10 Tips to a More Effective Radio Aircheck and Critique Session

We offer strategies to get the most out of review sessions with your on-air talent

By Gary Begin ⋅​
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Published: January 7, 2025

The author is the owner of Sound Advantage Media, a radio programming consultancy. Read his past commentaries.​

For program directors to be successful air talent coaches, it is essential to stop thinking in terms of the aircheck process as a critique and instead as advice. It is critical to do the following:

1. Ascertain Vital Subjects. Take the time to get out of the station and listen to the recording of your talent shows. Listening in real time does not allow you to go back and hear breaks a second or third time. Once you’ve stopped listening to the recording, make a request list of the vital issues you’d like to address with that air personality.
2. Arrange Issues by Impression. Ask yourself this question: what one issue will ensure improvement in the air personality’s ratings beginning today? Start your coaching session with the item on the top of your list.
3. Choose one or two vital subject issues. Pick no more than two issues to work on in each advice session. Don’t bring a long laundry list of issues to the aircheck session, mixing minutia with what is essential. People have a hard enough time dealing with change overall. The more changes you ask for at one time, the less likely you’ll get any.
4. Identify Objectives. Radio air personalities perform on the air with good intentions. Sadly, as they say, the way to hell is paved with good intentions. We all can have good intentions and obtain bad results. One of the ways to understand why an air personality is performing in a way you wish to change is to prevent defensive behavior stemming from your coaching session. Once you know your talent’s good intentions, you see them as well-meaning people.
5. Search for “Big Picture” Perspective. How you present each coaching point will go the greatest length to determine the success or failure to offer advice. Ensure you carefully think through this part of the process before each coaching session. Try to find a way to direct your coaching points that establishes your station’s big picture, including building ratings, revenue and community goodwill. One of the most common challenges program directors experience with air talent is too much material or words crammed into single sets. Outlining an issue from the listeners’ perspective and how challenging it is for them to comprehend unfocused scenes makes it much easier to understand why improved editing matters.
6. Formulate Details. Transcribe at least one hour of the talent show on paper for each coaching session. Once you transcribe, you’ve accomplished two things: First, you have indisputable evidence of what occurred in the air. Highly creative people, such as radio air talent, always focus on the future. They have no clear sense of what happened in the past. The second thing you accomplish with transcription is the primary human emotion. When we comprehend words on paper, we need to use the part of our brains rooted in logic. This helps avoid occurrences of emotional hijacking from happening as often as aircheck sessions.
7. Construct Your Example. Examine your transcriptions and choose several examples that support your coaching point. If you only bring one example, you risk being rebuffed with a response like, “well, you just picked a bad break.” Collect any other data that supports your point. One of the significant components of advice is the perception of your level of expertise.
8. Think Progression, Not Product. During your coaching sessions, consider changing the talent’s progression, not their product. Concentrate on possibilities rather than solutions. When you change the procedure, the development follows. Learning over a lifetime occurs when we change how someone thinks. No one wishes to be told precisely how to do their job.
9. Presume Success. Approach every coaching session with the presumption that what you’ve asked the talent will occur on the air. Say to them things like, “I have total faith in your talent and abilities and know you’ll make this happen on your show.” This requires a leap of faith for programmers. But people tend to rise or fall in an organization contingent upon how management treats them. If you treat people like they cannot fail, they rarely do. If they’re treated as if they can never succeed, they never will.
10. Screen for Progress. After every coaching session, try to find your talent by doing something right. Too much criticism de-motivates people and will cause “creative paralysis.” Suitable encouragement for progress and praise is your most potent and cheapest motivational tool. Too many managers don’t take the time to use it. Taking the time to notice alone will help make you a more efficient radio air talent coach.

Contact the author at garybegin10@gmail.com.

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Sound Advantage Media is a radio/podcasting consulting firm run by 40-year broadcasting veteran Gary Begin. He specializes in small and medium market stations. He's worked in all-sized markets. He solves problems while increasing revenue and ratings.

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