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.
United States
- Scripps are selling their 34 US radio stations; retains podcasting company
- What happens if you insult a Morning Joe ‘technician’ – an excellently amusing clip. Good work.
- Apple is giving music artists analytics now. There are some radio equivalents – indeed, I bet that some of the current music monitoring companies could build something like this relatively easily, to allow anyone to realise how large radio is. For example – could this page showing Rita Ora plays in the UK be combined with their RAJAR quarter-hour figures to get actual “play” equivalents? Indeed – this page (compiled by Radiomonitor) shows that KISS in the UK has played “MK” the equivalent of 18 million times.
- Surprises from Boise Idaho in the US – including an AM station being #1
- “Shitty radio stunt“
- Death of AM: LED headlights can interfere with radio signal (which we knew, but I’d forgotten that cars now have LED lights installed too)
- Really enjoying listening to the Tonya Harding story on the NYT Daily. This is a really well-told, well-produced story. Very recommended.
- Impressive development from the folks at Futuri Media: they’ve launched their own ad network (and dynamic ad serving)
- Triton Digital release their latest webcast streaming figures.
United Kingdom
- Watch “Every Football Phone-In Condensed Into 2 Minutes 30” – hits home. I’ve heard an awful lot of very poor mobile phone interviewees lately.
- Behind the call – a great story of Steve Penk not wanting to tell his boss what he was about to broadcast: particularly when it was winding up the British PM…
- BBC News no longer runs BBC Local Radio. Nor does BBC Radio, of course; but Ken McQuarrie is a good egg and this is a good move, all told.
- Nick Ferrari of LBC skewers another politician not knowing the basics.
- The BBC’s going for loudness normalisation for its podcasts, which is a good and sensible thing. Warning: jokes about similarity of LUFS to LOVE in this blog post.
- The enduring power and magic of football on the radio
- Who reads the news on BBC Radio 4? The hidden world of Chris Aldridge, Charlotte Green, Zeb Soanes and Corrie Corfield
- “Why radio continues to leave television standing” – and the final column, if I’ve read this right, from the lovely Gillian Reynolds before she goes to the Sunday Times.
Australia
- If you’re someone who believes radio is dying, and youth aren’t listening, here’s another inconvenient truth: triple j’s Hottest 100 attracts record number of voters. It broadcast over last weekend – is it the Biggest Streaming Radio Event in the World? – I think it is.
- Impressive. My TV set-top box has added very comprehensive support for Google Home (and Google Assistant). Nicely done.
- No-nonsense radio competition on the Central Coast…
Elsewhere
- Pakistan would like to regulate short-wave radio transmitters across the world. Ambitious.
- A podcast from South Africa covering radio there, and a #lazybugglesheadline
- Sobering future for radio: Scripps sell their US stations (keeping their podcast companies); boss of BNR in Netherlands says FM radio, by itself, isn’t enough and focuses on podcasts. There is a trend here.
- Data: Ghana radio listening. Congratulations Peace FM.
- Is the Swiss licence-fee for TV and radio safe? One poll thinks so. They vote in March.
- Online radio measurement statistics – a good overview of how things are in South Africa.
- How to get your podcast onto Google Home – it’s got nothing to do with Google Play Music, and everything to do with raw HTML code. Here’s how to do it…
- A 1930s Austrian radio which you tuned-in using a map.