In my other life I announce some baseball games for the St. Louis Cardinals. Last week, a Hall of Famer member of their storied franchise passed away. While he had a significant 21-year playing career, he was mostly known to recent generations for being a broadcaster announcing 29 consecutive post seasons in a row on national television.
In hearing the tributes to Tim McCarver, I ran across an interview with the talented Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post Dispatch where he talked about the craft of being a broadcaster.
“We can become the viewer. That’s what happens with experience. You become the viewer and you can develop a reaction to your own comments with, ‘What? What does that mean?'”
He was describing a skill developed over time of realizing how what you’ve said may not be understood by a portion of the viewers. After all, baseball broadcasts also have their own P1s and their casual fans. He was able to develop a sense for whether what he said was too “inside” for a casual fan.
“Don’t assume that people understand everything you’re talking about.”
So it is for our radio stations.
We can become the listener. We can develop a sense of what matters most to listeners on that particular day. After all, RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW TODAY is the thing we most have in common. (See Frost Advisory #416 – The Power Of NOW)
We can sense which songs have the most emotional impact and then honor them that way on the air. (Too often talent sound like they’re not even listening to the same station as the listener; a pet peeve of mine. Talk breaks can sound like they are dropped in from a Chinese spy balloon with little connection to the emotional shared experience).
If your radio station is one that even the staff doesn’t listen to in the hallways, then you haven’t become the listener.
Because the listener is actually listening.
