2. Take it from a newsreader - your voice matters!

Hear from channel 7 news presenter KENDALL GILDING on how she gets that beautiful news voice, why voice coaching is an integral part of her career plan, and the real reason she looks after her voice - HINT: it has nothing to do with work.

Transcript

Sally: I'm Sally Prosser, you're listening to That Voice Podcast. No matter who you are or what you do, your voice matters, and unless you've sworn lifetime vow of silence. This is the podcast for you.

I have a very special guest today. She might be a familiar face in many of your living rooms. I'm joined by the lovely Kendall Gilding. Now Kendall presents the news at 4:00 PM on channel Seven and she also pops up at 6:00 PM from time to time and does that ridiculous early start to read sometimes on Sunrise. Kendall, great to have you here. Welcome to That Voice Podcast.

Kendall: Amazing to be here. Thank you for having me.

Sally: So I always start with the same question and it seems a little bit ridiculous in your line of work, but would you be able to do your job if you lost your voice.

Kendall: I think in short, absolutely not. The irony is I actually have a bit of a cold at the moment and even stuff like that presents problems in my work for me. Everything we do is based around speaking obviously because it's TV, it's a bit different to radio. So there's a visual element, but really if I can't communicate and speak, I couldn't physically read the news. There's not really any way to get around that.

Sally: So on days like today when you are feeling a little bit fluey, what do you do?

Kendall: It's a bit of survival mode. Things like Otrivine and kind of, you know, you're doing throat gargles and I know Kay McGrath is a heavy, like we use, there's cough medicine always around cause you know, if you get a lingering cough during the bulletin, that can be a huge issue as well. So it has been, you know, whenever you get sick, it's just funny cause you just, my whole life becomes dedicated to 4 to 5:00 PM making sure my nose isn't blocked at that time of day. The rest of the day it doesn't matter. And then it's kind of like the strategic use of Otrivine to clear my nose or something.

This week the biggest issue has been that I can't breathe because my nose is blocked. Ubut yeah, I mean everything is geared towards voice and if you ever lose your voice you have to, you know, even if you're feeling awesome, you have to take a sick day because you can't speak. I mean, what are you supposed to do? Or if you're really croaky, there's been times where I've thought, Oh, I'm really croaky, I sound awful. But you read the news and people at home actually can't tell and you sorta just actually there's something about the TV that it just sounds a bit deeper and it's almost a bit nicer. There's like a little huskiness to it. But in person, if you were to hear me speak, you'd be like, wow, you sound like you're quite sick. But that doesn't translate through the TV. So that's kind of a good thing.

Sally: It's interesting. I wonder as well, whether when you are behind the desk, you go into that performance mode a little bit. Absolutely. You know, I've heard that some singers, I remember Katie Perry once had a terrible sore throat and could hardly talk and then went and performed a whole show. And you think, how is that possible? So maybe part of you goes in, has that adrenaline rush and, and performs just for that time and then dies when the bulletin's over.

Kendall: Definitely. And even throughout the bulletin, you know, you're sitting there before the show starts, the clock's counting down, you know, you've got 10 seconds, you kind of do your one last, you know, clear your voice moment with two seconds to go and you start reading and the bulletin's split up with, you know, new stories and ad breaks. So at any given time, you almost know, right, I've got to get through this 15 second intro. A story's going to play. I can have some water or, but it does, it does take over. It's, it's like you say, it's adrenaline that completely consumes you and you just get it done without really thinking too much about it. But it is like a performance mode. And this week I had an intern sitting in the studio with me and I said to her afterwards, you know, what did you think Rebecca? How was the bulletin? And it's always so interesting to get their feedback about what they think of watching everything come together live because it is live. It's not pre-recorded.

Sally: I was about to say, I think a lot of people don't realize when they're watching TV that it is genuinely that you are reading at Mount Coot-tha at the very same time that they're watching.

Kendall: I know, I think they maybe think it's close to live. Maybe it's a bit delayed or maybe we recorded it within the last hour, but there's like a three second delay or something. It's like, it's really happening. I'm sitting there when you're watching. But she said to me, Oh, I just found it so interesting. You'd be talking and then you had to snap straight into a story. It was just so fascinating how you transitioned from just talking to say, Shane Webcke sitting on the desk with you with two seconds to go, you two stop talking and you read the next story. And I was like, ah. Yeah. I guess I don't think about that. But it is, it's the performance mode that just kicks in.

Sally: Yeh and I bet that you weren't doing that when it was your very first bulletin. I think the ability to chat before your go on, it comes with experience.

Kendall: That's, true. And I'm one of those people I'm sure I make my director's a bit nervous cause they're like "be quiet." but I find it calming to talk. Even if I'm talking to them in my ear piece or something. It just, I find it calming to be chatting during stories and ad breaks cause it just, I don't know if I sit there in silence, I think I go a bit nutty before I then have to open my mouth again.

Sally: Yeah. And you have a beautiful, relaxed, fluent storytelling style. I work with a lot of journalists and I love your voice.

Kendall: Thank you.

Sally: Could you give people any tips about what you do to achieve that? I imagine having the conversation before you start reading is one thing that would help with that.

Kendall: Yeah, absolutely. I think for me, even early on, even when I was still at uni, I recognized that voice was a huge part of TV and I always knew I wanted to go into TV. But when you're at uni, you keep all your options open and you just kind of see what happens. But a really important part of my career plan was that, look, I'll get my voice sorted before I even graduate so that hopefully if someone wants to employ me, I've at least got the skills needed to, to voice a story or to do some radio work. So I actually, you know, invested a fair bit of my own money in voice coaching before I'd even finished uni and I think I did six sessions and the man I worked with, it was, I don't know, I just, I feel like I quickly realized when I watched TV, I didn't kind of love that wooden newsreadery style. There's still to an element we need to put on a voice because if you are to record a person naturally having a conversation, it can be nasally or you know, you almost listened back and think, gee, I'm a bit chipmunky or there's something about voice if you're not, you know, working in a bit of a lower register.

Sally: And I think as well with news, it needs to be objective.

Kendall: Yes.

Sally: When you're just talking conversational, I've heard people say, Oh, why does, you know, why do you put on that news voice? But it does have a particular cadence and inflection to it because you can't be putting your opinion into the environment.

Kendall: Unbiased. Yeah and it's information like you're delivering information and often it's devastating and often it's happy. But I just remember always thinking I wanted to sound like a friend in people's lounge rooms. That was always my mission and it still is today. And some days I'll watch, I watch my bulletin back every day. It's not fun cause you sort of, you know, naturally critique yourself. I don't watch my entire bulletin, but I'll watch sort of the opener, key intros. It depends if I have enough time, I obviously skip through all the news stories and just watch my moments just to see how I'm performing - coming out of stories. You know how I've read a really sad story whether I'd got this awkward banter with the other reader on the desk or you know, just things like that to see how I'm going. But yeah, I just, I still, it's still a mission for me as well that I just want to sound like a friend. I think that's, and to me that's what the viewer would enjoy most is that it wasn't someone talking at them. It's someone talking with them.

Sally: Absolutely. And how much preparation do you do before sitting at the desk? Have you, how much practice of the intros do you do?

Kendall: When I first started, I've been in this particular role for about three and a half years. So reading a bulletin Monday to Friday live for an hour. In the beginning, I definitely pre-read the whole bulletin out loud at my desk. I would read every intro out loud because I wasn't super familiar with my own style, my own strengths and weaknesses. So I would prepare by figuring out, Oh, I think I'd need to take a breath there and I'll put some dots in a, in a line to just naturally create a breath for myself. But over time you, yeah. You just get better at it. And now I don't read anything out loud and I just pretty much go down to the studio and, you know, do it live. We rehearse the opener every day. Just to make sure that that's, you know, it's punchy. It's the first thing people are gonna see and we want to grab their attention and make sure it's perfect, that's the same for six o'clock. For any bulletin, you would always rehearse the opener before you went on air. The people that don't know what that means, it's kind of the, the top stories. When the news starts, we're plugging to people, here's what's coming up. And I guess maybe that gets me in a bit of a mode or, yeah, it gets me ready and make sure, Oh yeah, no, my voice is working. But aside from that, yeah. You just with experience I guess don't need to prepare in the same way.

Sally: Yeah. Because you're just getting more used to it. And how often would you change the content?

Kendall: Daily. I'm very hands on with our bulletin. I write a fair few segments in it and I'll chip in wherever I can. I've got great producers and people that I've worked with - like the same team for that entire three and a half years. And we launched this bulletin from it was a brand new program. We had a four o'clock news that came out of Sydney, but a lot of what Sydney ran wasn't really applicable to people in Queensland, especially if you're in somewhere like Cairns you're not interested in a car crash on a Sydney highway. So there was a need for a local version of an afternoon bulletin. So it just meant we didn't have anyone's shoes to fill and we could kind of create our own show with a Queensland flavour. And so it's been really great working with the same people because we all have a great sense of ownership over it. And so they're fantastic in asking my opinions about where things should be in the rundown and how things should work. And it also means I'm very I'm given a lot of freedom to change content because I am the one that has to say it. I would never change the context of something. And as you mentioned, you know, we are impartial, unbiased. I've never changed the facts, but if sometimes there's just a word that I cannot get my mouth around, which happens all the time. Even a sentence that's too long that I just think, you know what, I need to break that into two. I am a qualified journalist. I've been doing this for eight years, so you know, I will, I will readily and regularly rewrite entire intros or stories just, you know, to make it flow better for me.

Sally: Yeah. I'm so glad that you shared that. I'm always saying to my students, nobody's sitting at home saying, wow, that reporter's used a lot of five syllable words. And that's, gee, that's a long sentence to get through. They're not thinking about that. So if it's too hard then like make it easier for yourself and just change the word.

Kendall: And often, I mean you wouldn't talk to someone like that kind of either with, you know, really complicated words. So sometimes I'll read things and go, well I don't even really know what that word means. So is the person at home? And if I'm looking up a word to learn how to pronounce it often I'm like, Hmm, it's a bit of a red flag for me. Unless of course maybe it's some obscure town in Italy and I just haven't been there.

Sally: Or a name.

Kendall: So yeah, that's a bit different. But if it's, if it's some word that I think, I don't know that means it's, yeah, I'll often change it.

Sally: Fantastic. And you have a lot of interns that come through the newsroom and I'd imagine one of the most popular questions is how do you get the voice? Is that something you do get asked?

Kendall: A little bit. I think that they are most surprised if say if they come down to the studio and watch the show, they're, they're surprised about the newsreader voice. Like it is, it is very much a thing and they're shocked from, I've been talking to you all day. You sound completely normal, but in an instant, you know how to put your voice on to that broadcast standard. They don't ask about it so much, but it is actually my number one tip. Anytime an intern is asking for advice about getting career ready, if they are serious about radio or television, my number one advice is just start getting voice coaching because there are so many tips that you will not learn yourself. Like there's so many things that even just with experience in a newsroom, you're actually not going to perfect your voice just by voicing all the time. There are skills and strategies you need. So it's always my number one tip and I still get voice coaching now. We have someone come into our work and you know, everyone in the newsroom essentially can still get a time slot no matter how many - 20 years experience - they can still sit down and get just a few critiques on maybe words they're not saying correctly or letters they're not enunciating. It's, it's a, it never ends.

Sally: Yeah, I say voice is a bit like fitness. Unfortunately you can't just go to the gym for a week and say that's it, I'm fit the end. It's something that you have to stay on top of.

Kendall: 100% and it's funny because when I first started this role, I remember thinking every time I, I covered updates say for the 6:00 PM readers, I couldn't like get the script out in the time that was allocated. It had been written to a certain length and I would always run out of time. I couldn't physically read the words fast enough and I was like, I feel like I'm reading like a race call or what's going on. But it is a fitness that I had not yet developed and throughout my career now that - the whole bulletin is timed to the second because it is live now, my producers are going, wow, you're a lot faster than your read rate because it's a fitness that you just build up. And if you go on holidays as I have recently done, you come back and you've got to, it's like taking three weeks off from the gym. You've got to kind of get back into it. You haven't lost all of the muscle. But you've lost a lot of it and you're starting again.

Sally: Do you think it's a challenge for a lot of young journalism students and journalists that as we've talked about, it is such an important skill? Like you say, it's your number one tip yet, even though you do have people coming into the news room from time to time and there are voice coaches around it isn't that accessible, is it?

Kendall: No. And I'm often surprised by maybe some younger journalists or you know colleagues that I even have that I'm always curious why people don't put more emphasis on voice. Why it isn't considered something we all should be working on more often. And it's not something you really talk about. Once you kind of have the job, there's no one kind of coming around and you get your script subbed by a producer and they check your words and say, yep, cool, this is good to go. But no one says afterwards, hey, like just some tips on, you know, perhaps you could have voiced it like this and often for any of us you can get very singsongy or you fall into patterns of your own that become maybe even your flavour. But truthfully you're actually not voicing the story to the best of not your ability, but maybe to the best way that it could have actually been done based on the content. So it is really interesting that it actually becomes very forgotten about despite it being, I would still believe the actual most important part of even what we do in television.

Sally: Fantastic. I definitely speak that language. I love to hear that. Kendall, thank you so much for joining me. Was there anything else you'd like to add?

Kendall: I suppose regardless of whether you're in media or you're a singer or something that actually really involves your voice, I guess I would just say take care of it because I'm a chatty person and I want to be able to have a voice for a long time, but it is one of those things. It's like your eyes. You only kind of get one set of eyes and you're really only gonna get one set of vocal cords. So just take care of it. Maybe let's think a little bit more about our words and how we use our voice and it's a very powerful instrument in this modern day. So take care of it and do the right thing with it.

Sally: Oh, fantastic. What wonderful advice, and I think it's often the missing link. When people think of voice coaching, they think of it as career advancement or confidence, but that care element is so important because as we began the chat with, if your voice isn't in good health, I'm also coming off the back of a bad throat infection. So I'm a little bit like you and my voice starts going. Next thing the whole entire house looks like a pharmacy and every single thing possible is laid out because it is so important that I can have that health.

Kendall: Yeah, you don't want to abuse your voice as well cause you know. Yeah. If you don't take care of it, it won't be there forever. And I can think of nothing worse than not being able to kind of, you know, tell my husband that I love him or talk to my kids because I've not taken care of it.

Sally: What a beautiful way to finish. Thank you so much Kendall.

Kendall: Thank you for having me.

Sally: Isn't Kendall just the loveliest and no, I didn't pay her to say her top tip for young journalists is to get voice coaching, but if you are a young journalist or a journalism student and you would like to get some voice coaching, please get in touch with me. I'd love to help. I also have an online program called Miked Up and it's very comprehensive. It covers everything you need to know about getting that smooth storytelling, natural style. It covers how to achieve that tip-top tone, that voice of credibility. And it also covers confident clarity. So what you can do to make sure that your words are formed nicely for the microphone. And you know what? If you are listening to this podcast, why don't I swing you a bit of a discount. If you go to the course page. So it's sally prosser.com.au/courses. Click through to Miked Up. Once you get to the checkout page, if you use the coupon code, ThatVoicePodcast, easy to remember, just the name of the podcast, ThatVoicePodcast, I will give you 50% of the retail price and the retail price is $497 that's an amazing saving. And I also offer a free 60 minute session, one-on-one with me with that course. So it's quite a good deal. So That Voice Podcast, and you'll find that at sallyprosser.Com.au/courses. Now I love that Kendall finished off her chat by talking about the importance of looking after your voice health. You know, it is important to be able to tell the people that you love, that you love them. And especially as you get older in life and your body might break down, your voice becomes more and more important. So you want it to be there for you and there's no need to wait. This episode's already been uploaded. So right after this just roll right on to hear my three must--do's to take care of your voice. They're very easy tips that I use in my life every day and will be very easy for you to use as well.

Sally: Thanks for listening to That Voice Podcast. To find out more head to www.thatvoicepodcast.com.