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 and on-demand, and writes a weekly international radio trends newsletter, at james.crid.land.
Hello. Strange times, these. Suddenly, that section of my recent presentations about “do you need a radio studio at all” is a little more useful – highlighting Nation Radio in Glasgow, or the upcoming Alfred Radio in Shaftesbury, which don’t have studios at all (and instead rely on peoples’ home offices). Lots of technology can help – and if anything, just-in-time voicetracking could really make your station the community hub that it should be.
Good luck everyone. We’ll need it, I think. Here’s mostly coronavirus-free trends from radio over the past few weeks…
- An enjoyable if random podcast ▸ from Tony Blackburn and Ricky Wilson, called Pop Detectives. A short excerpt from a recent podcast: “You can do magic, can’t you, Tony? You can make audiences disappear.”
- This is really very impressive shared video from Heart in the UK – with one contestant via Facetime, too. Lighting, camera angles, production values: all 100%. Really nicely done.
- A vintage YouTube clip here of the BBC covering a new competing commercial radio station launch in the UK. Quite astonishing coverage.
- iHeartRadio – podcast revenue up 33%; broadcast revenue down 1.4%. (Though broadcast revenue still much bigger)
- UK Government Digital Radio review puts analogue FM switch-off on the table says the I. But then, that was before All The Things Started Happening.
- I caught a quite lovely and moving moment from George Howell on the 29th Feb. Good of CNN to give him the opportunity to say goodbye to viewers. Media companies everywhere should do that more.
- About the lowering sales of Corona beer… whatever happened to these diet pills?
- Where does BBC radio go from here? A very good long read from David Lloyd.
- Significant closure of Australia’s only newswire service. More bad news for media.
- Tesla – removing AM/FM radio from their cars, remotely, by software update. Yikes.
- What’s happened to truly local radio? asks a BBC TV programme called The Village Loudspeaker, which is available to watch in the UK over here for the next 20 days. We foreigners don’t get to watch it, so I’m not sure how good it is.
- The best TV moment of the year so far looks a bit shit.
- The BBC has launched a podcast about the Coronavirus ▸; but it’s blocked from Google Podcasts, as all their output is. I wonder when “public service” overrides petty business decisions?
- This is clever. France Culture, taking portions of their coverage about Coronavirus and making a podcast from it. Clever way of getting the most out of your content. (Again, public service broadcaster Radio France also blocks its content from Google Podcasts).
- Genius – speeded up travel news. Just as entirely pointless as regular travel news, but takes less of the time.
- DAB services are running a looped information announcement about the coronavirus.
- Actually interesting biscuit news from Australia’s ABC