Privacy Guidelines

When our listeners tune into Leighton Buzz Radio they are picturing you, the presenter, sitting in a high tech studio, in a mystery location in Leighton Buzzard. Perhaps that is what you pictured when you approached us to volunteer?

Modern day radio works very differently; even the national stations are often not live and all of them use ‘voice tracking’ as we do, at least some of the time.

Indeed during the first lockdown many stations found themselves in trouble when presenters could not get to the studio. Those with remote voicetracking, like Leighton Buzz Radio, stayed on-air and were there for our community.

Voice tracking is a method of logging into the station from a remote location and recording a presenter’s voice between music tracks. It can be done minutes, hours or even days before it is to be broadcast. However the true skill of voice tracking is the listener cannot tell the difference between live and voice-tracked.

Your role is to keep that magic alive and that includes not sharing your location or saying the word “recording” or anything else that breaks the belief that this is not just a single conversation between you and the listener.

It is tempting to mention the word studio or here at my desk but everytime you refer to where you are or are not (in the case of the studio or not being live) you are breaking the magic of the conversation with you and the listener. We will cover more of this later but please do not share the secrets of radio it spoils it for everyone.

There is one golden rule above all about keeping the magic alive for our listeners and that is the the rule of “YOU”

In this training you will read and watch some really helpful hints and tips on becoming a great radio presenter but here is one rule you need to grasp from the beginning.

No matter what the subject no matter what your content the conversation you will be having is with one person.

All of these are  instant magic breakers.

“Hello listeners”
“I’m not sure what you all think”,
“thank you all for joining me”
“out there in listener land”

 Add to this the royal “we”
“what have we got for you next”.

It’s a BIG NO

You are having a conversation with a friend (54% listeners will be listening alone) and they are listening to you not an entire radio station. Imagine meeting someone in the street you wouldn’t say “how are you all feeling today, we’ve got some great news for you”.

The more you can do to nurture this individual conversation the more connected to you your listeners will be.

Even as he explained his Desert Island Discs to Kirsty Young on Sunday, Terry Wogan reminded us how well he understands radio. “You have to create this little club,” he told her. “We’re not talking to an audience. You’re talking to one person and they’re only half-listening. It’s a mistake to think that everybody’s clinging to your every word.”

Article by Elisabeth Mahoneyf rom The Guardian 3/01/2012