L'OBSDan O'Day Lessons
Dan O’Day is a well-known radio personality, not only in America but all over the world. He accounts for a long experienced professional career and being a constant feature in US, he started to work as a DJ in a small radio station all the way through to become a radio consultant: a final stage where it is very common to live off one’s job experience. His job’s scope has become international since he has visited almost 60 different countries to help them improving their radio programming.
Recently, O’Day offered a Master Class organized by L’Observatori de la Ràdio. O’Day gave an extensive lesson of four hours long, with no power point presentation, but with many audio examples which evoked much radio passion to explain how to make good radio.
A core idea helped O’Day to exemplify the meaning of radio communication from his understanding: "Say interesting things in an interesting way". And, how to become interesting in radio?: "To have a concern of our audience environment of listening and keep the permanent link with them."
A radio build upon routine is doomed to failure. Our listeners deserve our daily effort to be surprised. Foreseeable habits are like a bad disease that affects the task carried in front of the microphone of many of radio professionals and this provokes that the audience abandons the listening of that station to move to other media supports searching for information and entertainment. To sum-up: it is vital to surprise to your listeners every day, and this task has to be creatively and talented performed.
In revision of the main concepts that Dan O’Day explained in his Master Class, one realizes that all those great truths about radio we took them for granted seem to be completely forgotten. It often happens that the day by day routine, far from fostering , gets into the programming and into the formats because those in charge believe to have found a formula that perfectly works and they use it until exhaust it.
Dan O’Day say simple, evident and straightforward things, but above all he let us think over our jobs, specially in now when radio seems to walk disoriented to find the way of success in an environment where all is in constant change.
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