The first Multiplatform Radio Award in the Sonys
Posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 7:42pm. #
One of the first things that happened to me when I joined the BBC was an invitation from the Sony Radio Academy Awards to be on their organising committee. I was tremendously privileged, and really rather over-awed, to be part of the team that organises the awards: full, as it is, of radio’s biggest names. I felt rather humbled that the awards, the UK radio industry’s biggest and most critically-acclaimed, takes its job so seriously; really hard thought brings the awards to you every year, and judges and committee members alike are incredibly concerned with ensuring the awards are run fairly and with the radio industry’s best thoughts at heart.
Of course, I came with an agenda. As someone who’s worked within radio’s new media arena since the early 1990s, I was acutely aware that the Sony Radio Academy Awards were seen, by our community at least, as irrelevant. The “Interactive Programme Award” was a new award in 2007 which looked promising - but appeared, on closer inspection, to be more about phoneins and audience interaction, and less about the brave new world of new platforms and new media. (This year, that award was renamed the “Listener Participation Award”.)
And so, this year, a brand new award was accepted by the committee: the Multiplatform Radio Award. It exists to: recognise excellence in the creation of multiplatform support for radio - services that are designed to enrich and extend a radio programme, event, or station. Entries are invited from publishers and producers of radio station websites, services delivered to mobile (via text, mms, wap or web), DAB digital radio data services including DLS ’scrolling text’, or services on other platforms. Judges will be seeking to reward entries which make effective use of their chosen medium and enhance the listener’s experience. This may extend to supporting a programme or event during transmission, or pre/post broadcast. Services should be directly related to radio station output.
On Monday night, I was at the Grosvenor House Hotel, to watch the Awards being announced. I was already delighted with the amount of entries for the Multiplatform Radio Awards, and also - given I had nothing to do with the judging - delighted at a good cross-section of entries; from bronze award-winner Planet Rock, to BBC local radio, two BBC national radio services for which I’m responsible (one of which attained silver), but I was especially proud of the winner.
You see - it’s one thing doing a fantastic job capturing the excitement and additional content opportunities at the BBC Radio 1 Big Weekend. I’m proud of the team who did such a great job last year, and this year, putting it together. It supports a radio station event particularly well. With the advances this year (check it out before Saturday, due to some rights restrictions, for the full thing), I have no doubt that it’s capable of winning Gold in next year’s awards.
But this year’s winner, the BBC World Service’s Bangladesh Boat Project, was really something else; because this was a piece of radio conceived, first and foremost, as a full multiplatform experience - with, it seems to me, just as much thought on how it would work on new platforms as it would on the radio.
As Ben Sutherland says on the BBC Editors blog: If predictions about sea level rises come true, much of Bangladesh will simply be erased from the map. Our aim, therefore, was to hire a boat and use it to travel the long, wide rivers of the country to meet the people most at risk. There were amazing stories [...] but not only was the method of getting these stories remarkable, but so was our way of getting it out. We weren’t just using tri-media, and we weren’t just World Service. We were on Radio 5 Live, News 24, Radio Scotland - and on Twitter, iTunes, Google.
In the words of the judges, “it embraced everything from podcasts to GPS and Googlemaps to add value to the listener/user experience and met those listeners where they really lived using third party sites such as Flickr.” They even had the foresight to put those photos under a CC licence, to enable people like me to use them again. W00t, as apparently it’s trendy to say.
While I’d rather have had one of my team walk away with a deserved Gold, I am rather in awe of what the BBC World Service team achieved. It is true multiplatform radio; not just additional content but a great showcase of the theory that by not just embracing new platforms but producing specifically for them, you’ll contribute to the sound of the station as a whole.
Here’s to many more years of the award. And a win for my team next year would be nice.
Photo from the BBC World Service; used under licence. Disclosure: I’m a regular listener to the BBC World Service, and I have many friends there. My full disclosure is also relevant to this post.
steve martin said at May 14th, 2008 at 9:43pm 
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