Late To The Party

Right now, I know how talk show hosts who work in the evenings (and sometimes those who work in afternoons) feel.

By the time it's your turn, all the "good" topics are talked out. Exhausted, spent, done. Everyone else - talk radio and social media in particular -- has already done all the angles you can think about, and then some. All you can do is regurgitate used takes. And it seems like there's nothing new to add. (There's one exception -- prime time cable news hosts. They just take whatever happened that day and promote extreme positions. You're not them, and you probably don't want to go there, however financially successful they might be.)

The general news cycle has returned to this after several years of constantly breaking news during the Trump administration. Stuff kept happening, news kept breaking, scandals begat scandals, new material generated itself. We're not entirely back to the way things used to be, but we're definitely not in the 24/7 news cycle like we complained about not too long ago. And so we have the evening host's lament, and the Friday columnist's complaint.

This week, right out of the gate, we had the Ozy Media/Carlos Watson scandal. I had some observations I thought would make a good column, stuff about how so many media companies are less than truthful about their audience figures and how it shouldn't matter because ads should be sold on demonstrable results and attribution and not programmatic, but then roughly a kazillion opinion pieces and social media posts beat the Ozy thing to death. As I began to write that column, I realized it was just a little too late.

Okay, then, plan B: The Facebook-Instagram-WhatsApp outage. That dominated the news cycle... on Monday. By that evening, things were getting back to normal. Having scrapped the Ozy piece, I figured that the social media blackout would lead to some cogent observations on how the outage raised the question of whether your audience would miss you -- on radio, or on a podcast -- if you were suddenly absent. And then, a flood of columns dissecting the meaning of the outage made me consider whether anyone would care by the time Friday rolled around.

Nah.

And nothing came up in the interim that struck me as a good, timely topic. It's Friday morning as I write this, and "I got nothin'" is the theme of the day.

My problem isn't yours, not precisely, because I work in a very narrow category. I don't quite get to write about anything I want. It's a column that's ostensibly about radio and/or podcasting, and is really supposed to be about news and talk and sports programming, and I can only stretch that so far.

You, a host or programmer, probably don't have that restriction. Your dilemma is what to do when the main topics of the day are already toast by the time you open the mic. The grand revelation is this: If you're a talk show host, you don't have to talk about politics. Yes, I know, you're supposed to do "more of what they came for," which is to say that if the station's audience heard angry-guy-ranting at lunchtime, they expect angry-guy-ranting at night. (Weekends, for some reason, have escaped that mandate, or at least the GM decided that the audience wouldn't hold it against the station if they tuned in and got an infomercial.) That misidentifies what people come to your station for. Sure, the core, the ultra-P1s may be looking for partisan, shouty politics, but most people are tuning in for entertainment, companionship, acceptable background noise. They're not going to bail on you if you're entertaining them.

Take advantage of that. When there's nothing left to say about the news that hasn't already been handled by everyone else, do what I can't do in this column. Talk about what else interests you. Talk about your life. Talk about your family, your job, pop culture, fun stuff. It doesn't matter what time of day it is or what day it is, either. It's up to you to determine whether a news topic is burned out or still worth talking about, and if it's the former, you can treat it as an opportunity to have fun doing your job. Maybe the P1s will find it a welcome relief from the stress of the news. Maybe they won't. Make it fun enough and they'll probably stick around, because even people who are deadly serious about political issues need a break from that now and then. Being relatable shouldn't be against the Official Rules of Talk Radio.

I know, having fun on the radio is dangerous. You're supposed to stick to politics because that's what the audience demands. Yet, how many people out there do you think want to only hear about politics, to the exclusion of everything else? Who lives like that? Why not entertain the other 99.99 percent of the available audience?

It might drive your PD crazy, but it might just work.

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Where are you gonna find those less-political topics? Try your own daily life. And then try All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep section. Just go there by clicking here, and you can also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics and find every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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Yeah, I know, the column about not having anything to write about turned into the usual lecture. Honestly, if I took my own advice, you'd have been reading a column about Randy Arozarena stealing home, or how the proprietor of my local burrito joint told me that they instituted a minimum delivery order because people were ordering one burrito at a time. Consider yourself lucky.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon