RELENTLESS RADIO

 

Author:	Jerry Williams
Published:	August, 1998

 

You work hard developing your station's sound and image, devising promotions, constructing playlists and hot clocks, writing liners. And then you entrust all of your efforts, the fruit of all your labors, to a bunch of disc jockeys. If your air staff is made up of living, breathing human beings, you need to be conducting regular air check critique sessions.  THE VALUE OF CRITIQUES  Regularly scheduled individual critique sessions with each of your jocks are your most effective means of continually monitoring, tweaking, and improving the sound of your station. Anybody can fax the playlist to CRR; molding an entire air staff, now that takes a real PD. Think of air check sessions not only as a way of helping your staff improve, but also as a means to better accomplish your own goals of making your station the best it can be, increasing your own value to the station and your GM, and making yourself more marketable if you have aspirations for bigger markets in your future. The better your air staff sounds the better your station sounds and the better you've done your job.  For air check critiques to be really effective, they must done regularly. Once a week with full time jocks, at least monthly with part timers.  Jocks may act like they dread doing air checks with the PD, but they actually crave the FeedBack to their work. You know jocks, they're the creative-sensitive-insecure types. They can sit in a small room for hours at a time talking to people they can't see. And many of them have the potential to be talking to thousands of people every day, and to keep those people listening, and coming back day after day, to your radio station, if you take the time to unlock that potential.  Being the sensitive types that they are, jocks need constant reassurance. By regularly scheduling AND conducting critique sessions, you're showing, in a very tangible way, that each of your jocks is important to you, that you value his contribution to the station. Jocks know how overworked and underpaid you are, and by taking the time to regularly meet with them, one on one, to talk about their performance, you're building morale and their loyalty to you.  Your air staff wants to get better. They care how the station sounds, and want it to sound better. They want to move on to more strategic dayparts, bigger markets. Regular air check sessions will help them realize those goals.  Your time with your jocks must be guarded jealously. Schedule the critiques. Keep the appointments. Be on time. Don't allow any interruptions during the sessions. Don't let anything bump them. If you do, you're telling the jock who's been bumped, or forgotten, or kept waiting, that whatever the interruption was is more important than him and his contribution to the radio station.  PREPARE FOR THE SESSIONS Your studio is equipped with a cassette deck that's capable of producing a skimmed tape, one that records either from a radio (tuned to your station) or directly off the board, only when the mic is on, doesn't it? If not, bookmark this page, sign off the net, run into the engineer's office (or call him on the phone if you had to go to a contract engineer in that last round of budget cuts) and don't leave (or hang up) until he's promised to install a skimmer deck before the end of the day today. And then hound him every day until it's installed. Several times a day. Call him at home, late at night. You can't do your job without this simple piece of equipment.  Next, use the same procedure on who ever you have to at your station to order enough good quality cassettes for each jock to have enough to record every show for a week without needing to erase a tape.  Now distribute the tapes to your air staff, with instructions for each jock to record every shift they do. That way you can critique any shift at random, not just one that jock knew would be the subject of an aircheck session. Jocks tend to pay extra attention to formatics if they think they're going to be critiqued. This also ensures that your jocks will always have current tapes, just in case  Develop your own system for which tape you'll critique each week. Listen to the tape in advance of the session (not 10 minutes before hand, the day before) and make notes. Look for the obvious points to cover: stumbles, mispronunciations, unpreparedness, forgetting to give calls, etc. But also note those subtle things: how could this break have been better, could this have been said in less words, is the jock being local, relevant, speaking to your core demo, does he know who the core demo is and understand how to communicate with them, etc.  Of course this means that regularly critiquing your staff will take much more time than what you actually spend with them during the sessions, but it also means that your sessions will be more effective, efficient, and productive.  CONDUCTING THE SESSIONS There are several methods for conducting the actual critique session. Our suggestion is that you vary the methods you use. We've listed four here. A nice mix would be to do a Break by Break critique every other session, and then rotate the other methods on alternate weeks.  Break by Break: Go through a whole tape, stopping after each break, and reviewing your notes with the jock. Allow the jock to give FeedBack to your notes after each break. This type of session is wonderful for strengthening formatics, and it gives a very balanced view of the jock's performance. It also is the most time consuming, both in the preparation and session stages. You may want to limit your critique to the first two hours of a shift one session and then the last two the next session.  Best of/Worst of: Choose the two best breaks and the two worst breaks from the tape and explain why you chose them. Tell the jock what it was that made the best break so good, how to improve the worst break and what he can do to make all of his breaks sound like a "best of". The best of/worst of shows the jock his strong points and weak points within the context of the same shift. It also offers a nice change of pace; jocks expect to get hammered in these sessions, but by spending time on what he did right, he'll be more open to improving the worst of.  Overview: All jocks develop speech patterns and habits, verbal crutches that can become annoying. Some jocks become especially adept at certain things; tying a song to a spiritual truth without being preachy, do great song teases. The overview method is especially useful for pointing out those tendencies, bad habits, and special talents. Have some example breaks cued or, better still, dubbed to a separate tape for discussion.  Do-It-Yourself: After you've listened to and made notes on a particular tape, give it to the jock in advance of your session with instructions to critique it using one of the methods listed above. At the session, have the jock conduct the critique. You interject your notes after he makes each of his points. This method really forces the jock to listen to himself differently, and will develop an appreciation for the work you've done formatically for the station, and as a coach for him. Don't use this method until you've had at least six sessions using other methods.  FOLLOW UP: By the day after each session the jock should have received from you a memo outlining the areas you covered in the critique, including notes of any feedback he gave. At the end of each critique give the jock one area to work on for the next session. Be sure to include that area of improvement in your notes and monitor his progress in subsequent sessions.  Sounds like a lot of work. It is. But it's the best way to make your station and your staff sound better. And it'll make you a better PD.

 

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