James Cridland, the 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.
James Cridland’s articles
- Measuring radio’s best customers – my column this week looks at differences in measurement, and a learning from it
United States
- Triton Digital talk about radio’s digital (online) future
- The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society sounds fun!
- Fascinating. GDPR has essentially meant that many US websites have simply blocked their websites for Europeans.
- If you’re interested, I’ve turned off personalised advertising for EU citizens on my media website. A few observations: first, this’ll make advertising worse for EU citizens, which seems a bit of an own goal for the EU; second, revenue is actually slightly up.
United Kingdom
- The future of radio may well be digital, but it won’t survive on DAB, says The Register. The reality is that DAB is four times more popular than internet for listening to the radio, but tech journalists like this don’t really respond well to reality. The arguments this article makes, though, are better related to 1998’s DAB than today’s.
- I listened to the @RadioToday Programme ▸ today. It’s a really good listen, and I should listen more often. Feel free to skip through my bit.
- Very interesting look into what people actually want from a newspaper, and an attempt to deliver a product that suits. Would be interesting to do the same exercise for radio. I would suggest that a linear product would not be what was desired.
- Nice article about Hospital Radio Perth. We forget how important these niche services are.
Australia
- There’s been a blizzard of stuff like this in the press, highlighting apparent creative tensions on 2DAY’s breakfast show. Great PR? Or…?
- I’d probably prefer to see stories like this – a fun story of how radio connects people. Perhaps a little twee; and illustrated by another bloody vintage radio, though. (C’mon, Commercial Radio Australia, produce some copyright-free images we can all use…)
- A good piece of research – you’re likely to work with a bunch of psychopaths. Congratulations to Radio Today Aus, who have easily produced the most shared piece of content I’ve seen this week.
Worldwide
- One of radio’s competitors for ad spend? Facebook. Yet they took down almost 1.3 billion fake accounts in last six months alone… – the UK’s Radiocentre has been pretty good at highlighting radio’s trustworthiness: perhaps this should be a focus for all similar organisations
- For noting by radio stations: Google Home selling more units than Amazon Echo (worldwide). Smart speaker wars are hotting up. Be cautious: just as people in the media bubble love iPhones, people in the media bubble also love Amazon Echo devices. The actual reality differs.
- The Podnews podcast pages – here’s one, for mine ▸ – got a small reworking this week. I use AMP and a few little touches to produce them: I documented how I built them here if that’s of interest to anyone.