Learning From Mr. Rogers

I don't have to tell you to go see "Won't You Be My Neighbor?," the Mr. Rogers documentary, because you've either already seen it or your friends and acquaintances have been badgering you to see it for the last couple of weeks. It is, however, that good, and it will make you cry even if you, like me, spend most of the time not crying and wondering why people insist that you'll be uncontrollably sobbing before the movie's over. (Hint: It's that last segment. It's not sadness, it's... well, you'll see.)

Fred Rogers wasn't a radio host. He was a television host and producer, a puppeteer and pianist, a Presbyterian minister, but not a radio guy. There are lessons in that movie for radio people, but they're also lessons for everyone.

Here's one: Someone along the way had to give this guy, whose idea of children's television was absolutely the opposite of everything else for kids on TV, a shot. Even at the very beginning, children's television was loud, violent, frenetic, and hardly educational, and it got more intense as the years passed; Mr. Rogers was quiet, slow-paced, simple, gentle. Every other show was a barrage of sound and motion; Mr. Rogers was, well, not. The movie doesn't offer the full story -- it skips his working on commercial TV shows in New York and the years in Toronto developing the show for the CBC -- but what's true is that along the way, management, whether it was at WQED or the CBC or NET or PBS, had to take a look at this totally anomalous program and say yes. Someone did.

Compare that with how radio deals with something totally unique and counter to the prevailing wisdom. Anyone taking a chance on a talk show that isn't exactly like the ones on the air already? Radio has two approaches to "different": rejection or, if something somehow manages to break through, copying until it's no longer unique or interesting. The exception might be public radio, but even there, a lot of shows sound the same. At least they've been aggressive in putting "new and different" into podcasts.

Another thing we can take away for radio is obvious, Mr. Rogers' connection to his audience, which wasn't just "knowing his audience." He put in the work. He studied child development, developing his methods based on actual research. That's a lot more than putting pictures clipped from magazines up on your board to remind you of your average listener. How well do you know the people you're trying to reach? Do you know more than just what their political preferences are? Do you know what you can say to really reach them, to connect? Maybe you should audit some psychology courses.

And then there's legacy. You know that Mr. Rogers was a good man. You know that before you see the movie, or read Tom Junod's legendary Esquire profile. You wouldn't be going to see a movie about him if he wasn't special (although, of course, he'd have told you that everyone's special). He could have pursued great commercial success; surely, the hosts on commercial television at the time had higher ratings and made more money. But you're not going to see a movie about them, are you? There aren't movies made about them.

You're not Fred Rogers, and that's okay. But, as he would have told you, you can be special in your own way. Are you? Are you doing things that set you apart? Are you proud of the work you do? Or are you just doing assembly-line radio, parroting the topics and the phone number or playing canned bits? It's not a crime to not be the greatest radio host ever, but what are you striving to be? When your career ends, do you want to be the host people remember? Do you want to be, figuratively, the one they make a documentary about, or the other ones?

That would require doing things differently, thinking different, BEING different. Which is what Mr. Rogers was doing all the time you thought he was just being corny. Go see the movie -- I know, I said I don't have to tell you to go see it, but, yeah, go see it -- and learn and think and consider what you do and whether there's a different way to go about it. Just watch out for that last segment. Bring plenty of tissues.

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One way to be different is to take topics and make them your own and relevant to your audience in your own way. To do that, you need material. And that's what Talk Topics, the show prep column at All Access News-Talk-Sports, provides. I give you stuff to talk about, you make it your own. Simple. Find it 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, too.

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Time is flying, which is a way of saying you only have a few more days to register for The Conclave, July 18-20 in Minneapolis-adjacent, where I'll be on a podcasting panel, so don't wait, do it here and do it now. Meanwhile, thank you to all of you who sent along your birthday greetings this week; they made me feel special. But we're all special. Mr. Rogers said so.

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