You’ve decided the Jab-Jab-Punch format is right for your show. Congratulations. You’ve chosen wisely. Your next task is to Pick a Punch story that resonates in each segment. Most personalities assume that will be the biggest headline or most important story of the day. Not necessarily the case. Sometimes the biggest headline is the most obvious story in the stack, but not the most usable. It may be too closed-ended, overexposed, or too controversial for the show’s tone. Or perhaps it’s too complicated to explain quickly, or detached from the audience’s everyday life. Pick a Punch story is not just the story with the most talk value. That is a different standard.
In the Jab-Jab-Punch structure, the Punch is the last story, the one for conversation and personality. It is the segment’s payoff that is most likely to stick in the listener’s mind. That means the right Punch is not chosen just because it is “important.” It is chosen because the talent can do something with it.
Unless you’re a news/talk station or the information source for your market, information segments are more than just reporting. The job is to find the angle you can speak into.
Pick A Punch Story That Drives Personality
A headline is just raw material. It does not become a good radio segment until you find the human handle with a point of view. A good Punch story has the elements of a good personal story: Tension, curiosity, and an emotional reaction. The emotion could be a laugh, a spirited argument, or an eye roll. This is the relatable part of the update that makes people say, “Yep, that’s me,” or “Oh, I know somebody exactly like that.”
That is the angle you are looking for. Without an angle, even a big story can sit there like a box of unopened furniture from IKEA. All the pieces are there (hopefully), but nobody can sit on it yet.
Pick a Punch story that gives the talent something to lean into. Relevance matters here, but relatability is more important. Finding relevant stories is easy. You can spot what’s trending, but don’t stop with the topic. A story may be relevant because everybody is talking about it, but if the audience can’t connect it to their life, then it may not have enough talk value to carry the segment. That’s where you come in.
Personality-driven information segments need a human engine. They need a reason for the listener to emotionally or socially engage with what they are hearing.
Your Punch story may be a small lifestyle story about bad date etiquette, text message habits, vacation stress, grocery shopping, parenting guilt, or passive-aggressive workplace emails. These topics could generate much more usable conversation than a giant headline everyone already saw on their phone 30 minutes ago.
