The Meaning Of Everything

The easiest thing you can do as a talk radio host, it turns out, is to tell people what's going on right now. That, unfortunately for you, has become the domain of social media.

The thing that's a little more difficult is to explain WHY what's going on is going on. That takes some work, but it offers listeners context and maybe some enlightenment on how we got here.

And then there's the thing that's a lot more difficult, requires more work than a lot of hosts want to put into a topic, and yet is the most important and obvious thing a talk show host can do: Tell people what your topic means for them.

This once again came to mind while I was driving to an appointment in heavy traffic on the 110 freeway, listening to random talk stations on AM and satellite. I heard a lot of talk about Trump's tapes tweet, and a lot of talk about the Senate Republican health care bill; On the latter, I was served up plenty of the sporting angle to it, the Us vs. Them aspect, the wrangling for votes, the recalcitrant Senators and whether they were sincere or posturing, the prospects for passage. What I didn't get was what I wanted most, and that for which I suspect your listeners are looking.

No host was telling me what this bill would cost someone like me. Will I pay more for insurance? Will I get less? Will cuts to programs like Medicaid (or cuts to increases) have an effect on my wallet? If I have insurance from my work, will the bill's changes affect what I get, or my payroll deduction, or whether I'll get insurance from my job at all? v

In short, TELL ME WHY I SHOULD CARE. Yes, you can get reaction from the pure sporting angle, whether you get Trump supporters taunting about the taste of "lib'rul tears" or Democrats screaming that the sky is falling. That's the easy way to go, and you'll get an audience, but it'll be the same audience you always get, the True Believers, older and intransigent and spoiling for a fight. What you won't get is the larger audience, the people looking for answers that are hard to get even on the internet. And that's where you can come in and do what 140 characters on Twitter or a Facebook meme can't.

This works for practically every conceivable topic, political or not, national or local. The NBA draft and the trades surrounding it? Tell them how what another team did will impact your local team. Something happened at a daycare? Do some research about daycare safety, or the expense and difficulty of finding a good program. A big retail chain is closing stores? Discuss not only whether local outlets are involved, but what your town might be facing and what might replace empty malls (and the tax money they used to generate).

Why? Because anyone can point at something and describe it. Explaining why your audience should care is more unique. And since we know listeners will give you all of a few seconds to show you why they should stick with your show before they hit the Scan button again, ask yourself whether they're more likely to be interested by passively watching a political slapfest or by talk they can really use. It's "The Senate did this" versus "The Senate bill would likely cost you X" or "If the Council forces bike lanes onto Main Street, it'll take you X minutes longer to get across town" or... you get the idea.

Try it. You can do what everyone else is doing, or you can generate passion by hitting the audience where they care about the most. That, incidentally, is what politicians do to get elected, find out what concerns their target audience the most and talking about it while their opponents deal in generalities. Someone won a big election in an upset not too long ago in large part by doing exactly that. You might have read about it on social media.

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Start, however, by perusing All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics for things to talk about, all free and all available with a mere click of your mouse by clicking here and/or by following the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item. And there's the Podcasting section at AllAccess.com/podcasts.

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So, basically, I just assigned you homework -- researching your topics to find out the actual impact on the audience -- just as Summer is officially underway. Figures: I was the kid who WANTED to read all the books on the Summer reading list. I haven't changed that much, I guess.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
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