Hit The Road, Jack

Here's some unsolicited advice: Get out of here.

No, really, get out. Get out of the studio.

I've written a lot throughout the pandemic about remote work, and a lot of you did your shows from your homes in that time. Podcasters mostly record at home. That is not what I'm talking about.

It occurred to me when looking at TikToks and Reels that so much of what's entertaining to new generations is not studio-bound, nor is it bound to any particular place. People record or stream from wherever they happen to be, whether it's the laundry room or a Starbucks or in the middle of a field. Radio hosts and podcasters, on the other hand, are mostly sitting inside, away from other people besides guests or producers, unless they're at a paid remote, sitting under a canopy in a parking lot selling cheap meat.

Video has broken free from the studio. We'll talk about video and whether you need to do that at another time, but as for audio, technology has gotten to the point where you could easily do your show from anyplace. You can use your cell phone. You can use a portable recorder or board pretty much anywhere. You can set up anywhere someone will let you do it and broadcast live, or record a podcast. You can do it with or without video. You can make a big deal out of it -- hang a banner with your logo -- or do it quietly. You can just talk or you can interview passers-by, which might be a lot more interesting than taking faceless calls from listeners. You're no longer tethered to the board in a studio, and you don't have to wait for the sales department to sell an appearance or for the engineers to let you take a Marti or Comrex unit on the road to go live from outside.

Oh, wait, let me digress. Back in the day, when I was a program director, we always counseled talk hosts to prep for their show by getting away from everything and everybody connected to radio and just go out in public and observe. Walter Sabo would tell us on a regular basis to "go to the mall" to interact with our listeners, not while doing a remote or being a radio host but just out in the wild like everyone else. It helped us know who we were talking to and what their daily lives were like, and armed with that, we could be more relatable.

Today, maybe the mall is not the hub of activity it used to be, but you don't have to go to a mall. You can go to a coffee shop, or the beach, or a park, or the town square. You can broadcast from your car -- one of the most memorable radio shows I've ever heard was on KSTP in Minneapolis-St. Paul years ago, when Tommy Mischke did the first half hour or so of his show from his truck, but didn't actually do a show, instead airing the sound of driving along, muttering about traffic, stopping at a convenience store and making small talk with the clerk, greeting the security guard at the station, walking through the halls, and eventually arriving at the mic and starting the show. "He's not really doing this, is he?" gave way to "how long is he going to do this?" and, ultimately, "what's going to happen next?" It broke a lot of radio's rules, and it was glorious. Maybe getting away from the studio will inspire you to break some rules, too.

But, yeah, you need to get out of the studio once in a while, whether you're on the radio or podcasting or whatever you're doing. Maybe the sound quality won't be as good, but I'll bet that people will put up with that if they're hearing something that's worth listening to. Every other form of entertainment has ventured outside its cocoon; why not yours?

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Wherever you go, you'll want to be armed with stuff to talk about, and you'll get that at All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep page. Find it by clicking here, and you can also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics and find every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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We at All Access will be off on Monday, September 5th for Labor Day. Back Tuesday bright and early. See you then.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon