How to become a powerful radio storyteller

"Tell the truth, make it matter, and never be boring" are the three rules that international broadcast consultant Valerie Geller tells broadcasters around the world.

Geller has worked with radio and TV stations in 35 countries since 1991, helping journalists and production teams increase their ratings and grow their audiences.

She has also been named among the most influential women in radio by Radio Ink Magazine for the past ten years. 

In her work, she uses in part a simple model she presented to attendees of the Next Radio conference in London today.

“Storytellers filter what they see through their own creative process and put it back out for other people,” Geller said.

The model Geller uses is made up of four categories which aim to help guide the journalist to create stories about the most interesting and powerful subjects for their listeners.

The first is ‘focus’ – asking what it is that is going to be most beneficial to the listener.

“There are four things that we know [make] humans say ‘oh, I’ve got to hear this!”, she explained, naming health and safety, money and emotion as the top subjects listeners want to hear about.

Secondly, Geller asks journalists to think about what the audience will get out of the story, with the category ‘engage’.

“When I first came to England, trying to get people to say ‘you’ on the radio and talk directly to one listener was like trying to move a boulder up a hill."

Some 15 years on, this has changed, but Geller highlights the importance of talking to an individual listener and making them feel like you are speaking directly to the audience and working for them as a storyteller.

“It is not about what we have to give, it’s what the user gets,” she said.

She explained that even though “audiences come to us to be entertained, informed, inspired and persuaded, the real gift to the audience is that journalists “connect audiences so they are not alone anymore”.

The third category in Geller's model is ‘opinion’.

“Never put anything on the air if you cannot answer why someone would be listening to this."

Although it is not the journalist’s job to give their opinion to the audience, she said, emotion is the core value of any story and therefore the stories should be interesting to the audience.

“If you do not care, it is words on a screen. This is not a job for actors,” she added.

Lastly, the what, where, why, who and how of storytelling are highlighted at the end of her model.

It is important to explain things visually through images, video, audio and words, she said, in order to capture a wide audience.

“The curse of our business and the curse of being content creators is that the good ones make it look so easy.”

Listen to Geller's insights here:

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