There will never be another John Laws.

Good.

My first real media gig was working as a talkback radio producer.

The job was formative. I was taught to chase stories, write quickly, and be decisive under what could be immense pressure. I’m grateful for having had the experience. A decade on, and I still use those skills regularly.

But it was also the place where I learnt to navigate around fiddly things like ‘facts’ and ‘balance’ so they didn’t muddy our chosen narrative.

I was never explicitly told to do that, of course. But scripts returned with red lines through qualifying paragraphs here, and counter arguments there, was instruction enough. If you keep pruning the branches of a plant, it will eventually grow to the gardener’s chosen shape.

There was just one time when a senior producer, from a different show, clearly articulated the guiding principle of our station.

“We don’t make people think,” he told me. “We make them feel.”

He said it as a statement of fact – devoid of either judgment or shame. Bakers make bread, not wine. Vets treat animals, not humans. We make people feel, not think.

An appalling admission, perhaps. But also quite useful!

From that point onwards, I performed a vivisection on every story we covered, trying to find the emotion beating at its centre. Not all feelings, I soon realised, are equally useful for radio.

For example, sadness, empathy, and joy are all fine at a pinch. Stories about loss and love could make for beautiful radio when they were done well. But you also risked being saccharine – good talkback should always have an edge, I think.

Amusement could be good, but used sparingly, and only if you’re certain the content is funny. Ray Hadley, for example, would get a musician to write satirical songs about politicians. The one I remember most clearly was the tune of “Forever Young” being adapted to the lyrics “Sarah Hanson’s dumb”. It was excruciatingly bad. You’d find more laughs in a crematorium.

By far the easiest and most fruitful emotion to trigger – particularly with our baby boomer-dense audience – was outrage.

We, a producing team largely made up of morally-compromised 20-somethings, pushed that button like trained monkeys expecting a treat.

Whether we were covering politics, business, or culture, if there was a way to muster up indignant anger, we would find it. We were like evil Marie Kondos, digging through piles of rubbish, and asking whether it sparked outrage before proffering it to our audience.

If it did indeed make them angry, we were rewarded with a full board of calls and an easy few hours on air.

I was good at my job. We all were. When it comes to positive societal contributions, this placed me somewhere in the vicinity of parking inspectors and those people who sold asbestos.

But even at our best, we were all in the shadow of the man who perfected the art – John Laws.

His death, at the age of 90, was announced yesterday evening.

As audiences fragment, and people can entertain themselves in a million different ways on their commute, it’s hard to remember the immense power radio used to yield. More than 2 million people once listened regularly to John Laws hosting his breakfast show.

Radio made more sense then, I suppose.

If you had an opinion you were compelled to voice, it had to go through an intermediary. Perhaps that was writing a letter to the paper, perhaps it was talking to Laws – if he was willing to listen. That small discretion belied a tremendous amount of power.

The callers you chose to put on air can create an illusion of either disagreement or consensus. It can shape the public discourse, change opinions, alter our politics.

Or at least it could once.

The media’s position as a filter between the public and their ability to voice their thoughts is long gone. Now we can pour all our discontent into the internet’s insatiable maw. The views we hear these days are determined by shadowy algorithms programmed by tech companies in countries far from our own. It’s hard to say which system is more terrible.

But one thing is for sure, there will never be another John Laws.

That, I think, is for the best.