James, you are in the main sooo right. Lots of good points you make here. Nice post

Exactly right. Radio 4 is a wonderful station, but very insular. I always thought it would have been good for OneWord to branch out by buying what I would imagine to be low cost, quality radio from around the English speaking world.

The right mix of programming by a commercial broadcaster could indeed compete with R4. LBC News at the weekends, perhaps?

“Last year, Global Radio sent two people to the Radio Festival”

Shouldn’t that be “Last year two people from Global Radio attended the Radio Festival in a personal capacity”? I seem to recall Global were sending more people – and sponsoring the civic reception – but pulled out completely at short notice. Wasn’t Nick Piggott’s presentation done by someone else because he wasn’t allowed to be there?

I would agree with James on the radio business becoming too insular and that can be applied right across the media business. A Dutch newspaper journalist remarked to me a while ago that he thought people had disconnected from the newspapers. I disagreed with his point of view.

It’s not that people have disconnected from the media, it’s the media business that’s become disconnected from the people it’s meant to serve.

We live in two worlds, there’s the one the media occupies and the one the rest of us live in – and increasingly there’s no correlation between the two.

Death of a thousand cuts for local commercial radio…

I found your entry interesting do I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog …

Agree with the R4 insularity argument. Elsewhere, to be fair to the BBC, Radio 5 Live does reach out to the USA, and occasionally other countries, through simulcasting. It has also taken a fair bit of ABC news over the years on the Up All Night programme. Not quite what you’re talking about, and it does not contradict what you’re saying (far from it), but thought it woth mentioning.

Totally agree.

And in the case of the BBC World Service, funding structure means they are are isolated from other platforms like BBC World News. I see too many stations making programmes for the public and not trying to think with. It is weird because radio was the first social media.

If you want to punish someone, solitary confinement is probably one of the best ways of achieving that goal. So why is the radio industry doing this to itself?

@blackwatertown – you’re right, 5live does take some interesting programming from abroad, if only using it overnight.

@david-sim – Of course, I’d forgotten about LBC. Their excellent programmes on Sunday afternoons might have a good fit with taking some from NPR – after the Travel Clinic, why not have Car Talk?

@paul-easton – I know at least one Global employee went officially from Global; and only one Bauer employee (who only turned up for TechCon, if I’m right). We’ll see what happens this year.

A friend of mine makes a valid point when saying the press don’t help. Every time the RAJARs come along, they tend to treat the London stations (as in Heart, Capital and Magic) in the same league as the nationals. Now I know London is the biggest radio market in the UK – there’s such a huge proportion of the UK in there to ensure that – but it really treats London as something “special” and seems like they think everyone else is irrelevant.

The Hits radio is an interesting one as its content comes from across Bauers Big City Network. Well according to Wikipedia. I haven’t seen the station have a proper schedule or website

“Why isn’t This American Life on the BBC?”

I think we already have more than enough USA-centric news and features on the BBC. I’d rather a lot more European content, such as stuff from DW, RNW, etc.

Obvious language problems with most European programmes. You could translate, but not as authentic sounding and more expensive to produce…

@Chris Kimber: I specifically chose Deutsche Welle and Radio Netherlands Worldwide as they have English language programmes.

Robert: bluntly, the English-language stuff from RNW or DW are, as far as I can understand, just worldwide news. That’s what the internet’s for. I couldn’t give a stuff on ‘viewpoints on the news from across the world’ – it’s boring and irrelevant for most of us.

Go take a listen to This American Life, or CBC Spark, then come back and argue that the UK’s radio stations are already doing that stuff.

Oh – or “The Moth” podcast. I’ve heard some amazing stuff on that. (It, too, has a home on US public radio).

@James: but what makes you think anyone would be interested in ‘This American Life’ when it, obviously, will only be about specific US issues and, as I’ve said before, we already get more than enough US-centric news.

If you were to say it’s the *sort* of thing UK networks should do, that’s another matter but stop bashing the BBC for not doing it when that sort of innovation is almost completely non-existent in UK commercial radio – which, given what has happened to Heart recently, is becoming more generic, more pop-music and more regional rather than local.

Robert, you’re arguing against This American Life or CBC Spark without actually listening to them. They’re absolutely not “US-centric news”. CBC doesn’t even come from the US; and what Spark discusses is absolutely relevant to the UK.

UK commercial radio has no speech outlets, except LBC; and I’ve already said, above, that some of NPR’s more talk-back programmes, like Car Talk, would fit quite well. (That’s a bad example, of course, given that US cars and UK cars are rather different).

Robert asked “but what makes you think anyone would be interested in ‘This American Life’”

That is like saying what makes you think anyone would be interested in watching
“All The President’s Men” or watching a documentary on the migration of Monarch butterflies from Canada to Mexico.

The stories featured on “This American Life”, although obviously based on events in the USofA, have appeal far beyond the 50 states and are presented in a very appealing manner … Act 1 … Act 2 … Act 3.

For example the program on urban legends included the question “Can a cell phone give you brain cancer” — Does that question only apply in the USofA.

So please listen to the show before forming an opinion — otherwise known as prejudice.

PS The BBC after many years of ignoring one of American Public Media (formerly Minnesota Public Radio, not NPR) most popular shows “A Prairie Home Companion” has been broadcast on BBC-7 in a cut down emasculated version.

If I may be permitted a followup, since it is highly relevant to the eclectic nature of “This American Life”, this week’s broadcast features a 20 minutes segment on an English patient in Broadmoor Hospital, England — so nothing USofA centric about that, and certainly should be of interest to listeners in England who probably have never heard the details of the case involved thanks to the self-censorship by the BBC and commercial radio and television.

The guiding principle really must be applied to this show — Do Not Judge a Radio Show by Its Title alone.

[...] follows my piece on a possible future for BBC Radio 4, and my spirited claim that the BBC ignores great speech radio elsewhere in the world, by writing an interesting piece asking where’s the 6 music of talk radio? In it, he, too, [...]