F
FloridaBear1776
Guest
Let's face it, if you're a locally owned AM station with a small signal, your options are limited.
If you pick up syndicated product, the good shows are already taken, leaving you with the fifth-rate Blanquita Cullums of the world of talk. If a syndicated show you pick up happens to get hot, a bigger station or company will take it away.
Local talk would seem to be the alternative, but it's expensive to find and hire good hosts. Even wannabe talk hosts fresh out of college (remember those?) might be too costly for the average also-ran AM. Brokered shows pay the bills, but drive what little audience there is away. It's sort of like eating your seed corn or not letting the fields lay fallow.
The alternative: Build a talk radio format around callers, not hosts. Hire
"moderators" as cheaply as possible to handle formatics in and out, sort of like C-Span, only with a little more interaction. The host would be the equivalent of a music-radio liner card reader. You don't need great talk show geniuses to get you in and out of calls and repeat phone numbers. Don't hire a board op if you can help it; instead spend a little money on delay systems.
Remember THE CALLER IS THE STAR.
That's not such a new idea. Most local talk radio stations before about 1985
were caller-driven. Those types of shows were driven out under the relentless whip of consultants promoting the cult of the host and making their unemployed DJ buddies into superstars, as well as the arrival of the earliest syndicated product (ABC Talkradio, Rush Limbaugh, Sun Radio Network, etc.)
The disadvantages: Potential for the callers to skew older, and the tendency for a few "regulars" to dominate the station.
The advantages: The "regulars" can be promoted the way you would a host. Promote them the way music formats promote their artists. Talk about their viewpoints, their idiosyncrasies, etc. Make them famous. These days, a regular caller isn't that much worse than the amount of talent you're likely to get for minimum wage, and best of all, the caller costs you NOTHING other than the cost of a phone call. Granted, you can't require exclusivity of a caller. But, your listeners are not going to hear your local callers on the station that runs Rush, Sean, Glenn and Savage all day.
There are some stations that employ this approach still today, such as KDWN in Las Vegas, but in those cases I don't think they deliberately set out to do so. Rather, these are the products of holdover ownership stuck in the 1970s.
My rules for a "caller driven" station:
The host may counterpoint and even argue with callers, but he can't hang up on a call unless another caller is waiting, or unless the caller says something indecent or libelous, or if there's a break coming up. The host can't filibuster or monologue, he has to have a caller on the line. If there is no call on the line, the host has to beg for calls until he gets one, read e-mails or play podcasts from listeners. The host cannot be the star under any circumstances.
Callers who want to debate can and should be conferenced together. If you get a really controversial caller who calls in all the time (say, a neo-Nazi, Communist, or someone who is obsessed with their own agenda), the station should emphasize that the way to answer that voice is with another voice.
"If you don't like what Bob the Bigot or Mike the Maoist is saying, call in now!" I have a feeling that most of your regulars won't come from that cutting edge though.
Callers would be told through on-air promos or other notification that they concede the station the right to use their voice and "handle" in promos and other station promotion. (This would preclude cases like the retired AFTRA announcer who called into a show once and got mad that his voice was used in a station promo.)
In short, run all local all day, but with the caller the star. They cost nothing, and the big station that runs syndicated all day can't steal them away very easily.
<P ID="edit"><FONT class="small">Edited by FloridaBear1776 on 06/26/05 04:14 PM.</FONT></P>
If you pick up syndicated product, the good shows are already taken, leaving you with the fifth-rate Blanquita Cullums of the world of talk. If a syndicated show you pick up happens to get hot, a bigger station or company will take it away.
Local talk would seem to be the alternative, but it's expensive to find and hire good hosts. Even wannabe talk hosts fresh out of college (remember those?) might be too costly for the average also-ran AM. Brokered shows pay the bills, but drive what little audience there is away. It's sort of like eating your seed corn or not letting the fields lay fallow.
The alternative: Build a talk radio format around callers, not hosts. Hire
"moderators" as cheaply as possible to handle formatics in and out, sort of like C-Span, only with a little more interaction. The host would be the equivalent of a music-radio liner card reader. You don't need great talk show geniuses to get you in and out of calls and repeat phone numbers. Don't hire a board op if you can help it; instead spend a little money on delay systems.
Remember THE CALLER IS THE STAR.
That's not such a new idea. Most local talk radio stations before about 1985
were caller-driven. Those types of shows were driven out under the relentless whip of consultants promoting the cult of the host and making their unemployed DJ buddies into superstars, as well as the arrival of the earliest syndicated product (ABC Talkradio, Rush Limbaugh, Sun Radio Network, etc.)
The disadvantages: Potential for the callers to skew older, and the tendency for a few "regulars" to dominate the station.
The advantages: The "regulars" can be promoted the way you would a host. Promote them the way music formats promote their artists. Talk about their viewpoints, their idiosyncrasies, etc. Make them famous. These days, a regular caller isn't that much worse than the amount of talent you're likely to get for minimum wage, and best of all, the caller costs you NOTHING other than the cost of a phone call. Granted, you can't require exclusivity of a caller. But, your listeners are not going to hear your local callers on the station that runs Rush, Sean, Glenn and Savage all day.
There are some stations that employ this approach still today, such as KDWN in Las Vegas, but in those cases I don't think they deliberately set out to do so. Rather, these are the products of holdover ownership stuck in the 1970s.
My rules for a "caller driven" station:
The host may counterpoint and even argue with callers, but he can't hang up on a call unless another caller is waiting, or unless the caller says something indecent or libelous, or if there's a break coming up. The host can't filibuster or monologue, he has to have a caller on the line. If there is no call on the line, the host has to beg for calls until he gets one, read e-mails or play podcasts from listeners. The host cannot be the star under any circumstances.
Callers who want to debate can and should be conferenced together. If you get a really controversial caller who calls in all the time (say, a neo-Nazi, Communist, or someone who is obsessed with their own agenda), the station should emphasize that the way to answer that voice is with another voice.
"If you don't like what Bob the Bigot or Mike the Maoist is saying, call in now!" I have a feeling that most of your regulars won't come from that cutting edge though.
Callers would be told through on-air promos or other notification that they concede the station the right to use their voice and "handle" in promos and other station promotion. (This would preclude cases like the retired AFTRA announcer who called into a show once and got mad that his voice was used in a station promo.)
In short, run all local all day, but with the caller the star. They cost nothing, and the big station that runs syndicated all day can't steal them away very easily.
<P ID="edit"><FONT class="small">Edited by FloridaBear1776 on 06/26/05 04:14 PM.</FONT></P>
And you ARE pretty much limited to chronic regulars in this situation. Been there, done that, bought the box of T-shirts at a small Northeast Ohio talk station 15 years ago...