The Hot Buttons

Heart
Purse
Health
Leisure
Family
Local community

Strong content always hits at least one of them!

Riffing, Radio And Restraint

When you're extremely talented at something it's very tempting to press your advantage and show off a little bit.

Nashville-based performance coach Tom Jackson advises his clients not to just do a carbon copy of their hit when on stage, but to change someone's life by creating a larger than life experience. 

Nail that In front of a live audience and you get immediate positive feedback, perhaps a standing ovation.

That can make it very tempting the next time you are in the recording studio to overdo it in the same way, but a savvy hit record producer will ask you to tone it back down, create a more intimate and personal experience, one that can be listened to for a thousand times, becoming more potent which each listen.

Great radio personality isn't a stage performance. 

It's one to one and time is precious.

The difference between good and great on radio is not how long you can do the things you are best at, but how quickly.

No matter how large your radio station cume is, it's best to reach it all - one at a time.

What's Good For Public Radio, Is Good For You Too

"Essentially, we're raising the number of segments per hour," Arvid Hokanson, deputy program manager for KUOW tells Morning Fizz, in an attempt to keep up with the way audience surveys say people listen to radio—in short bursts, while they're making breakfast or in the car. "Our frequent listeners now are people who listen more times per day."

KUOW will effectively condense four hours of daily local programming into two.

Do the math.  If you want to keep up with a top-rated public radio station in PPM, it's time to say the same things in HALF the time!

"Brief Moments Of Relevance"

A&O&B's prep producer Dan Vanlandingham (aka Dan Van) has a way of finding and tightly editing celebrity audio clips which defy the conventional wisdom that "PPM doesn't like interviews."

He says, that's because so many interviews on radio take too long and aren't entertaining, which must be the table stakes for any content to get on air.

Just a testimonial to what I stress all the time about prep:

1. Everyone is worthy of an interview, because they can have brief moments of relevance.
2. Old prep can be new again, with a good edit for brevity sake.
3. Questions of the moment can always find a moment in time again.
4. Recycle all great prep, because if they haven't heard it....it's new to them.

The key to creating compelling content is recognizing those "brief moments" at the precise instant and having a system to locate the right voice for it immediately.

Vox Pro Celebrates 16+ Years

Charlie Brown's now-ubiquitous "Vox Pro" Apple Mac-based digital editor, that started out as merely a control room telephone editing station has evolved over the last two decades to something less expensive, downloadable from a website to Windows machines and in many, many other ways quite impressive.

Charlie & his partner Ty Flint first put it through its paces as a part of their 1993 simulcast KUBE (CHR)/KJR (70's) morning show (yes, that's how big they were at that time!).

It started as a mono unit and now handles stereo and quite a bit more memory storage.

I am so proud of the accomplishments of my Bainbridge Island neighbor and inventor Charlie Brown. Congrats on going from a durable Seattle morning star, to having created a great business around a terrific piece of equipment, a must for every control room. Its career has outlasted yours (which is saying something!).