their listeners in real time and topical content. Those two things also feed off each other. However, far too many live and local shows not only sound like they’re voicetracked, they sound like they’re voicetracked way in advance because they avoid topical content completely. Here’s why they avoid it and a couple thoughts on how to coach them out of it.
The silly reason on-air talent avoid topical content is because they think it’s overdone. They’d rather search far and wide to find something no one else is talking about rather than identifying the thing everyone in their audience is talking about and hitting that early and often. Which is a mistake. The audience is talking about it because they have an interest in it, making it relatable and making them more likely to call in with their opinion. Hence how topical content feeds interaction. A lot of talent would rather talk about weird news than the big stories everyone has an interest in and opinion on. Nothing wrong with doing a one-off weird news segment but it’s not something to build a show around.
The more legitimate reason talent avoid topical content is because they are scared of offending someone by getting into anything political. Which is extra challenging right now because seemingly everything has a political angle. ‘I can’t talk about the Emmys or the Oscars because Hollywood leans left and my audience leans right,’ or ‘I can’t talk about current events because half the country feels one way and the other half feels another way.’ Next thing you know there are so many subjects off limits that we’re left with just a handful of things that no one cares about, like what boring national day it is. Pushing a show into a place where it’s irrelevant, too watered down and wholesome to entertain anyone and never makes the audience feel any emotion whatsoever.
A better approach is to find our angle to personalize or localize any topic to make it relevant to our audience. I always tell talent when we know our audience well enough there’s no subject that’s off limits. There’s nothing wrong with being a little edgy as long as it’s strategic and calculated. One trick on stations where we know a topic is going to be too polarizing is to let the listeners have the edgier takes, which they will have, and let the talent stay ambiguous and middle of the road. But, for the most part there’s nothing wrong with having a take. That’s the value on-air talent add to the content they choose. Otherwise, we’re just relaying information, which an AI voice could do.
The ability to be topical is live radio’s big advantage over tracked radio, canned podcasts and pre-recorded video shows. But industry-wide we’ve seeded much of that advantage by largely avoiding topical content or burying it in a single, once a show break just to check a box. I am by no means saying shows should only choose topical content. Shows should mix in a healthy balance of evergreen content as well, but it can’t all be evergreen.
What do you think? How should talent approach topical content? Comment below or email me at Andy@RadioStationConsultant.com.