Today in Ariel, the BBC’s internal newspaper, you’ll find a short article from me about my round-the-world trip visiting radio stations. Below in this post, you’ll find the text of this article (or you can click through and read it in all its subbed glory).

This is 1,000 words from my blog entries during the trip. And it occurs to me that I’ve not, yet, added a full index page with all the blogs I wrote while I was swanning round the world. So here is one.

I visited…

VOA, who are doing interesting things with ‘radio with pictures‘
NPR, who has a very enlightened way of doing things
StreamTheWorld, who can fix the thing we most often screw up on our websites
CBC in Canada, who have an interesting way of getting interview questions, who are rather excellent value, and who run their own pirate radio station in Vancouver
Arbitron, who busted a few myths about the PPM, which is changing the sound of radio in the US
Alcatraz – where radio was especially valuable
Vancouver, where everyone wanted to talk radio
An electronics shop, where at least one form of radio is nearly dead
A ‘big-ass boardroom’ which reminds me of the waveband we forget in radio: and a company that has Toronto sewn-up
Advertising from a few hundred feet up
Where North Korea meets South Korea, a blog posting that has little to do with radio, being fair
Radio in Bangkok, which sounds bloody terrible at least five minutes of every hour, but has a familiar name on the dial, and where everyone agrees what makes radio websites work
Hong Kong, which has an interesting way of kicking off the DAB age – not least their playout system of choice (and they’re not alone)
Japan, a mad place with complete disregard for any global standards, where they get their now-playing information completely right, where listening on a mobile phone via FM is an augmented hybrid experience, and where they’ve done something clever with their iPhone app.
Australia, where commercial radio is worth learning from, and where they’ve a strong industry body. Oh, and more than one public service broadcaster (other than the ABC).
And India, where they work hard and play even harder.

I have a presentation of all this, and a little more, which I’ve been giving to interested people. I’m about to put a copy of this (with the audio recorded from my Copenhagen presentation) online shortly, but would be happy to come to your team if you want. Just get in touch.

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And now, here’s the article text from Ariel today. (This is the original text).

Radio is a bit different to television. Yes, I know you’re shocked.

You’ll be familiar with Who Wants to be a Millionaire. It’s shown in over 100 countries; tellingly, in China it’s called Who Deserves to be a Millionaire, while in Ghana it’s simply Who Wants to be Rich. But, in over a hundred countries, it’s the same format, with the same set, the same graphics, the same scoring system, and the same cheesy local version of Chris Tarrant.

Compare that to UK radio, and the difference is stark. By and large, UK radio is made in the UK, by UK people, for UK audiences. There are a few imported programmes: but in a country with hundreds of radio stations, those exceptions can be counted on the fingers of one hand. After a gruesome farming accident. And not using your thumb.

When I left the BBC, I was aware that I’d been in something of a cocoon. There’s precious little mention of commercial radio when you work at the BBC, let alone international radio. And for someone like me, who looks at the areas where radio and new platforms collide, I felt there was a lot that UK radio could learn from other countries. This was the excuse I needed to go on a round the world trip: to visit radio stations, drink beer, and otherwise have a bit of a rest: a rest that my accountant assured me would probably be tax-deductable, if only I’d keep the receipts and bother to answer his emails every now and again.

I visited over twenty different radio stations and companies, across North America, Australia, and the Far East. I learnt lots.

NPR, the public radio organisation based in Washington DC, was fascinating. Unlike BBC Radio, they produce transcripts of their interviews and programmes: mostly automatically, by using speech-to-text computer programs then an editor to tidy the transcripts up. This makes their content available to many more people, including the robots at Google: resulting in much better results in Google searches.

NPR also has a proper API – a way for computers to access the content from the NPR website. It enables anyone to build things with NPR content, subject to a few terms and conditions. A fireman who codes “for fun” in the evenings used this API to build an unofficial iPhone app called NPR Addict: an app which was so good, it was actually better than the official NPR app that was being worked on. As a result, NPR raised their game. The official NPR iPhone app, powered by the same API, accounts for a huge 33% of all of the traffic to npr.org. By comparison, the best API that BBC News can offer is an unformatted RSS feed containing just one sentence.

The public service broadcaster in Canada, CBC, runs a new-music station on digital platforms. The only thing CBC Radio 3 plays is new Canadian music, uploaded by the artists themselves. On their website are over 20,000 artists, and 90,000 tracks; and these tracks are available by podcast, on-demand, or on the live radio station. It broadcasts live from Vancouver, while the rest of CBC’s networks come from Toronto or Montréal; and as a result, it’s been able to act as a kind of mini pirate radio station inside the organisation: not forced to work the same way and carry the same “it’s always been this way” baggage of the larger networks. If the BBC Trust reject the proposed closure of BBC 6music, surely this is how the BBC should refashion the radio station: give it a building of its own in Bristol, remove any traditional radio programmers, and give it the licence to reinvent itself as a social, new-music, network: something that genuinely adds to British musical culture, and breaks the rules as often as John Peel would have done.

Via Japan, where global broadcast standards mean little, and Thailand, where commercial operators have to rebroadcast state-controlled news programmes during peak breakfast hours, I ended up in Australia, a country that not only has the best weather in the world but probably the most positive radio culture.

The recession didn’t really bite here; and DAB+, launched in June last year, has learnt from our experiences in the UK with DAB. The ABC has launched “pop-up” radio stations on DAB+, stations which last weeks or even days. A 24-hour, non-stop talk radio station for the Melbourne Arts Festival was aired for only two weeks by the ABC: and run with a staffing level of two people. Yes, just two. Just like the CBC, they’ve used this space to innovate around production techniques for great radio: and, in the process, made a real talking point for digital radio. Commercial radio, too, is launching new services on digital radio: experimenting and innovating. All radio in Australia comes with pictures on new DAB+ units; and Australian advertisers now provide images and URLs along with their audio copy. Australian radio innovates like nowhere else on Earth.

Australian radio is edgy, fun to listen to, and full of content. No “ten great songs in a row” here: it’s the kind of radio we used to broadcast before we collectively lost our bottle. While we now judge good radio by a blandly inoffensive zero complaint tally at Ofcom or the BBC Complaints Unit, Australian radio judges it by its entertainment value.

Touching back down in the UK, I’m struck by how television is now a global market, but most of our radio simply isn’t. From CBC’s Spark to NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and Kyle and Jackie O on 2day FM, I’ve been lucky enough to hear some great radio. It’s a mystery why radio doesn’t act more like television, and share great programming worldwide.

Radio might be different to television, but perhaps television might be able to teach radio something after all.

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