James Cridland’s International Radio Trends: Spot-checking radio’s customer service

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.


  • Spot-checking your customer service for radio stations. BRILLIANT post from Paige Nienaber that should be shared far and wide. I used to talk about 102.3 Now Radio in Edmonton, Canada which had a rule that the on-air talent’s job included responding to every single email, tweet, Facebook message or SMS that they were sent: but it’s surprising how poor many radio stations are to respond.
  • This is a great thread on the BBC. I praise and critique it in this newsletter every week, mainly because it matters.
  • If you thought your playout system’s user interface is a bit rubbish, you haven’t seen this toaster
  • Woah. Rutland Radio appears to have discovered an alternate talk topic to ‘my favourite biscuit’ and ‘remember Spangles’. Genius! 😉
  • Pleased to notice not much change for ABC Radio Brisbane next year (for local programming at any rate). Consistency, even if your schedule is not 100% perfect, is an underrated programming tool.
  • Interesting to spot Fox News Radio getting better distribution on Entercom’s radio-dot-com platform.
  • A really nice bit of television – an “election blind date”. This adds a little bit of politeness to an election, and is such a welcome change from journalists shouting at politicians (or the reverse). Bravo to the BBC News team for trying something different.
  • TuneIn is appealing against last month’s UK High Court ruling, which has effectively stopped it from linking to overseas radio stations in the UK. But then, so are Warner/Sony, so nobody’s particularly happy with the judgement. (I read it, and saw very little about geo-locking. That’s how you fix this, surely – you don’t go after companies like TuneIn, who are merely linking, you go after the radio stations who are deliberately not geo-locking their streams).
  • I dont have a subscription to the NZ Herald, but I don’t need it to be able to see the #lazybuggles first paragraph
  • And here’s a new radio competition that you should be running, from Y 107.9 in Ghana. Suddenly, that “listen to win” mechanic seems quite dull.

James Cridland