The Trouble With Trending

Jeff McHugh • March 1, 2021

You often hear radio features named  Trending Now  or  Trending Topics  with a mix of breaking news, entertainment updates, fads, weird news, and so forth.

A trending story benchmark can make your show topical. It can also open floodgates for a rush of weak content and stories that your audience already saw two hours ago on Instagram.

It has become our regular practice to find out what time our client’s competitors air  What’s Trending,  and we sometimes get ratings results counter-programming it with killer content.

You can make your trending-stories feature a strength instead of a weakness. Here are guidelines to consider for content, execution, and infusing your character through the segment.

  • Choose universal stories that work regardless of celebrity.  There are more “who-cares” stars than ever. A news story about robbers stealing two dogs and shooting the dog walker is  universally  compelling even if you do not care about the people involved. That breaking news involved  Lady Gaga’s French bulldogs  but the story would still be A+ if the dogs belonged to Snoop Dogg, AOC, or to an average person in your town.
     
  • Audio is non-optional.  Computers and the internet make adding a clip to  any mention of a movie, tv-show or performer  quick and easy. Use sound effects too. Audio is worth a thousand words and serves as a pattern disruption to reengage attention.
     
  • Insert  focused  point of view.  Listeners enjoy  brief  host banter expressing emotions and observations around the stories. Your stories should be so strong that the banter is the icing and not the cake – otherwise, why air those stories in the first place?
     
  • Choose stories, not announcements.  An  announcement  is, “Country singer Kacey Musgraves is recording her new album.” “Country singer  Kacey Musgraves bought her grandmother’s old house and painted it pink ” is a  story.
     
  • Be flexible and improvise . Some days you have too much content, other days not enough. Some days your trending feature is one minute and another day it runs four. (Hint: shorter is usually better.) Some days you might skip the feature altogether. The one thing that you are  never  flexible on is keeping your content filter high.
     
  • How important is being relevant for your market  really ?   Some cities are thirsty for current events and others not so much. In this month’s Portland ratings there are two news stations ranked in the top three while St Louis has no news radio anywhere in the top ten. Maybe your audience wants trending content occasionally, not hourly.
     
  • Consider super-short bulletins.  Audiences have a strong interest in  local  news, but the stories often do not need much airtime to tell well. We worked with a Victoria, BC show that aired  News In 140 Characters  hourly. Three headlines in 17 seconds –  with production and sound clips  — and it was great! 

A trending topics feature can be good for your show if you take all the steps to make it entertaining, emotional, and relevant.

Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash

Share this article

Recent Posts

By Randy Lane • September 29, 2026
When I start coaching a show, talents often say:“Nobody calls anymore.” Or: “Listeners in this market don’t call radio shows.” My response is, “That’s interesting, because several of our shows get more calls than they need.” The difference isn’t necessarily the market. It’s often how the show invites people into the conversation.  Airing callers and text […]
By Randy Lane • September 21, 2026
Jerry Seinfeld wrote every episode of Seinfeld longhand, on a yellow legal pad, with a blue Bic pen. He still writes that way. He’s said the flashing cursor on a screen makes him anxious, like it’s asking, “So, whaddaya got?” Why Start With Pen and Paper?Writing by hand slows you down just enough for ideas to […]
By Randy Lane • September 15, 2026
In the era of loud, fast-talking announcer DJs, my radio mentor, Todd Wallace, asked my fellow DJs and me, “Would you talk to your neighbor over the back fence like a pukey DJ or just in natural conversation?” Of course we all said we’d talk to them conversationally. Todd concluded, “Talk to listeners on air like […]
Show More