Talk Radio

Name of show: The Rundown

Target Audience: Male, 25-45 years old

Station: Music based

Role: Package reporter/ Assistant Producer

The first few weeks of this project started off with researching and understand the importance of talk radio, and listening to a range of different talk shows on stations like BBC Radio 4, Talk Radio and Talk Sport. This gave us an idea of how we wanted our shows to sound and what sort of style we would want for our final shows.

To start off our planning, we first needed to decide what sort of topics male 25-45 year old people listen to/ what they are interested in. The topics we decided on were ‘Game of Thrones’, ‘Mental health’, ‘Knife crime’, ‘Brexit’ and ‘Vegan Easter’ as these topics were relevant and had a slight male bias, which is our target audience.

We then decided to dedicate roles to each member of our group, mine being ‘package reporter’ and ‘Assistant Producer’. I worked on an animal therapy and mental health package over the early weeks of working on this show, which included meeting alpacas, mental health experts and doing research on the effects that therapy animals have on people who have mental health issues and how they can help. I edited a rough draft of the package for the pilot shows however leading up to the final show I added a couple beds and tightened up the edits ready for our final show.

My role as an assistant producer also included working alongside our editor and working on documents such as the running order and keeping track of the time throughout the entire show. Other jobs included checking the scripts of the presenters, phoning up guests for our show, making sure that everyone is on track before and during the show and also sorting out and collecting guests for our show and bringing them into the studio.

Overall, I enjoyed my role as a package reporter and I enjoyed getting interviews for my piece, however we also had a Game of Thrones package as well as the therapy animal one and I didn’t have any control over what was being done foe the GOT one. This is a weakness as I should have overseen and had a contribution, however we decided that we were going to split my role as a package reporter between two people so I could focus more on being an assistant producer.

Our group worked well together, with roles being given to the right people and with everyone having a good understanding with what to do on the final day. One weakness is just the amount of stress everyone was under, this could have been down to the lack of people coming to group meetings before the final show and the lack of work being produced by certain individuals. This later on became less of an issue as after a few words and meetings with people from the group during class time, we managed to resolve a lot of these issues and moved forward to perfect our final show.

What I would change about our group and project as a whole would be the work load being spread out on certain people, some people had more work to do than others and I would personally split the work evenly if it was appropriate to do so (this includes running orders and scripts). I would also like to keep the role as a package reporter to just one person rather then the two we had in this project as this caused a lot of confusion between myself and the other reporter.

Things that went well in our practise runs and final project was the outside broadcast and general timings of the shows. In pilot shows, we had issues of not having enough content and we learned from this and made an effort to add content to make up the extra time we had in the early stages. We also overcame technical issues over the weeks and it all worked out well in our final show. This includes microphone levels, communication between the studio and the control room and also issues with the outside broadcast, so things that we improved on and made perfect for our final show.

What I have learned from this module as a whole is what impact talk radio can have on an audience, I have always only ever listened to music radio stations and have been slightly put off talk radio stations in the past, however this module has inspired me to listen to more talk stations and that they can actually be interesting for our age range.

I also learned how to work well in a new team (after the music radio module last year) and how different people worked when under pressure. This is valuable and will help when in the industry once I leave university.

I overall enjoyed the whole experience, with ups and downs of course over the weeks preparing and planning our final show but I believe that we pulled through and made a final show which proves the amount of work that we all did and contributed to the final project.