You Say Potato...
More on Ryan's Virginity
So, last week I wrote about Ryan Tubridy and his move to mid mornings on Virgin Radio. I’m delighted for Ryan, there’s a lovely piece in the Sunday Times, in which he explains how excited he is by the new challenge and how much he’s looking forward to London life.
As I said last week, I too have upped sticks and moved to London and spend three very happy years working for both Bauer and Wireless across the Magic and Virgin UK brands.
The question here though remains the same. If you write this story without the name Ryan Tubridy and all of the baggage that comes with him, driven by his exit from RTE, what does the reality actually look like?
I’ve rewritten the story without the Ryan element, see how it sounds now
A Version with Less Spin
“Rupert Murdoch’s News UK group has announced that it’s intending to network the output of its Virgin Radio brand, initially for the 10am – 1pm weekday slot, across Ireland and the UK.
The Virgin Radio mid-morning show will now be broadcast simultaneously in two separate radio markets and it’s not clear what impact this will have on staff in Murdoch’s Irish operation. There will also be a packaged weekend show which will air on a number of Murdoch’s other Irish stations.
It remains unclear how the editorial content will be regulated, although it’s understood that the staff at Q102 will have no input on the content of the UK based show. The 10 – 3pm slot on Q102 had been performing well, increasing in both Reach and Average Quarter Hour listening in the last book (JNLR Q3 2023) and there appears to be no JNLR based reason for the change.
The announcement was followed up with an in depth interview in one of Murdoch’s newspapers, the Times, with the new show host and was also covered extensively in the Sun and online by all of his Irish stations.
News UK has several other radio stations which may well be interested in networking content to Ireland, which includes Talksport, who already share football commentary online with a number of the Wireless stations.”
Spot the Difference
The point of that exercise is to strip away the circumstances and examine the precedent this move sets. That’s how things work with regulators, you propose a change, it gets approved, the goal posts have moved.
And once the goal posts have moved, anyone can then use the precedent you’ve set to do the same thing. That’s why this move is alarming, in a radio market where two of the biggest players are international companies, owned by billionaires, then any small shift in rules, or goal posts creates a new dynamic.
What makes Irish radio strong is the fact that it’s local, connected and largely produced within the area that it primarily serves. This move opens the door to a different dynamic and there’s very little evidence that the regulator is following closely enough in terms of what might come next.
Syndication
One of the points raised in defence of the networking / simultaneous broadcast proposed was that “other stations have syndicated programmes”, so it’s nothing unusual. That’s a little disingenuous.
Firstly as discussed above, the proposed 10am – 1pm weekday show is not a syndicated or bought in show, it’s networked content from another Rupert Murdoch owned station.
Secondly, many stations do buy in programming, including Ireland’s Classic Hits Radio and Radio Nova. In Classic Hit’s case, we buy the Kim Wilde 80’s show, she’s an international star, she plays music that fits our format perfectly and the show does really good numbers in its time slot.
We don’t just buy it off a shelf though, the show is customised, Kim records links and station ids and promos which make it part of the fabric of our station.
Equally when Radio Nova runs the Bruce Springsteen Show, or we get Duff McKagan from Guns N Roses to do a show from the road on his world tour, they do custom links and promos so that the shows match the station.
But, crucially, they’re also special events, features or occasional things in the schedule and they don’t replace other presenters or represent a cost saving.
Ryan Tubridy will be providing a “custom” weekend show which is due to run across 4 of the Wireless UK stations in Ireland. That makes sense, he’s a big name and he would be a good draw on a weekend schedule, what’s still not clear though is whether or not presenters on those local stations will lose their jobs and the goalposts get moved again.
I guess we’ll see how things play out from January 4th
AI and the Smart 7
If you enjoyed the recent RAudio newsletter about how we’re using AI in the Smart 7, you might also enjoy a chat I had with Jim Salveson on the Voiceworks: Sound Business podcast about AI in audio and podcasting, how it works, what the drawbacks might be and how to consider some of the ethical questions it throws up
This has been the 23rd official edition of the RAudio Newsletter
Just to recap, each week I’ll be taking a look at big stories in radio, podcasting and audio.
Any feedback, questions or potential topics are welcome – you can get me on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/liamthompsonconsulting/ or on Twitter @Maxliam