“The edge that we have is that we have a lot more access to other people’s stories, more reach towards people that wanna share what they wanna say.”

STAN SY (LAST HEARD ON) MELLOW 94.7 Changed his mind from wanting to be a lawyer to wanting to be in radio after DJs gave a talk in his high school, giving up a lot of money JAM ALAS MAGIC 89.9 Only became a radio DJ when she was asked to hang out (not tr

But that wasn’t personal branding, though.

R: It wasn’t personal branding, but you know, they still used their clout, they still used their reach to in uence a lot of people.

S: But that’s different in the sense that they did it through traditional media. We are more in tune with non-traditional media. Like if I tweet, you know what, I’m hitting the streets tonight because of what’s going on, I don’t need to say who’s with me, but the fact that, say, Renzo Magnaye tweeted this out, he’s in the streets right now, check this guy out, he cares, he gives a shit. If I am a listener of Renzo, for example, that says a lot to me about how much he cares about what’s going on.

K: And in my mind, he is a public gure, and yet he chooses to ght for this. J: To take a side. K: And I think we’re a little less afraid, and also more afraid to ruin our reputations. I don’t know. Before, I was so afraid to speak my mind and then I realized because I wanted to get somewhere–and it’s not that I’m anywhere right now— but it’s just that being more real to myself and having a personal brand of positivity and not agreeing when there’s injustice, and all those things, you kind of also have a responsibility to people who are tuned in to you. You don’t have to do it on your radio station, you know, and we don’t at all.

R: Yeah. I think this is more in the context of social media than it is on radio. Just to answer the original question, what gives us an edge, I feel like we’re part of not only the generation that demands to be heard, just wants their opinion out there; we’re also part of the most self- aware generation we’ve had in a long time. We are now calling out our parents, we’re now calling out authority gures. J: Calling out your past self, even. R: Yeah. We’re telling ourselves that sometimes, it’s okay to be sad. And we’re not supposed to feel bad about that. I feel like this generation is so drastically different from the one that came before, that listeners from our generation can tell the difference between someone who doesn’t know them, basically, compared to someone who’s just trying to do the things they’ve been doing for the longest time.

K: I get it. If you’re a young DJ from our generation trying to relate to people and an older DJ trying to relate to this generation, you’ll know the difference. Like you’ll really see it.

R: That’s why I think one of the best qualities you can have as a radio DJ is if you are self- aware, if you are meta enough, if you can look at society and culture from an outsider’s perspective and see it as something you can just manipulate, then you will do so well. I think the edge that we have, in the context of radio, is that we have a lot more access to other people’s stories. We have the reach of social media. We have more reach towards people that wanna share what they wanna say.

Before, like the only way you can do that was to call up the station, once someone calls up, you can’t call up the station anymore because they’re already talking to someone. Now, we have social media, now we have a lot more stories to reach, we have a lot more conversations that we can have, and that provides for a lot more content than I guess what was available back in the day. Yeah, I think our reach is much bigger. Limited to just radio, radio’s reach is much smaller just because there are other avenues. But the stories radio can tell and the stories radio is able to tell, that’s where they’ve grown a lot, because of the power of social media and the internet.

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