James Cridland’s Future of Radio: Tony Blackburn’s magic trick that we can all learn from, plus data from NPR and lots of jobs
James Cridland
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
