It’s good to remind ourselves of the basics.
One of the quickest ways to focus your radio station and give your air talent an objective way of discerning what to talk about is the simple rule of…
RELEVANT then INTERESTING
Choosing only content that is relevant to your listener forces the talent to put the listener ahead of themselves. This profound realignment of priorities changes the paradigm from what is interesting to the talent to what is relevant to the listener.
In other words, this puts you in the position of serving your listener’s interests and expectations, quite an appropriate mindset, I’d say, for a Christian radio station.
Hearing irrelevant content on the air is the result of air talent first looking for things that are “interesting” and then trying to make them relevant (if at all).
That is how one ends up hearing things like Shirley Temple’s birthday, National Pickle Week, and what I did on my summer vacation. Without an objective filter of relevance to the listener, the talent resorts to becoming sort of a content assembly line, paying little attention to whether what they say enhances the listener’s experience or fulfills their expectations of the station.
Ego rears its ugly head when we assume that the listener will care about anything we decide to talk about.
It’s not true in life and it’s certainly not true when people are deciding which radio station to listen to.
