Radio Stuff
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Sugar Coated Radio? Not here!
There was a story knocking about in the news last week about Naomi Campbell. Did you see it? No? She’d probably turned sideways. HAHAHA. Actually, I’d better be careful what I say here, because Cadbury issued an apology to the supermodel over an advert for its new product Bliss. It used the tagline “Move over…
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Sounds Like You Want To Hear
Nostalgia’s a thing of the past. Right? Well, not always – because in the next few weeks not one, but two attempts are being made to try and relaunch one of the best known names in radio. And it’s creating quite a fuss for the very reason that the name is so well known. It all…
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Size Matters – The Smaller The Better
A few years ago, the comedy show Naked Video featured a fictional ultra-local TV service. The Outer Hebrides Broadcasting Corporation was the work of Gregor Fisher, who also created the sterotypical Scotsman Rab C Nesbitt. All jolly stuff. And jolly is certainly one way to describe the Sunday morning show on Two Lochs Radio, arguably the UK’s smallest radio station. Based in Gairloch,…
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Why Localness Matters
Since starting this blog, I’ve talked a lot about the importance of local content – mainly from a BBC perspective. So it make a pleasant change to read a report from Radio Centre highlighting some good practice in public service broadcasting in the commercial radio sector. PSB and commercial radio used to go hand in hand. In fact,…
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Live and… erm… local… sort of
Much has been written recently about how exactly we should define “news”. It should be simple, but of course, one man’s news is another’s chip paper. Things came to a head last month when UTV Radio, the owners of TalkSport, failed to have a complaint about BBC Radio Five Live upheld – yet the BBC Trust…
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Sing When You’re Winning
BIN LADEN’S DEATH ON AMERICAN TALK RADIO It’s a talk radio station’s dream – a Major News Story breaking in the middle of an otherwise mundane Sunday night. Wherever you are in the world, your audience wants to hear about this : the death of Osama Bin Laden. So, after digesting some of the early…
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A War of Words
This is a Training Zone post. For the main blog click here For the past few years, the commercial radio sector has frequently hit out at various parts of the BBC – mainly Radios 1 and 2 – for what it said was too much duplication of what commercial stations were already providing. Radio 2,…
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A Crash Course in Media Law
A journalist is never really off duty. We live for this game, it’s a fact – and we often find it difficult to switch off from work. This very post is being written on my day off, having just witnessed a fairly interesting story on the Nottingham Ring Road. All very exciting stuff – at…
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Keep It Simple
This is a Training Zone post. For the main blog click here One of the biggest steps you’ll take from a training course to a real newsroom is coping with the sheer amount of information that’s thrown at you. But the real art is knowing how to turn that information into informative and entertaining radio.…
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Joined Up Radio
Well it’s been an interesting few weeks in the industry whilst I’ve been on my travels. But perhaps the most important development has been the apparent lessening of the threat to merge BBC Local Radio with Five Live. On Thursday, the BBC’s Chief Operating Officer Caroline Thomson gave an update on the BBC’s Delivering Quality First…
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