lukeyoung wrote:Hi Aled
Can you give me any tips on how to launch a radio presenter career as its allways been something i want to do, and i want to do it when i leave school.
cheers
luke
No offence but I hate questions like this. The answer's never short and after "What's Chris like?", "Will you play my band?" is the most common question I get asked. I've also noticed my answer changes slightly the more I'm asked it because you soon realise just how many people there are out there who want to be presenters.
I'd guess that 75% of people who work behind the scenes in radio stations all wanted to be presenters who either failed to make it or who once they saw the breadth of jobs there are behind the scenes in TV and radio choose to go into that.
Keeping all that in mind is important. You should always ask yourself two questions: "why you over anyone else?" and "what is it they're looking for?" (and by them I mean the radio station's management and audience - which, if management is good should be the same thing).
The answer to the first will come from how talented you are, any things you can do better than anyone else (humour, slickness, personality) and how much experience you've got. Your talent will grow and so will your cv by the amount of local radio, community radio, internet radio, personal tapes and generally any experience you can build up - no-one can have too much. For my one Surgery show I rehearsed for 6 weeks and did 2 pilots.
The answer to the second question is just, if not more important as the first. Who's the audience? Their age, their sex, is the radio station a more music station, a speech based one? Is the emphasis on presenter personality or the audience? etc etc. This sounds obvious written down but I can't tell you the amount of demos I've heard that are basically commercial radio djs trying to get work at Radio 1! By default having a one size fits all demo tape is the wrong thing to do when you're sending it out to lots of radio stations.
Hope this helps.