Hello, I'm James Cridland, the radio futurologist, and every week or so I write a newsletter
all about the future of radio and international radio trends.
And this is it for March the 20th, 2023.
Can your presenters publish to your website?
Because there was a great tweet from Amanda White last week highlighting just how hard
it is to get anything done at the BBC.
And I can corroborate much that's in the tweet as well.
Here's a choice quote for you.
The choice quote is, I can take control of a radio station and open the mic to hundreds
of thousands of people.
I can broadcast live on television, but I'm not trusted to post anything on the BBC website.
Now, it is 25 years ago now and much has changed, but when I worked at Virgin Radio, we gave
our presenters the tools, if they wanted them, to be able to post directly onto the Virgin
Radio website.
Why wouldn't we do that?
Well, I hate to mention it to Amanda, but as a BBC senior manager in the late 2000s,
I was able to publish directly to the BBC website without any editorial oversight, which
I found a little bit strange.
Anyway, BBC local radio journalists went on strike last week protesting at the loss of
local programming on these stations and full marks to the BBC's Gail Lofthouse on BBC Radio
Leeds, who ended her live show this way before giving over to the strikebreakers.
Epichondylitis, whether you play Watt or not, the answer is tennis.
It's tennis elbow, something I have had and I have never played tennis in my life.
Question number three.
In the body, ossicles are very small watts.
I can't tell you how many times people have said testicles to me.
It's not rice.
The answer is bones.
And finally, what is the common word for a sanguiness crust?
The answer is scab.
Enjoy the rest of your day.
I shall return tomorrow after 11 o'clock.
Yikes.
Now, AM's enforced switch off in the car in the US is getting people quite worked up.
Science Magazine uses the but in times of emergency defence, but no data is put forward
as to how many AM radio stations actually bother to broadcast any emergency information
in the US.
And particularly on weekends, most AM stations in the US are an empty studio, rebroadcasting
something from satellite or something from a computer and wholly unable to produce any
emergency broadcasting at all.
Unless you know different, of course, but I don't think in the US that that defence
stacks up anymore.
I would love to see more data to the contrary, but the evidence isn't particularly good.
Australia's new radio audience figures also came out.
ABC Radio Melbourne on AM posted its worst ever figures.
2GB on AM slipped from number one in Sydney.
4BC on AM.
6PR on AM.
And 5AA on AM.
So post large drops in audience.
ABC Local Radio and other cap cities on AM showed a small rise in audience after for
most their worst figures.
And ABC RN on AM is currently near its lowest figures as well.
And if you walk to your local electronics store and you try and buy an AM radio, well,
good luck because they're beginning to be quite rare as well.
I think AM is increasingly unfit for purpose and broadcasters relying on AM for their flagship
services need to have an urgent plan to fix it.
In other news, Kerry Jones posts a short video explaining how he's using chat GPT for his
radio service.
I've not yet taken the plunge with AI, but he seems to be doing quite well doing that.
The world's longest serving female DJ is profiled in The Guardian.
Mary McCoy is 85 and she's on KVST FM, which is a radio station better known as K-Star
Country 99.7 in Huntsville in Texas.
AM FM radio ratings overtake TV among persons 18 to 49 for the first time in media history,
says a blog post from Pierre Bouvard from Westwood or Cumulus or whatever it is that
they're called.
They would gently point out that of course this all depends on definitions.
What is radio?
What's TV?
And the uncharitable might point out that this is a feature of radio's decline of listening
time being slightly slower than that of TV.
But even so, it's not going to stop me or anyone else using this new stat with abandon.
Someone contacts me just after I sent this out as an email saying, yes, not sure that
this was the case in the 1940s or 1950s.
So perhaps this isn't the first time in media history at all and I would probably agree
with them.
I also link to the history of radio drama in India, which is quite the read.
And I put out a few more old blog posts online from 2007.
There's a piece there about Radio Silly's pre-launch blog.
There's a piece there about John C. Dvorak who says all sorts of silly things about internet
radio, highlighting the mistakes that many commentators make when assuming that the internet
is free to broadcast on.
It's not.
Bandwidth costs serious money if you're doing it properly.
And Radio in Norway, more futuristic than you think, was a look back at how research
worked in the country back in 2007.
And finally, Paul Easton's funeral will be at Chilton's crematorium in Amersham in Hamden
Chapel on Monday, the 27th of March at 11am.
There will be refreshments afterwards at the King's Arms Hotel and I hope the wine list
is good for his sake.
Thank you to Richard Hilton, to James Masterton and to Brunn Audio Consulting for your ongoing
support of this newsletter and this podcast.
I'm very grateful to you.
If you'd like to support my work in any way, please do.
Buy me a coffee.
Buymeacoffee.com.
James Cridland is where to do that.
You can give regularly or just give a one-off coffee or five, then that's all good.
And perhaps I will see you at a big event somewhere soon.
I'm at Radio Days Europe next week, Prague, March 25th to 30th.
I'm at the NAB show in mid-April.
Spotify's event in Berlin in mid-April as well.
Still haven't found out what it's called.
The New Zealand Podcast Summit in mid-May.
The podcast show 2023 in London at the end of May.
And Radio Days North America in early June, among many others.
My contact details are james.cridland.net slash contact if you're there in any one of
those.
And I'm also on Masterton.
Just give me a search james at crid.land and you'll find me there.
My professional website has more details about who I am and what I do and if I can help you
further.
That is james.cridland.net.
But until next time, keep listening.