James Cridland
, radio futurologist, is a conference speaker, writer and consultant. He runs the media information website media.info and helps organise the yearly Next Radio conference. He also publishes podnews.net, a daily briefing on podcasting. Buy James A Coffee HERE.
What is actually in BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme? After reading a grumpy social media post about it, I thought it might be interesting to take a listen; so it’s a full blog post for you to read over here where I categorised everything and gave it a play.
What surprised me was the space given to “what the papers say”, which I guess is part of the history of the programme and also (listening to it) appears to be a way of soaking up unused time. The newspapers appear to be sliding into irrelevance; I wonder how long this part of the programme will remain?
Worth doing the same for the ABC equivalent, ABC RN Breakfast? I thought it might be.
So here’s the same analysis for that show. Interesting differences at the end of interviews; and the lack of RN feeling as if it’s part of a bigger ABC, using none of the organisation’s other resources.
There’s also “what the papers say”, which (slightly counter-intuitively) also covers some editorial on other radio stations…
Delighted to hear, in some of the new on-air production for ABC Radio Brisbane, a list of ways to listen. While it doesn’t mention digital radio, it marks the return of a mention of 612 AM, heard on-air for the first time since 2017.
Frequencies, particularly AM ones, are important to remind people of – so that they can continue tuning in on other receivers, but also so that they can tell their friends how to tune in. I’m surprised that they’ve not had any production mentioning 612 AM for so long.
I also had the great pleasure of speaking to the ABC Radio Sydney team last week, in an away day in Parramatta. I enjoyed playing them some clips of radio from other places, and hopefully giving them some ideas for the future.
