James Cridland’s International Radio Trends: The launch of LBC News; DAB listening in Australia
James Cridland
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.
Above: here’s what happens if you let TuneIn control the radio experience on smart speakers: you get a brand new radio station appear with an old logo. Bad TuneIn.
The new LBC News has just gone live, a 24-hour national rolling radio news channel for the UK. You can hear it over here. Oddly the UK has never really had a national rolling news service like this – the closest we’ve had was London’s “News Direct 97.3 FM” from ITN. Here’s a clip of that. The BBC did BBC Radio 4 News FM for two months in 1991 – here’s a clip of that. And there was also DNN in some parts of the UK, though I can’t find a clip anywhere.
30.4% of radio listening in Australia is to DAB (in coverage areas). Surprisingly high, given no radio station appears to ever mention it here. I learnt lots about DAB in Australia at the #CBAAconf – here’s some notes.
In Brisbane, “local” radio station 4BC (which rebroadcasts 2GB excepting news, travel and ads) is moving in with new owners Nine. On the plus side, that means I get a radio studio half a mile away from my house, at the top of Mount Coot-Tha. On the negative side, there’s probably no reason for them to actually build a radio studio. I hope they do, mind.
