What Mona Brought Home from AMPPR (Part 1 of 2)

This guest post was written by Mona Seghatoleslami, a classical announcer, producer and blogger at West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

I’ve just had my first day of work since I got back from this year’s Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio conference in Fort Worth, Texas. I want to do everything at once; I’m really inspired to try a bunch of new things, and even the mundane tasks at work seem more exciting. That’s probably pretty typical after a conference. The true test will be how I’m doing after a few weeks or months.

I have a whole lot of notes from all the sessions, which I can share with anyone who’s interested. I’d also like to hear from what other people learned and plan to do. For now, here are two things I’m inspired to do.

Use Instantencore.com

I am in love with this site! It gathers info about concerts, artists and arts organizations, along with blogs, news and audio and video content.

You can sign up as an individual or as an arts organization and receive e-mail updates about when concerts are occurring in your area or when pages of artists that interest you are updated. Also, some concert organizations are offering audiences recordings of the concert they attend as free downloads.

Here’s how I plan to use it:

• Get our blog listed (if your station has one, you can suggest it here)
• Tag content relevant to artists on their pages (example: I added a link of an interview with Anne Akiko Meyers to her page on Instant Encore)
• Get classical music organizations around the state to register and enter their concert info. Then, we can add their calendar widget to our site and track concerts around the state (like they do at KUSC))
• Read, learn and listen — hey, I’m a classical music fan, as well as being part of an organization.

Work on my announcing

Training to announce is not just about warming up your voice and pronouncing things correctly. John Silliman Dodge (VP of Programming at KPBS All Classical Portland) talked about the importance of preparation — prepare, rehearse, edit, perform. Preparing well can make you sound more effortless and help you keep your stories from rambling.

Dodge also talked about finding the place between one extreme — simply delivering information without personality — and the opposite extreme of being overly self-absorbed and narcissistic. A host who strikes a balance in between is authentic, honest and interesting.

Dodge also emphasized the potential to double classical music radio’s audience by reaching baby boomers. He shared statistics and data about where people are listening (car and home), how they feel about their knowledge of music (not very secure), their interests (travel, health, grandchildren, arts and culture, community service), and how long they listen (about 80 minutes at a time). He made distinctions between the “old school”, more musicological style of presentation and a newer style of being more personal — and he emphasized that this was not “dumbing down” our presentation.

I might disagree that simply serving more people equals more community service (what about the quality of that service?), and I’m also not sure about the idea of acting authentic (can one pretend to be real?). I do want be understood, to tell stories that appeal to people, and to end announcing breaks without regretting the difference between what I wanted to say and what I did say.

Here’s what I plan to do after hearing Dodge:

• Transcribe some airchecks, to observe my habits, and also try editing them and practice rerecording them.
• Try to touch on topics listeners might be interested in, other than music, in my announcing breaks.
• Prepare and rehearse what I’m going to say — keep a few notes written in front of me, and at least prepare how I’m going to begin and end a break.
• Tell stories that have a point and not ramble.
• Avoid radio jargon when announcing, such as “top of the hour” and “music of (insert composer)”
• Find someone to help coach me!

That’s Part 1. Up next: fundraising, blogging, digital rights and the world outside the sessions.