The Training Zone
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Circles Within Circles : Nothing’s New When It Comes To Ownership
In radio, it’s said that you only have to work for two stations and you know just about everyone in the industry. Although a lot of that will depend upon the size of your anorak. So it’s interesting to see a few familiar faces popping up this week in Exeter, where I started my professional…
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Remember – Radio Should Be FUN!
Quite a few things made me smile this weekend. The sun was (sort of) out, I ate more than my fair share of barbeque food, had a laugh with some good mates and celebrated the relaunch of one of the greatest names in radio. Radio Trent – back on air, 36 years on. Regular visitors…
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Smash And Grab : Why News Is A Steal
In journalism, friendly rivalries between competing organisations are part and parcel of the job. A bit of ribbing down the pub from your local newspaper colleagues about who got which story first and how is good for the soul, and keeps us on our toes. But that’s quite different from the rather bitter attack on…
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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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Natural Born Fillers
This is a Training Zone post. For the regular radio blog, please click HERE I’ve just woken up after a mammoth shift covering the local elections in Nottingham City, and across the rest of the county my colleagues are sweating it out at counts in the various districts. It’s a huge logistical task for a radio station,…
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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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