Reasons to be cheerful - 1, 2, 3
- Reasons to be cheerful, part one - Tim Perry was stuck in Spain during the almost nationwide power-cut. What was that like? And what was the only thing that worked? Yes, it was radio - as has been covered in the press all week. Indeed, I was on BBC Radio 4’s PM on Tuesday, talking about it (it’s not available on BBC Audio, which doesn’t do radio catchup, so here it is).
Reasons to be cheerful, part two - If you were at the Paris Radio Show in January, and you spoke perfect French, you’d have enjoyed this spirited speech from Pierre Bellanger about the future of radio. I wasn’t and I don’t, so I’m really grateful for Pierre sending me his speech and letting me reproduce it.
Reasons to be cheerful, part three - “radio isn’t going anywhere”, says Steve Jones of Canada’s Stingray. Worth following him on LinkedIn for a dose of positivity.
Steve Herman wrote a requiem for the Voice of America, published by the Foreign Service Journal. It sounds as if the Russians and Chinese have been quick to jump onto the vacated frequencies: but, so has the BBC, with BBC News Burmese launched really quickly onto VOA’s vacated channel in Myanmar.
The good folks at SoundStack are running interviews with public radio station leaders. Todd Callahan from KUT has just been posted; you can also find Steve Williams from WBGO and Nathalie Hill from KCRW.
In the US - research on how farm workers listen to “farm radio”. It’s “mobile”, and “trusted”.
Daylight savings time is potentially to be eliminated in the US. One of the slightly unlikely groups against this idea is National Religious Broadcasters. Why? Because a reduction of morning daylight means more time on reduced power for AM radio stations.
New radio ratings for Australia have just dropped. ARN’s Kyle & Jackie O are down in both Sydney and Melbourne; though good to see Christian O’Connell continuing to perform well on Gold Melbourne. For the ABC, they’re down in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide; static in Brisbane; and the only place where they’re showing better numbers is Perth. This will continue to the be the case while they languish, unloved, on AM.
Apart from Kyle & Jackie O continuing to slide in the ratings, there is a litany of troubles at ARN, Australia’s worst radio company: the normally disinterested regulator, ACMA, has found that ARN’s Kyle & Jackie O breached decency rules - “offensive to any reasonable person listening to the broadcast” - and have opened more investigations … the Kyle & Jackie O “Hour of Power”, a replay of some of the less indecent bits carried nationally, appeared to go out entirely commercial-free recently, to the delight of the Mad Fudging Witches, who have been campaigning for advertisers to stop supporting the show … there’s that whole bad AI voice without telling listeners thing … the RDS encoder for KIIS 97.3 here in Brisbane managed to reset itself, and for over a week has been calling the station “RDS PS” but not a single person at the station cared enough to notice … and Kyle Sandilands has promised that if the show continues to do badly in Melbourne, he’ll take it off, which doubtless another promise ARN will fail to keep. The company made 70 more job cuts this week; here’s hoping that at some point it considers cutting the people who got it into this mess.
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Where I am speaking next
- Radiodays North America, Toronto ON, Canada (May 7-8)
- The Podcast Show, London, UK (May 20-21)
- Podcast Movement, Dallas TX, USA (Aug 18-21)
- Radiodays Asia Jakarta, Indonesia (Sep 1-3)
- Pennine Radio’s 50th birthday! In Bradford.
- PodSummit YYC, Calgary, Canada (Sep 19-20)
Supporters
Thank you to the supporters below, plus Greg Strassell, Sam Phelps, Richard Hilton, Emma Gibbs, Jocelyn Abbey and James Masterton for being regular supporters.
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I’m on Bluesky as @james.crid.land or on Mastodon as @james@bne.social
My website has more detail about who I am, and what I do, and whether I can help you further.