You Be You

What will you be doing for a living ten years from now? Twenty? What's your goal?

Everybody asks themselves that once in a while, but for radio talent, it's an especially fraught question. Depending on who's talking, you'll hear that radio won't exist twenty years from now, or it'll be a ghost town, or it'll be thriving and healthy, or that it'll morph into, or merge with, digital and podcasting and video and other media. Truth is, nobody knows. It's a safe bet that broadcast radio will be around, but it's anybody's guess as to what it will be broadcasting.

No, we're not going to litigate the usual debates about radio programming right now. We're going to talk about you. Specifically, we're going to talk about what you want out of your on-air radio career, and how you're going about getting that. (I'm limiting things to on-air here, because if you're in sales or management, you have more options.)

There are times I'll hear a jock tossing off voice tracks, going through the standard radio motions, and I wonder if this is what that talent always meant to do. Or I'll hear a local talk host droning through rote impressions of the national hosts or disinterestedly interviewing someone and I wonder why. That's not to say that it's wrong to not have ambition, and I have heard some very talented people do very creative things in lesser roles. Lord knows, having worked in major markets, I understand the appeal of staying in a smaller market where you can establish a strong long-term community presence and family roots. It's not about striving to be in New York or Los Angeles or syndication. It's about doing the best radio version of you.

That's important, because while practically everyone who gets into radio on the air was inspired by someone or something they heard in their impressionable youth. You heard Stern or Rush or your local morning host and you thought, yeah, I want to do THAT. But everyone learns, some later than others, that "doing THAT" shouldn't mean "imitating THAT." It's doing that job in your own way. It's why, as I've discussed here before, the "next Stern" or "next Rush" won't be someone who sounds like Stern or Rush. If that star comes along, they'll sound like themselves, not their inspirations.

This is true in all creative endeavors. I know that my writing started with heavy reliance on stylistic crutches that I surely picked up from my favorite writers; whatever this voice is today evolved from my own personality. ("You talk just like you write!" is a compliment. At least, I hope it is. Maybe they're telling me "You talk just like you write, and I hate your writing!")

What you do on the radio should reflect your own personality as well. Otherwise, you're an interchangeable part. You're replaceable. You don't want that, do you? (Some will argue that everyone is replaceable; I'll stay away from that for now.) Your project, if you haven't done this already, is to find what makes you different from everyone else on the air, and then apply that to what you do. That's not easy, because it takes some self-analysis and self-awareness that not everyone can do. But I hear a lot of talent, on radio and especially on podcasts, try to skate by with the "hey, I'm just an average guy talking about stuff!" approach, which is... average. You can SAY you're a typical member of your target audience, but you can't BE that. You have to be special enough that people will choose to listen to YOU, not another "average guy" and not just the station (you DO want to elevate yourself from being a cog in the machine, right?). Relatability is important, but it doesn't require you to be average. Being a star in what you do doesn't mean you can't be relatable.

How, then, do you figure out your hook? It's the stuff you don't always think belongs on the air. It's your hobby, your interests, your family. Back in my PD days, I told hosts to go out and have a life, then bring that back into the studio; lose the canned, standard bits and just do real life. I hear a lot of that on the radio now, and that's a good thing. (I don't hear enough of it on talk radio, which is sad, really; I still think there's a vast and under-tapped market for talk radio that doesn't obsess on politics, and podcasts are proving it, and for political talk that doesn't sound like everyone else doing political talk. But that might just be me.) These days, I'd add this: Okay, you can do a podcast on the side talking about stuff that interests you, and maybe it will ONLY interest you. What would the show be about? Take that and see what you can make with it for your radio show. You're a fan of a particular movie genre, or food, or any hobby? Could you endlessly and entertainingly talk about it off the air with passion? Let's hear what you can do with that on the air.

Which all brings me back to the initial question. What will you be doing in the future? If your goal is to just read liners between the hits, good luck; that job may exist, but there might not be many of them. If you want to be something more in the industry of talking into a microphone (or in front of a camera, or projected as a hologram, or fed directly into people's brains by technology surely to be demonstrated at CES in January), you'll need to stand out. You need to leverage what makes you special. Find that and you'll get a better feel for what you can do with that. And in ten or twenty years, if you're still talking into a microphone, it'll be because what you're doing is something nobody else can do, or do as well: being yourself.

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Being yourself on the radio requires, of course, material for yourself to respond to or expound upon or just take into whatever direction your mind takes it, and when you need ideas to jog your brain into gear, there's one place you'll find them in abundance, All Access' show prep column Talk Topics. Just click here and/or follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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You can follow my personal Twitter account at @pmsimon, and my Instagram account (same handle, @pmsimon) as well. And you can find me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pmsimon, and at pmsimon.com. I'm also on Clubhouse at pmsimon, so if you're in there, feel free to follow me.

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Another sign that we're lurching back towards normal: at our local Home Depot, they put all the hand sanitizer in the clearance bin. If you're doing any talk about the post-pandemic era, you might want to ask listeners what other signs of recovery they're seeing. I'm just happy that toilet paper hoarding is an increasingly distant memory.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
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Twitter @pmsimon
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