James Cridland is Managing Director of media.info, and an Australia-based radio futurologist. He is a consultant, writer and public speaker who concentrates on the effect that new platforms and technology are having on the radio business. Find out more or subscribe at http://james.cridland.net
This week’s story recommendations from James Cridland:
United States
- Interesting – a YouTuber shares his revenue for the year, where it comes from, etc. Not sure operating YouTube videos is a viable business by itself, but pays for this guy to live, so there’s that.
- There is now a station called 98.7 Donald FM in Tampa, Florida. Plays songs to do with money (quite a nice stunt). Presumably doesn’t play Mexican music. Here’s where to listen live.
- Enthusiastic new online station in the US
- The electricity goes off – and this man discovers that, all of a sudden, AM radio actually sounds good again. And that’s the problem with AM radio in a nutshell: it’s obliterated in urban areas with noise. Naturally, this US guy wants to take someone to court, but you can ignore that bit.
- ‘Profitable’ Washington Post adding more than five dozen journalists #deathofprint
- Good, long, detailed review of actually how good Alexa really is at recognising commands for audio.
United Kingdom
- Excellent video editing to end Britain’s 2016 – The Guardian’s good at commissioning ‘cassetteboy’ to do stuff like this, it’s nicely viral and very well done.
- The top 100 tweeters of 2016 according to Iain Dale – I’m in it! Again! 🙂
- Some rather fine archive video from 1978 showing Noel Edmonds on Radio 1. As ever, I’m always amazed at just how rubbish radio actually was in those days.
- “Digital is taking away one of the treasured aspects of radio: its serendipity” – a bit of a confused piece, partially because she really means “on-demand” rather than “digital”, but I agree with the sentiments.
Australis
- “Nine things we’ve learnt in one month on Facebook Messenger” some good stuff from the Aussie ABC News. Worth a look. I subscribe, and it’s quite a clever way of getting news over to a different generation.
Sweden
- Amazing: in Sweden they do weekly radio ratings sweeps. You can find the Dec 12-18 ratings here.