New media, by its very nature, is constantly looking at new ways of communicating and evaluating its successes. Web geeks tend to be younger (in spirit if not in body, James), and because they often have to approach things from a blank piece of paper/monitor point of view, the conventional wisdom is less entrenched.

In sales, because media buying and the ad industry becomes ever more sophisticated, teams have to devise new ways to package what they’re selling, and offer creative solutions to a modern marketplace.

Engineering/technology, despite poor personal hygiene and Olympian grumbling, thrive on being able to work around seemingly impossible conundrums, in fact, the best way to get a radio engineer to do anything is to to prefix your request with the words “I don’t think this can be done, but… ” And they love nothing more than new toys.

When it comes to programming though, it can be the case that if you dare to suggest an even moderately different way of playing music, or talking to the listeners, or broadcasting information, people start rolling around the office floor, wailing and covering their ears in horror, like Puritans exposed to some terrible blasphemy.

(nb. Can I stress that I am not necessarily describing my own experience at my current employer. The fact that I have been allowed to pollute the airwaves with my ill-thought through, barely coherent, uncoventional-but-not-in-a-good-way tish and piffle for such a long time is testament to their bizarre but undeniable open-mindedness. )

It is sad, though, that programming departments often cling to a received dogma from a decade ago, or a flimsy and leaky piece of market research, or the expensive witterings of some snake-oil charlatan consultant whose idea of an idea is to steal a gimmicky promo contest from the other side of the world and pass it off as the next big thing.

I’m not saying that we should rip it up and start again and reinvent music radio. As much as I love Resonance FM, nobody’s going to get rich applying that much free thinking to a commercial radio model. But why don’t more programming departments take the time to work with and invest in their own best resource – the passionate, clever, creative people working throughout their businesses, to generate imaginative and original content.

PS. I left out all the admin and account people. I don’t know so much about their systems of working. Maybe they’re archaic. Maybe it’s them that’s stuck in the Steam Age, not programming. Probably not, though.