How Top Hosts Hook Listeners in 60 Seconds or Less

This transcript was auto-generated from an audio recording. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Think about the last time you looked for a new podcast to listen to. How much time did you give it before you decided to stick around, or not? Maybe you're patient and you gave it three whole minutes. Or maybe in just 30 seconds you knew, oh, this is interesting. Or in that same 30 seconds you said, forget this and kept looking. 

As hosts, we have very little time to hook new listeners. We know this because we are listeners. We may have only half a minute or less for someone new to decide our show isn't for them. So how do the best hosts hook their listeners and what can we learn from them? 

Listeners to this first season know that Sound Judgment is a quest to uncover the universal skills of the most magnetic audio hosts. Today, I'm bringing you something a little different. I'm starting some solo episodes. In these shorter episodes, I'll explore one skill at a time as practiced by different hosts. The first one we'll delve into is the lead—how to make your listener curious enough to stick around for more. It's hook your listener time on Sound Judgment. I'm Elaine Appleton Grant.

Before we dive in, in case you have young kids around or you feel sensitive, this episode does include the sounds of guns and a brief discussion of some tough topics, including suicide. That's from an episode I did with Stephanie Wittels Wachs. Her third season of Last Day is about guns. And if you're a host or producer thinking about the 10th anniversary of Sandy Hook yesterday and how to report movingly and sensitively about guns, Last Day is a model of how to do this both beautifully and ethically. 

I grew up in a family of writers and readers, so it was only natural that from the time I was a teenager, I was seeking out information about how the best writers wrote. As a young journalist, I spent a disproportionate amount of time learning about the lede, that first sentence that would sparkle enough to make the reader stop in her tracks, followed often by a nutgraf, an old term for the paragraph that was designed to show the reader, here's why this matters. Naturally the lead wasn't always in one sentence and the nutgraf could be several. Regardless, the examples I read made me want to make that kind of magic too. Which I did in print for a long time. But radio, I wanted to learn the craft of telling the kinds of stories that gripped me. 

In my mind's eye, I can still remember a panel discussion at a conference about long-form nonfiction storytelling. The conference attracted producers and hosts from public radio and feature writers, many who'd won Pulitzers from newspapers and magazines. It was heaven for a writer, no matter the medium. And there was a panel about how to hook your listener. An NPR journalist said something that seems obvious to me now, but I didn't know it then: start with your hottest tape. He meant, as a reporter, you've done your research, you've taped your interviews with sources, you've got all this material. Now how do you actually write that radio feature? Where do you start? 

Hot tape. It's a term a little like hostiness. It means something different to every listener. But people like us who listen closely recognize it when we hear it. It's tape that surprises us. It's a counterintuitive thought or maybe something contemplative or beautiful or sound rich, including the human voice—or perhaps not. The point was, don't save your best stuff for later. You gotta hook them now. 

That journalist went on to play a couple of minutes of a story that he'd started with hot tape. The room hushed, listening to a model in France talk about the then fat positivity movement. That was hot tape. I've never forgotten it.

This is one of the universal skills of hostiness, the ability to hook your listener. So let's look at doing this through the insights and practices of three different Sound Judgment guests. Oh, and for all of you out there getting mad right now because you're a producer, a writer, or a story editor, and you're feeling overlooked, I am employing poetic license with the made up term hostiness. You may be the one conceiving a blow you out of the water lede and making your host look great. I also mean you, and we love you.

Clip from Last Day

Man: Did you hear the ding? It's shooting all right now. 

Woman: Yeah, the ding! 

Man: Hey, guy. 

Man: How about that? All right, now. 

Man: 100 yards. 

Man: You're not done yet. 

Woman: Good job, Jack. 

Stephanie Wittels Wachs: That's our team, hanging out with Wayne Yates and his neighbor, Lloyd. You might remember those squeals of delight from our last episode. All of us were shockingly super into shooting guns. The one you're hearing now is a vintage hunting rifle. And every time we heard that little ding as the bullet hit this tiny piece of steel a hundred yards away, it was thrilling. Like winning an arcade game. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

That's how Stephanie Wittels Wachs and her team from Last Day started their episode, A Love Story. It's a tale of a Montana couple who lost their son to suicide by gunshot. Why would anyone start an episode about something so tragic by whooping it up at a shooting range? Two reasons. 

First, it got your attention, right? It sure got mine. And of course, that's the intent. But there is a warning here. If the only reason you choose your lede is as an attention grabber, that's sort of cheap. As listeners, we know when we're being exploited and it won't make us hang in there. 

Okay, there's a lot going on in this lede. It's surprising. The sounds grab us by the throat. They're taking great advantage of the medium of audio. Put us in the middle of the action, and we'll go there in our heads with you. I've never shot a gun, but listening to A Love Story, I feel like I'm at a Montana shooting range just as the sun rises. I'm freezing, and I see rosy cheeks on my fellow shooters’ faces. Scientifically, the adrenaline also pumps through me. My blood pressure and heart rate actually climb. She's got me now, and I'll follow her anywhere. 

It also makes me curious about why we're there, what physical and emotional journey she's about to take us on. Stephanie's created what's sometimes called an open loop, a question that, until it's answered, creates tension for us as listeners. To resolve that tension, we have to stick around to learn the answer. Open loops are great. Deconstruct almost any content you consume, and curiosity is at the core. It's also why so many shows employ cold opens, some more effectively than others. 

But there's one more thing that's deeper. For Stephanie, it's showing the truth, the whole truth, not just one side. The central question of this season of Last Day is, how do we live safely in a country with more guns than people? It would be easy to make the mistake of oversimplifying, of reporting only the parts of the story that match a predetermined narrative of, get rid of the guns.

But that would be boring. It wouldn't eliminate anything for anybody. It certainly wouldn't create empathy or help us understand the richly textured lives, motivations, and journeys of Austin, who died by suicide, and his grieving parents. It also wouldn't show us anything about the journey Stephanie as host takes. She understands the issue of guns very differently. By the end of telling these stories,than when she started working on them. Here she is again about the decision, made, by the way, in revisions, to lead this episode at the shooting range. 

Clip from Sound Judgment

Stephanie Wittels Wachs: I had never understood how could hunting bring somebody joy until I shot a gun that morning. And I was like, whoa, this is actually fun. Can I say that? Is that allowed? I had a ton of fun and then—this is my thought process—seven hours later, we were in a living room talking to a family who lost their son because he took his life with a hunting rifle. I didn't know how else to tell that story, honestly, because that's such a part of the story. And I'm always—my team probably is like, please, please, please stop. But I'm always like, show, not tell, show, not tell, show, not tell. How can we show this? And the way that we showed it was let's have fun shooting the guns and then let's see the pain that this causes. And you have to have both of those to understand the issue. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Notice one more thing about this choice. Back to the idea of surprising your listeners from the very get-go, it offered contrast. The lede is loud. They're having fun. It's energetic. Much of the rest of the piece is intimate, contemplative. It takes place in a cozy living room with two people telling their family's love story. Sometimes writing our ledes is easy, it just comes to us, thank heavens. Other times, like this one, we need to think hard about the whole destination of the piece. Ledes don't exist in a vacuum. They're woven into the fabric of the journey we want the listener to go on with us. 

Here's another take on leads of scripted narrative nonfiction. It uses the same principles: surprise, spark curiosity, and start with a scene. But this lede by Emma Courtland, host and executive producer of Gimlet's Crime Show, begins not with something shocking or unusual, like a shooting range, but with a relatable story: the memories of a guy going to baseball games with his father. 

Clip from Crime Show

Emma Courtland: To anyone who knows Steve Barnes, it should come as no surprise that one of his earliest memories, and certainly his most vivid memory, is the day that his dad, Gerald, first introduced him to baseball. 

Steve Barnes: He took me to my first game. I wasn't even two years old. And they carried me through the tunnel at Wrigley Field. And I remember seeing how beautiful and green it was, that—not even two years old. I have that memory planted in my mind sixty something years later, where I could tell you exactly what it looked like. It was the most beautiful, lush, gorgeous thing I ever saw in my life. 

Emma Courtland: It wasn't just the beauty of the field that seared that day into Steve's memory.

It was the fact that that beauty had been shared with him by his dad. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

This episode is about a con man, a guy who pretended successfully to be a doctor for decades. He wreaked havoc. He spent time in prison. Emma and her team could have started with a dramatic story of someone dying. And in fact, in an early version, they did, but it fell flat. There are plenty of amazing true crime ledes, but they knew that if they led the story this way, the more obvious choice, it would have sounded pedestrian. The word Emma told me was, it felt hollow. 

That choice to start at the baseball stadium, made in revisions, just like Stephanie Wittels Wachs, turned their lead into something immersive and beautiful. It's just as counterintuitive to lead with an ordinary, relatable moment into a sensational crime story as it is to start with something sensational or shocking to lead into an intimate family story. How you surprise listeners, that's up to you. 

Also, Paging Dr. Barnes, this story about the con man, starts in a scene. There's that theater of the mind again. Most of us are familiar with baseball stadiums. We're right there. We can almost smell the hot dogs and the spilled beer and hear the roar of the crowd. Why would we leave?

Plus, we know from the show itself and the episode description that this is a con artist's tale. So this lead does create an open loop. We're curious. And also, there's one other thing to think about with a lede, which is demonstrated here. Steve is the character we follow through his father's story. Starting it this way tells us a lot. He sounds like a good guy. He sounds normal, like someone we might want as a friend, not someone whose father was a lifelong criminal.

A lede can set the stage for a character-driven story. It can make us root for the hero. 

Okay, we've looked closely now at two different scripted podcast ledes. What about a conversation or an interview show? I'm hearing you in my head right now saying, Elaine, I'm never bringing a team to a shooting range in Montana. I don't do narrative scripted shows. I don't investigate crime. So how does this apply to me? Great conversation show hosts—think Terry Gross and Guy Raz—inspire curiosity by telling us from the get-go who they're interviewing, why this conversation is relevant to us, telling us something surprising, hopefully, and making a promise about what we'll get. 

Typically, great hosts employ a central question, which can be answered differently in every episode. How I Built This, Guy Raz's show, is really asking the question, How did you build it, and how can I? Anne Bogel of What Should I Read Next? uses this approach. The whole show, all seven years’ worth, consists of different answers to this question, what should I read next? But Anne doesn't just have a central question for the show as a whole. Each episode also has a purpose. It answers a question about a particular genre, or a writer, or a reading goal for a particular guest.

Clip from Sound Judgment

Anne Bogel: It can feel silly at first to name your purpose, but like, what is this podcast? What is it here for? What do we hope you take away? Like those can be really important things to state, and it's easy to take them for granted and let them remain unspoken. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Now I do want to acknowledge that there are a lot of entertainment and comedy chat shows that successfully lead with banter between hosts that don't explicitly tell us the purpose of the episode or why we're there. Those are different animals, and it takes either celebrity status or a ton of skill to hook listeners this way. It's a skill that we can't simply rely on just because we know how to talk. 

So challenge me on this, but I believe providing listeners with a compass and a map can make a big difference in whether you hook that listener or not. 

All right. One last thing. The lack of sound quality can kill you. If there’s any place in your episode where sound quality is the most critical, it's in your lede. The cleaner and more meticulous your audio is, the less your listener will notice it. If it's hollow, echoey, or noisy, it creates a sense for the listener that this host is an amateur. It's like dating. Your shoes are ugly or you show up without a shower, and we'll go look for someone else to fall in love with. 

There you have it. How to hook your listener: a hostiness skill as practiced by three very different hosts in two different formats: scripted narrative shows and an interview program. Let me give you a little reminder list, which will be in the show notes too.

1. Surprise your listener.
2. Spark their curiosity.
3. Start with a scene.
4. And in an interview program, state your purpose upfront. 

Before I go, I have two invitations for you. The first is to support the Podcasting Seriously awards fund. This fund helps independent BIPOC, queer, and trans audio storytellers enter awards programs and pay for training. I'm so happy to support this fund and I hope you'll consider doing it too. There's a link in the show notes and also in our newsletter, which you can subscribe to from the show notes. 

And my second invitation, are you still looking for that special last minute gift for the podcaster in your life? Or a gift for yourself?

Make sure you're doing everything you can to hook your listeners, so you or the podcaster in your life can grow their show. For the holidays, we're offering a special Hook Your Listener audit. Give us a link to an episode. We'll critique it and give you feedback on all the things we discussed here today and many more. And that feedback will be a list of takeaways that you can put to use right away. Buy one of a limited number of these audits for your favorite podcaster or yourself now for $149 and schedule it for January or February. The price goes back up to $300 on January 1. What could be a more personal gift? You'll find a link to the Hook Your Listener audit in our show notes or at podcastallies.com. 

Thanks for listening to Sound Judgment. For these takeaways, see our show notes. Also in the show notes, you'll find links to the three episodes that I referred to in this episode. Our episode with Stephanie Wittels Wachs of Last Day, the episode with Emma Courtland of Crime Show, and the episode with Anne Bogel of What Should I Read Next? 

If you liked this first solo hosted episode examining one skill shared by great hosts, take a minute to rate and review it on Apple Podcasts or your favorite listening app. It really helps us. 

And I would love to hear from you with your feedback on whether this experiment worked for you, or if it didn't, drop me a line at allies at podcast allies dot com. I promise I'll write back. All of our contact info is in the show notes if you forget this. 

Sound Judgment is produced by me, Elaine Appleton Grant. Sound design by Andrew Parrella. Our gorgeous cover art is by Sarah Edgell. Project management—and all the things!—by the wonderful Tina Bassir. 

We'll be back on December 29th with another solo hosted show, a short end of season wrap up, to look a little more deeply at what we learned and to look ahead to the new year and to kicking off season two in January with Glynn Washington of Snap Judgment. I hope you'll join us. 

Happy listening and happy holidays.