| President’s
Corner
 Everybody
in public radio is talking and worrying these days about the future of
our old-fashioned med-ium in the swiftly evolving digital world. How will
we attract and keep listeners when they can tune in hundreds of CD-quality
satellite radio stations and thousands of stations from around the world
on the internet? Certainly many stations will focus on improving, increasing,
and more intensely promoting the local aspects of their programming, which
makes great sense. But there’s another opportunity here: our listeners’
need for human connection.
Public radio listeners tend to be highly educated and to work in highly
paid but demanding fields. Higher education and the careers it leads to
often mean multiple moves, often to random distant places. Higher income
through the earning years gives our listeners the opportunity to move again
when they retire. Demanding jobs leave them little time to socialize. Many
of our listeners, therefore, live in communities they have only known for
a few years, far from family and old friends, and they are simply too busy
to develop a circle of acquaintance. In a word, they are lonely.
Public radio has always been good at providing its listeners with a sense
of community, just through its content. We give them a place where they
can feel they are sharing values, interests, and humor with like-minded
people. Unfortunately, the internet also excels at creating such virtual
communities. In fact, in at least one way, the net does it better, because
specialty web sites, chat groups, and listservs can bring together people
who share even the most obscure interests, regardless of geography.
In this intensifying competition to be our listeners’ virtual community
of choice, public radio does have a resource which, properly developed
and managed, can keep us in the game: truly effective on-air personae.
I don’t mean just competent professional announcers who use their voices
well and can structure a break, though these basic elements are essential.
I mean those announcers who have that extra touch on the air which creates
the illusion of a unique three-dimensional human being to whom listeners
react personally, emotionally. Listeners are drawn to these announcers
because they like them or think they are funny or find them entertainingly
irritating—because they enjoy their company, one human to another.
The trouble with developing and managing on-air personae is the elusiveness
of the effect. For one thing, there is a huge range of workable styles,
from the outrageous to the subtle, from the car guys to Bob Edwards; and
it’s going to be different for each on-air voice. For another, it requires
a more difficult managerial approach. You can train a mere announcer by
timing breaks and ticking off required elements. To coach an announcer
in search of his or her on-air persona, you must listen and respond both
professionally and emotionally while the host you are working with risks
exposing aspects of his or her defenseless real self on the air—real voice,
real thoughts, real sense of humor. Then you must accept the difficulty
of measuring the result, of quantifying your listeners’ emotional involvement
with the station.
It’s a complex and risky form of radio, both for the individual on air
and the station as a whole, but what a potential payoff: fans, as in “fanatic.”
I wrote the above before learning of the untimely death of WGBH “Morning
Pro Musica” host and AMPPR board member, Robert J. Lurtsema. My first thought
was to replace this column with a tribute to Robert, but then I realized
that what I had written was already about him as much as it was about anybody.
Robert’s on-air work was a perfect example of successful “persona” radio,
and he was our nation’s most famous (some might say infamous) classical
host because of it. Was he perhaps poised, after so many years of faithfully
doing what he had always done, to re-emerge on the cutting edge of radio?
If so, we have lost not only a unique voice and a stalwart champion of
music, but a steadfast pioneer as well. We’ll miss you, Robert.
Dave Bunker
President |
