Not so Fresh Radio

Over recent months - well years really - I’ve been reading about the what seems like the prolonged death of Fresh Radio, a small commercial station in my old hometown ok Skipton. In the past year reports have suggested that staff haven’t been paid, the tax man has taken them to court and transmitters have fallen silent.

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A casual reader may conclude that the recent woes are just that, a result of their takeover by Laser Broadcasting - who to be fair don’t always have the best reputation in the industry but even this seems to be an all time low point. Continuous music seems to suggest the back-up CD is playing and posters to MediaUK, would back this up. So, it’s probably more of a technical issue than a management or programming one; something’s broken or something’s not been paid. Again, this is a real low point but one that has probably been on the cards for sometime.

This is where I reveal my past. I worked for this station in the dim and distant past. in 1995 I spotted a little article in the local paper saying there was going to be a short term radio station on the air just up the road from me. As someone who knew a bit about radio and had worked in the business and currently working as a freelance hack I went along and found myself made the News Editor. As a group of people they were really passionate about local radio, they’d had some experience having put Stray FM on the air some years before and wanted to do the same in Skipton. I freely admit at the time they had me, I agreed. Radio should be local, it could be about more than music etc etc etc…. and in an ideal world that’s how would it be.

So, the licence comes up for grabs. 3 applications go in and they win. They approach me and offer me a job, which I accept as the college I was working was slowly falling apart round my ears and I wanted to be back in Yorkshire and in radio. I suppose the writing was on the wall early on. No dry runs happened as the studios weren’t delivered as the board didn’t want to pay insurance to soon and so on. The most experienced on-air presenter had shifts at Stray and the AA. No-one had a regular daytime experience. There was no PC. The MD did breakfast but he was new to paid radio as well and brought his dog into the studio. It had a certain charm I suppose and I was no better in some ways. Launch day came and despite agreeing what the first song was some months before (it was the last we played as an RSL) half an hour before we went live we realised no body had bought a copy. This was the reality.

Within about a year, most of the launch day staff including me had gone, some were pushed, some walked. The problem is the staff were blamed for what were much more  widespread issues. The station lacked focus, it needed better PR, it needed management who knew how to make money from radio and a board with the guts to wait for the audience to come. To me that view about real local radio clouded all this. The area is also a problem. Geography stands in the way of making it truly cohesive. In the southern part the valleys run north to south (roughly) so people head south to shop etc. Further north they run east to west, so people generally go to the nearest big town. Either Penrith or darlington, neither of which is in the TSA and this is the problem it’s an area created by licensing not community.

Over the years that station had some programming success and a few coups: foot and mouth coverage, awards and so on. But is never made money. New studios were built and transmitters added but the PR effort never seemed to lift and programming still seemed woolly, old fashioned even. The board bailed the company out, shareholders were asked to buy more shares to add liquidity and resources were sold off to raise capital. The area could support a radio station I am sure but it needs a group who can support it and know how to eek out a profit of smaller or more difficult markets.

We’ve already seen bigger stations using networking and automation to fill the day and save money but Fresh seemed all too keen on live voices, which makes good radio but not always business sense. On a small station automation may not always be ideal but it saves a few pennies, keep those to pay the bills, promote the station and people will come. They tune in, hear music and stay. If the money comes add more live presentation, if it doesn’t you still have a sensible base. Local radio is expensive and requires skill. I wanted more speech on the station when I was there and it didn’t always happen or presenters didn’t always have the skill to be able to pull it off, which is no fault of theirs because speech is hard and needs training.

It may be a little early to write an epitaph but if it needs one then something like ‘ it could have been really good’ would do or maybe ‘they tried’ is more apt.

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Working in Radio

I’ve been engaged in another one of those debates over on the Media UK forums this week, where the value of education gets called into questions. It’s actually not been the hostile one I’ve seen to be fair, in the past I used to feel like I was banging my head against a wall such was ferocity of the attacks against media education. The tide has turned… a bit.
This time it’s about Journalists, the shockingly poor wage some of them get and the fact that there’s an awful lot of journalism graduates out there for seemingly less and less jobs. Which means students spend lots of money on a course in the hope it will get them a job…. and it doesn’t. I can see why they’d annoyed. The thing is though often they’re priced out of the market by the work experience kid who’ll do the same job for a pittance just to work in radio. I can see why, if I didn’t have kids I’d love to jack in my job and go and work in radio again. It’s great fun, the people are lovely and it can be the best job in the world and because of that people will do it for free…or almost free.
As a graduate, you’ve done the living in shared houses with people who don’t wash-up or spend 45 minutes in the bathroom every morning. You want a life and that means a living wage, it’s only fair after all. But if someone will do the job for less than a decent living wage then commercial stations will go for that, they’re in business to make money so any savings they can make, they will. It’s been the case for a long time that in journalism at least there’s a hierarchy of stations~: small commercial > Larger commercial > BBC or national commercial > National BBC. The Beeb pay better and have more people, so you can actually get on with some proper journalism. OK, so this is a generalisation.. but it’s true.
So, who gets the blame? This is where I come in and why I say we’re back to the old debate. Universities were getting the blame here, so pushing out graduates with false promises into a market where supply exceeds demand. That’s true. But then that’s usually the case in labour markets. Now, normally what happens is that employers choose the best (cream floats and all that) but what seems to be happening is that graduates are being offered silly wages or aren’t getting that far. I really don’t believe this is because there are too graduates but simply that they’re being priced out of the market. It was suggested that we set quotas. Ok, so that in theory means the cost of the job goes up, because you need to pay well to get the staff… in reality it means employers will look to the work experience kid, send him on a 2 day legal course and call him a journalist… paying him peanuts because he lives with his mum and dad and will do anything to work in radio. I’d have done the same. So, if we set quotas nothing would change and who sets them? and who tells HEI’s that they have to limit one part of their business? If they make academic sense, eg limit the class sizes so staff can focus on students or they all get access to resources then that’s all fine but anything else is daft.
It does annoy me when I read that graduates can’t get jobs, it’s sad and irritates me that colleagues at other places have sold students a line, promising great careers if they take their degree. Sure, we all tell candidates ‘this is what our graduates are doing’ … the parents ask us and it’s part of the sales patter. But I always balance that by saying you need to something else as well, get work experience, make yourself stand out and when I can I’ll help students with that.
Maybe it’s a case that we need to lobby the radiocentre or even ofcom to set guidelines for minimum wages in radio, as surely paying peanuts gets monkeys and certainly doesn’t buy loyalty.

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Global buy GCap

As expected Global Radio have bought GCap for £375m thus meaning that not only has the UK’s newest radio group has bought the biggest but also that the majority of UK Commercial Radio is now in private hands. This might be really interesting as private owners won’t have to slash cost to keep the city happy, although the investors will want their money back.
This might be interesting for other reasons as well. As reported here the new group may well have to dispose of some of the stations to satisfy competition rules. In London and the the Midlands both GCap and Global have stations, which means the new group will have more than one station. For example, Heart, Galaxy and BRMB in Birmingham. The rules say that in any given market no-one group should have unfair dominance of the ad business, which is interpreted as ‘2 + the BBC’. Which in Birmingham and London is the case, as both H Bauer and GMG have stations. GMG also operate Smooth Radio in the East Midlands but the speculation is that the new group will divest the older stations formerly part of Gcap in the east and west midlands. These would be a good fit for Bauer, as they could roll out the Big City Format on FM and expand Magic on AM. This would put Bauer on a better footing as they could sell advertising across a larger footprint.
Of course, this could all spark lots of consolidation in the sector as this one group will now have such a huge dominating effect that the other groups will be minnows by comparison and so will lose the bargaining power they once had with big advertisers, which of course means that one of them might want to pick up anything that the Global/Gcap want rid of or that they merge with each other and so further consolidate the industry.

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