James Cridland

Live radio and on-demand radio are two different things

Above: the BBC’s reporter covering a petrol shortage in the country must have been sent there deliberately. See this hall of fame for more from the UK; but the best reporter placement in history must be the one sent to report from Melbourne’s AAMI Park, named after an insurance company.

For a while now, I’ve been saying in radio conferences that the way we make radio needs to change away from “the primacy of live”: that we might want to consider a different way of making the audio that doesn’t simply place live radio first, and leave on-demand to just bits hacked out of live radio. If we produce pieces of radio as great-sounding pre-produced segments of audio that can be played out on the radio, but also work well in on-demand contexts, too, then we can get the best out of all the platforms we’re on, not just one of them. Steven Goldstein’s blog this week is a good one: “Unlocking local radio’s digital future is not about repurposing the same terrestrial signal”. That’s a much more erudite way of saying part of what I’ve been trying to say.

Elsewhere…

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