Now with radio being live, bloopers are bound to happen occasionally. And not just me butchering the pronunciation of foreign names or words. On International Women’s Day, the studio had a MAJOR technical meltdown and Daragh was forced to waffle for a while until transmission switched from my campus to MI’s Radio Studio. I was on the inside with him, and he asked me for my thoughts on the day itself. But… I left him hang out to dry because I didn’t have A CLUE what to say about it! And as the day progressed, he got more and more frustrated trying to salvage something and I was just there in the room, making sure he was calm and wasn’t going to be killed by the station manager.
I also threw him under the bus LIVE ON AIR on one of the days I was host. While a segment of Wired In was going out, he confided in me that he attempted to decipher the key point of the next story that he was responsible for but struggled badly. And I decided, for some reason, to actually use the word ‘attempted’ in my link to said segment. And he reacted with his face in his hands, probably howling with awkward laughter and thinking ‘Why did you say that to the audience?!’, which is completely fair because realistically, a news reader is meant to be objective when introducing a story. They’re not supposed to pre-empt how any interviews go; that’s for the reporter to assess themselves if they’re asked. I honestly don’t know if I have a forked tongue or a sharp sense of humour. Judge for yourself based on that anecdote.
But perhaps the most hilarious blooper of all is when a segment fails to go out as planned. This happened to me twice. The first occurred during a Friday edition of Wired In, basically a weekly round-up of segments from the week just gone. After I introduced a story, the audio file failed to play properly. And all I could do was apologise for that and move onto another item in the schedule! And the second was during another show where a young schoolgirl was in the studio as a guest co-host. I thought it would be nice for both of us to take it in turns to read links to the segments that I had prepared. When I finished one of mine, the audio file wasn’t playing and the second de factor Floor Manager I had just urged me to move onto the next item and recover the segment later, which we did. It can be very awkward when a link that’s supposed to go out doesn’t go out as planned. But from what I’ve seen on rolling news coverage, the only way to deal with this sort of thing is to keep calm, make an apology for the error on the studio’s part and keep the show going with something else.
In fact, that first link failure was part of a submission I made for a category in the Student Media Awards. Now that category ultimately didn’t go ahead because of a lack of sponsorship, but the file did get assessed by people in the Irish Media and they were full of praise and constructive feedback. First, Sean Defoe, political correspondent for Newstalk:
“Good entry. Presenter seems comfortable with the topics and guests. Nice style of interviewing. Newsreading voice is good but some mispronunciation of names and places in the bulletin – which happens to us all from time to time!”
And Sean Moncrieff, award-winning broadcaster on Newstalk FM:
“Adam Cronin is an engaging and already quite polished news anchor. There was a nice lively start to the show by running through what’s coming up, and the news headlines were efficiently done. It was refreshing to hear news that you wouldn’t normally hear in other news bulletins, such as the ceasefire in Ethiopia and the coral bleaching in Australia. The choice of items Adam included in the show were well mixed, including Covid, hospital waiting lists, inflation, gender-based violence and relief work for Ukrainian refuges. He also did well to ensure some Limerick angles in the stories. There was also a good tonal balance by including slightly lighter items such as Mick Molloy on Irish people not being multi-lingual.
The one disappointment was that none of the reporters were given an on-air credit for their work. However, the mark of a good host is how they handle things when they go wrong. In radio, there is always the danger of technical problems: pre-recorded items won’t play, lines go down. When Adam threw to an item and all we heard was ‘hello?’, Adam did what any good host should. He calmly apologised and moved on. Full credit to him for that. I would have liked to hear Adam do an interview himself. Perhaps that’s one for next year.”
Funny he should mention me doing an interview myself because I did conduct two interviews with two of the officers of the next Student Union that formed during my final year at college. And, if I can remember what I did with my copies of those files, you might see a transcript of how both of them went in the future.
In the meantime, as my spell came to an end, my mother spotted something in the Limerick Diary that sounded right up my street. And tomorrow night, you’ll get a chance to read all about that! Just remember, I’m The Aspie behind The ADog Blog, speaking by myself, for myself. Unlike Autism Speaks.
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