The Morning Hike with John & Mike can officially say
that it’s first week on radio was a success. We ran one contest, did two
interviews and played a lot of good music. This blog post will walk you through
our journey to become Red River Radio’s first ever morning show team.
I was first introduced to radio last year, when two
colleagues and myself decided to do a weekly sports comedy show on Red River
College’s radio station which was 92.9 KICK FM at the time. Now days the
college radio station is known as Red River Radio.
It never occurred to me when I first started doing my sports
comedy show that I would be hosting a morning show on a radio station,
especially not one year after my first taste of radio.
I first realized that I wanted to host a morning radio show
after about two months of doing a weekly 1-hour show. I enjoyed the back and
fourth banter and liked the energy and adrenalin I felt during and after every
show. I was hooked on the feeling and inquired with the station manager about
what it would take to host a regular morning show on the College’s station. I
knew there wasn’t currently a morning team but that the station had had a team
in previous years. I discussed with the station manager about the idea and received
positive feedback that they would be open to having such a thing.
Preparing to launch a morning radio show took lots of
planning and brainstorming sessions. We would meet regularly with the station
manager and other morning show hosts here in the city of Winnipeg, ask for
advice and the dos and don’ts of the radio business. After we came up with a general
theme for our show we had to pitch our idea to the station manager and with
some convincing we were told that we were going to be able to do our morning
show starting in the fall. This was exciting and scary because both Mike Cuma
and myself were told about the hard work and dedication required producing such
a show.
Mike Cuma, who is co-hosting the morning show with me, had
both decided to take the summer off radio. However we would meet up regularly
and talk about ideas, express the fears we had as well as talk about all the
exciting opportunities that our show would provide us. Our biggest fear was
waking up early, 5:30 am every day. However we were both generally excited
about the thought of talking on the radio, playing music we like, as well as
delivering friendly banter back and fourth.
My advice for anyone who is considering working in radio in
any capacity would be to relax, enjoy it and make sure it is something that you
really want to do. I would also advise you to plan, plan meticulously but to be
open for anything. As the old saying goes planning is guessing and you never
know who might call in or what might happen so you do never really know what
you will be talking about on air.
If you enjoyed reading this I will be blogging weekly about
the heartaches and joys of hosting a morning show on radio. I will be
discussing challenges, opportunities and the planning involved in producing a
morning show.
