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
James Cridland’s articles
- An article about a clever thing that Tony Blackburn does.
United States
- Anchor can now transform podcasts into shareable videos, which should help their shareability.
- Automatically Repurpose Your Podcast and Facebook Lives to YouTube, Facebook, and SoundCloud – it’s like these tools are buses, and they’re all arriving at once! This one’s a nicely automated service.
- Apple Kills Off Its First and Only FM Radio says Radio Survivor. (Not quite true: its first one was a plugin thing for the iPod, which was even more ungainly than you’d imagine.)
- Dead Air: The Ruins of WFBR Radio – I rather enjoy abandoned-places blogs, and this one has a surprising picture of a very complex control room. In Baltimore.
- NPR posts more data gleaned from their NPR One app – this time, How to make local listeners care about your story. This is most definitely worth a read.
- Public Broadcasting Fact Sheet – some useful US stats
- Wow. The Internet Archive has uploaded loads of old 78 discs, professionally digitised.
- Marketers And Millennials – some useful detail on why you can’t get advertisers interested in 40+ targeted radio
- Facebook wants to become the new YouTube, and have launched a video platform.
- John Oliver on the Sinclair Broadcast Group. How media works in the US. What surprises me most about this is not just that Sinclair would pressurise its stations to air this kind of nonsense, but that ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox are seemingly complicit in this being done under their brand names.
United Kingdom
- Most-shared this week: Radio remains relevant over a century after its invention. Contains quotes from me, but also some other people who know what they’re talking about.
- The Wireless Group are having a hiring spree, wanting presenters, producers, journos and content controllers.
- Interesting tech: Cleanfeed is a (free) replacement for Skype or ISDN for broadcasters. Already used by some quite big names. Worth a look?
- The Guardian unwisely allows someone who knows nothing about anything to vomit up some words on a page. This article has had widespread condemnation from radio folks on social media – but it’s nothing especially unusual for journalism around radio, where one person assumes everyone else is like them. Crimes committed by this journalist include: not understanding how RAJAR works, equating one person’s show with an entire format, and the heinous line: “who doesn’t have a Spotify wake-up playlist?” – almost everyone, is the answer.
- Bargain? Unusable tat? Or a total scam? A portable DAB+/FM radio, with SD card player, for £1. Includes delivery. Of course I have, and I’ve absolutely no doubt that it’ll be rubbish – if it ever arrives.
- “Why the Americanisation of English Is a Good Thing” – a BBC Radio 4 program y’all should hear.
- An old Radio 4 programme on mysterious numbers stations
Australia
- Australian senate rejects bill to restore ABC shortwave.
Elsewhere
- Norway: think the FM-DAB transition is going smoothly? This thread (hit those ‘translate’ links!) says otherwise. Of course, Facebook is a magnet for discontents; and Aftenposten, the Norwegian newspaper, is delighting in it, with a seemingly neverending set of articles about how dreadfully the transition is going. Wait a second: it earns its money from advertising, and all of a sudden, there are significantly more commercial radio stations on the dial with DAB+? Surprise… the newspapers are fighting for their survival.
- Germany: SoundCloud’s Investors May Terminate the Company In 24 Hours – they didn’t, and the company has now had a reprieve, but for how long is anyone’s guess.