Being a Presenter
Many people's first taste of working in radio is by having a turn in front of the microphone. You may be volunteering at a hospital or community radio station, you might be making a podcast at home, or you might catch the bug at your student radio station. For many of us, it's how we fell in love with the medium, and we probably all at one stage thought we'd found our vocation - the dream job.
Being a full time radio presenter is perhaps one of the most desirable, competitive, and hard-to-get careers in the industry. But somebody has to do it, right? So, how do you make sure it's YOU that gets to follow your dream?
There's obviously no one route to doing it. Look at the rosters of the big radio stations or the lists of top podcasts and you'll see people from all sorts of backgrounds. TV personalities, music artists, comedians, subject experts like historians or naturalists, and yes you'll see people that have ground out a career hopping from station to station, honing their craft and building their profile as they've gone along.
That route is harder than it ever has been, with fewer local radio stations to run up your 'air miles', as more stations network programmes from central broadcast hubs. Because of this, there are few radio presenters these days that are just radio presenters - many are developing their brand and their personality through multiple platforms including podcasting, social media, club DJing, and more. It's vital to be multi-skilled, multi-faceted, and not to limit your profile to one outlet.
The more you do, the more material you'll have to demonstrate your skills to programme directors that are hiring presenters. Presenting jobs are often advertised, but programmers are also generally always on the look-out for new talent that will fit with their station brand. The main way to catch their attention is with a 'demo tape' - of course not a tape any more, but still a short compilation of your best bits of radio material.
We've compiled this advice page by talking to leading programmers and talent agents, who between them have heard thousands of demo tapes and hired far fewer presenters. How do you make a great demo tape? How do you make your demo stand out from the crowd? And how should you approach programmers to let them know you're the best new presenter they should be hiring?
