A Crude Ladder and a Forgotten Craft

If you’re in radio, you’re still in the entertainment business. That used to be so obvious it barely needed saying but in recent times it’s not as obvious. The industry now talks fluently about pipelines, creators and multi-platform talent and it talks much less about the unfashionable mechanics which are the live hours in which a beginner is allowed to make mistakes, a Content Director who still has time to air check, and a medium that plays to the magic which is theatre of the mind. Without those, the next generation of radio talent will arrive from somewhere, they just won’t arrive as radio people.

For a long time, to work on-air in a major market you climbed a ladder that was crude, but it worked. A young announcer got weekends or overnights in a small non-competitive market where they talked too much, missed the post, recovered live, and were air checked by a Content Director who still regarded that as part of the job. If you were good, mid-sized markets came a calling, then if you were really good major markets sought you out. This is not folklore. I was one of those young announcers who tried to climb that ladder however I wasn’t good enough to climb too far, so I jumped from on-air to off-air, but I learnt a lot in those early years. A recent talent study found roughly one in three on-air people now primarily voice-track. Forty-four percent had not been air checked in the previous year and only eighteen percent would recommend radio as a career. Small markets still exist but only a handful exist where you can at least take those first tentative steps up the ladder. A voice tracked night shift can sound competent, but competence is not how anyone learns timing, silence, recovery etc. Essentially, the ladder has been dismantled.

Where is future talent coming from? Well, it’s not from one place. The fashionable answer is that the next generation is already performing on podcasts, TikTok and YouTube, and radio only has to collect them. There is some truth in that, however also challenges, in that they often want a portfolio; host, podcaster, events host, short video etc and not just an on-air shift. One common mistake is treating a follower count as an air check. A creator who can hold a camera and a comment section has practised performance under feedback. That is not the same as working within a format, teasing across a song, talking to one person while tens of thousands overhear or surviving a dead phone line. Some digital natives have those muscles, but most do not. Importing a personality, sanding them back to fit a format and calling the result “authentic” is another mistake.

The less glamorous sources still have remnants of that crude ladder, and they include high school and university stations and community stations who still provide a platform where people can perform in real time. The constraint is conversion. Students leave for podcasting and content jobs because those jobs exist. Commercial Radio entry roles are scarce and often simply aren’t there. Adjacent trades like comedy, improv and theatre will also keep feeding the medium as radio continues to steal from those places. The problem is those people generally arrive with no real radio sensibilities. That is fixable, the issue is that all too often the Content Director doesn’t bother to teach the craft and they often end up as a disposable novelty discarded after half a dozen surveys. When a network fails to teach the craft, they are actively setting up the talent to fail.

The honest answer is a hybrid intake: some creators, some students, some adjacent performers and some people who are lucky enough to have found a ladder to climb. Radio needs to teach the craft in order to protect one of the great strengths this medium has to offer.

“Just be yourself” is the most repeated and least useful instruction in the business. It sounds democratic but it produces two kinds of failure: people who narrate their lives and create a flat show, and people who invent a radio voice so shiny the audience can hear the varnish. Most are negotiating a self that can survive four hours without becoming a cartoon or a corpse. Entertainment, humour and storytelling still decide whether anyone stays. A persona built from real traits, then shaped, and stories embellished to be more interesting is not a lie, it is the job. Authenticity matters in one narrow way. Listeners detect contempt and ventriloquism. A presenter reading a liner they do not believe, performing a local reference they googled, or inflating a feeling they do not have, trains the audience to stop creating their version of the visual which is fatal in a blind medium.

Theatre of the mind is one of radio’s great strengths where the listeners provide the visuals through their own imagination. Orson Welles understood the extreme version and delivered it in 1938 with his radio broadcast War of the Worlds. Everyday radio uses the ordinary version every time an announcer says “picture this”: a caller becomes a character, a sound effect does the work a camera would over-explain, or a contest paints a holiday prize so specifically the listener is already there. That is still radio’s key advantage. Music streaming offers catalogue and mood, and almost no co-authored story. Short video shows the picture but once the audience has seen the face and the reaction shot, the brain stops casting. Audio-only podcasts and fictional podcasts often do theatre of the mind better than current commercial radio, because they have time, sound design and no format.

Commercial music radio still uses the technique in imaging, in the better commercials, and in the occasional benchmark bit however it has largely stopped using it as a daily discipline. Tight formats, risk-averse legal, voice-tracking that cannot react, and research that punishes “too much talk” will do that. The result is a medium that claims companionship while in some cases sounding like a well-produced playlist with straplines. When it’s used well, it remains the cheapest spectacle available. A breakfast team that can turn a caller, a sound bed and ninety seconds into a break the city repeats when they get to work has done something Spotify cannot buy and TikTok cannot finish for you. Kyle and Jackie O, whatever one thinks of the content, understood that a studio can feel like a circus tent. People did not listen for information; they listened because Kyle and Jackie O were great storytellers and imagination turned the words into wonderful visuals and each listeners imagination created their version.

Video will keep winning on demonstration and discovery. Radio can still win on incompleteness though, as the brain likes to finish things. A face on a screen is finished. A voice in a car is not. That edge only exists if the voice gives the brain enough sensory information to work with, like concrete detail, sound, characters, stakes, and unfortunately most presentation today doesn’t do that. It summarises.

What needs to happen is not a return to 1987. The P&L will not fund a live announcer in every daypart in every market. Pretending it will is nostalgia in a better suit. Ideally, we need to rebuild that crude ladder for today’s realities. We need more live shifts, including some overnights. Networks should keep one live developmental shift per region and treat it as research and development. We also need to get back to coaching; air checking cannot be something that slips down the priority list for a Content Director running three or four stations. We need to hire for raw material and train for radio. Look for taste, curiosity, timing, and the ability to notice the world. Then teach the craft so they develop an understanding of radio sensibilities and how powerful theatre of the mind is. And put theatre of the mind back in the clock as a discipline. Producers who think in scenes. Imaging that implies a world rather than yelling the strap line. Phone bits directed like short plays. Contests that create pictures.

That takes time though, and skill and when the focus is on cutting costs whoever holds the knife usually doesn’t understand the craft of radio therefore decides for example to centralise six imaging producers into a hub of three servicing multiple stations. Some cuts are simply stupid. These days some of the best sound design now lives outside the building. Fictional podcasts, live comedy and independent audio makers already practise parts of this craft. The smart response is not to sneer that it is “not radio.” It is to steal what they do well or better still invite them inside the building.

The next generation will come from wherever people are already talking into microphones and getting better. That much is already happening. The open question is whether those people learn this medium’s craft, or whether the industry keeps importing personalities, sanding them back, and hoping for the best. The supreme irony is that audiences aren’t spending less time with radio because they fell out of love with radio; they spend less time because radio largely abandoned the craft. Podcasts like Serial and S-Town, are structurally built on the exact principles that made radio so successful. Intimacy, word economy, painting brilliant pictures with words and a profound respect for the listener’s ear.

A scenario today that has become all too familiar is one where an announcer or new personality imported from an adjacent industry is left to flounder in a studio without direction or training and they create a product that feels both frantic and hollow. There are still some great stations, but many sound like a corporate machine and these days the listener leaves more often than they used to, and if nothing changes there will come a day where they won’t come back at all, and the medium will slowly morph into just another music stream.