Photo (cc) Maia C

The future of the medium, a digital strategy to implement now.

Radio isn’t sexy. Radio has never had a point release number added onto it. No such thing as Radio 2.0. When was the last time you heard a new radio station get VC funding. Actually, when was the last time you heard of a new radio station starting up at all. But radio is a remarkable medium having survived pretty much intact and on the same model for the past 50 years. Despite the hype of Last.fm and pandora, of podcasts and RSS, of satellite in the US and DAB in the UK, radio still exists and plays an important part in communities world wide.
But seismic change is enveloping the entire mediascape right now, not least of all because of massive advertising budget cuts. Here’s my take on why and how radio will have to adapt to changes in technology and more importantly its audience.

Before looking at radio exclusively in the digital space, I’m going to take a helicopter view on the situation right now.

To look at what’s happening to radio now let’s first take a look at radio as it emerged in the sixties the loser of a two decade battle with television. This was how Marshall McLuhan saw it in the Understanding Media, 1964.

One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous informations system. News bulletins, time signals, traffic data, and, above all, weather reports now serve to enhance the native power of radio to involve people in one another. Weather is that medium that involves all people equally. It is the top item on radio, showering us with fountains of auditory space or lebensraum.

[And]

Radio affects most people intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber. The resonating dimension of radio is unheeded by the script writers, with few exceptions. The famous Orson Welles broadcast about the invasion from Mars was a simple demonstration of the all-inclusive, completely involving scope of the auditory image of radio. It was Hitler who gave radio the Orson Welles treatment for real.

The antithetic electric power of instant information that reverses social explosion into implosion, private enterprise into organization man, and expanding empires into common markets, has obtained as little recognition as the written word. The power of radio to retribalize mankind, its almost instant reversal of individualism into collectivism, Fascist or Marxist, has gone unnoticed, So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain. It goes without saying that the universal ignoring of the psychic action of technology bespeaks some inherent function, some essential numbing of consciousness such as occurs under stress and shock conditions.

[Here comes the payoff:]

Centralism of organization is based on the continuous, visual, lineal structuring that arises from phonetic literacy. At first therefore, electric media merely followed the established patterns of literate structures. Radio was released from these centralist network pressures by TV. TV then took up the burden of centralism, from which it may be released by Telstar [25 years before Sky launched this was a good guess, but really it was the internet that is doing this job - Cian]. With TV accepting the central network burden derived from our centralized industrial organization,  radio was free to diversify, and to begin a regional and local community service that it had not known, even in the earliest days of the radio hams.

Since TV, radio has turned to the individual needs of people at different times of the day, a fact that goes with the multiplicity of receiving sets in bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, cars, and now in pockets. Different programs are provided for those engaged in diverse activities. Radio, once a form of group listening that emptied churches, has reverted to private and individual uses since TV. The teenager withdraws from the TV group to his private radio.

This natural bias of radio to a close tie-in with diversified community groups is best manifested in the DJ cults, and in radio’s use of the telephone in a glorified form of the old trunk-line wiretapping. Plato, who had old-fashioned tribal ideas of political structure, said that the proper size of a city was indicated by the number of people who could hear the voice of a public speaker. Even the printed book, let alone radio, renders the political assumptions of Plato quite irrelevant for practical purposes. Yet radio, because of its ease of decentralized intimate relation with both private and small communities, could easily implement the Platonic political dream on a world scale.

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I’m not going to have to labour the point here that you have merely to replace ‘TV’ and ‘radio’ with ‘internet’ and ‘social networks/platforms’ at various junctures above to see we have transitioned into a new media age again. Neither am I going to labour the point that it’s TV that has lost more and has more to lose whilst radio continues to serve well the masters McLuhan writes of.

There’s another point arising from the above worth considering. TV took the responsibility and “radio was free to diversify”. Whether or not this diversification has continued apace over the 45 years since McLuhan wrote this is irrelevant. We’re now at an end of history juncture in media evolution where all media is being forced to evolve, or die. Audience migration to other media, general falling advertising revenues and stale formats all play a part here. But let’s not dwell overly long on the past.

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Current radio landscape
Okay, so we know where we’ve come from. Let’s take a look at the current radio landscape and

Radio does an awesome job of building relationships between listener and presenter. In the listener’s view this comes down the mainline. One to one. And great relationships are always built on the same thing; trust.

To see just how important this trust is lets take an example of trust failure. The Sachs / Ross /  Brand incident. I’ll leave for now the fact that the original airing didn’t produce a single letter of complaint and it was only after other media outlets picked up the story it snowballed.  [http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/oct/27/russell-brand-jonathan-ross-andrew-sachs-calls]
No, the interesting angle is that Ross and Brand pulled their prank on on radio. Would it have produced the same reaction on TV? I suggest that on TV we would have seen the footage aired back to back for a news cycle or two. And then? Then the news editors become interested in something else. But the relationship, the trust we have with our radio hosts, is very different. We invite them in to our space, one on one, and nobody wants that space violated in this way. It wasn’t just Ross and Brand leaving voice mails, we were all collaborators and we didn’t like how that made us feel ultimately.

[As an aside it's interesting to note that during the his enforced sabbatical Ross became one of the planet's most followed Twitterer. More on this some other time.]

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If this were a full on research piece I’d be forced to bring more examples to the table, it’s not and I don’t have time right now. So onwards.

Let’s take the step into tomorrow’s world. With us we’re taking a (pseudo) one-to-one relationship between the radio and the audience. Singular. So let’s survey the new digital world we’re entering. A few notes and buzzwords if you’ll permit me.

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Facets of future radio

• First of all it’s distributed – it’s anywhere you like
• It’s post-scarcity – the means of receiving content/information/communication/media is not limited by atoms (Like it was when we pressed music onto plastic discs), or even airwaves.
• It’s always on – ditto
• It’s hot in here – because it’s really really crowded. With content creators and content users and it’s hard to tell these guys apart.
• It’s noisy in here too – ditto
• It’s remix ready – Somebody younger and smarter than you is going to take your media and pass it on to someone else in ways you never imagined. You may as well make it as easy as possible.
• It’s a bit like a cult – Yep, everybody just wants to say hello. And we don’t care if you have

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The future of news organizations.
Adapt or die. Emily Bell recently described ITV as belonging to a “Sunset industry”. It is unlikely the broadcaster can survive the current recession without significant change, and it is questionable whether they can implement that change quickly enough.

Whereas the BBC, for all it’s “scandals” and “-gates” has managed to do something revolutionary. It has, though the wildly successful I-Player, turned itself into a platform. Yes it still produces world class content, but it now has an end to end distribution solution for all of this content too. The value of that can’t be valued.

Commentators such as Jeff Jarvis have been long telling all old media outlets to drop the commodity content and focus on the differentiators. For newspapers this means this means letting go of glamours foreign bureau and putting more resources on the local beat. Big media has started to listen; the New York Times last month announced a hyper local initiative with bloggers and reporters stationed throughout the cities five boroughs and in surrounding states. Over the past couple of years Guardian News and Media (GNM) has been slowing acquiring and partnering with leading blogs in order to bring specialist content and expertise under the Guardian.

And this week GNM took the brave step of opening up ALL it’s databases: news; demographics; statistics etc. to any potential third party application developers. They have an unproved advertising revenue model backing this up which may or may not bring in serious cash, either way it’s a revolutionary move. Whether it pays or not GNM have reacted quickly and boldly to the changing outputs (distribution, audience etc.) that the IT revolution has brought us.

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Audience
Let’s bring this back to audience.
Radio’s job is to engage audience, engender trust thus keeping the listener tuned in and  bringing the audience back regularly. A radio station is that familiar comfort zone a listener can go to.
What can a radio do in the digital space to back this mission up. Can it offer the same services, the same comfort zone? Where the answer to these questions is no, can it drive audiences to places where

Up until now a radio producer has dealt with easy one way flows of information.
The talent speaks down from on high and the listeners have two choices and the second one is turn the dial. Sure phone-ins and texts, emails and letters have their place. But in all of these the producer or talent act as gatekeeper. They control the flow both ways.
All of this has changed.
Using realtime tools like Twitter and Facebook status, listeners can now self organize. They can take the conversation

If radio stations don’t tap into this information ecosystem the talent is reduced to the role of conversation starter. The answer? I can’t tell you, but it will involve both the talent and the station becoming part of their listeners’ social graphs. They will be deeply integrated into this new ecosystem. And a conversation in this space doesn’t end at 7pm when the drivetime slot turns into the SportsNight. The conversation is 24/7. Or at least 7-23. Are radio stations ready to play under these rules. They’d want to be. Can they take part in an audience relationship that’s listener-to-listener and not talent-to-listener.

The big paradigm shift producers are going to have to deal with is two way communication. you have to talk back to stoke the trust engine

There are some facts we should keep in mind. Content. The great reliables in life; taxes and death. These are still the subjects “listeners” will engage in. They’ll simply engage wherever the barrier to entry is lowest. There’s room, and a distribution platform for niche, but the big issues remain just that, big
And let’s also remember that not everybody out there wants to be involved in a global discussion. There is still an appetite for expert opinion presented professionally. In fact as the hum of the crowd (in places like Twitter) grows, the need for the professional content, clearly identifiable as such, grows. So give the people what they want.

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Filters
On the subject information overload, of modern media which is cheap, globally distributed and always on, Clay Shirkey suggests we don’t have a problem with too much media, merely difficulty filtering it. Our traditional filters were newspaper editors and radio producers.
As we bypass these forms of media we lose an important buffer. Many of us are now utterly swamped. I have hundreds of songs lined up in iTunes and Last.fm I’ve never listened too and never will. I have podcasts downloaded that will never be synced to my mp3 player. I’ve got 15,000 articles in my RSS feed reader that presents me with a chronological impossibility.

Linear radio offers a wonderful reprieve from this constant barrage. When I turn on the Today programme in the morning I’m trusting that the Oxbridge educated editors and researchers have programmed a breakfast’s worth of topical and insightful content for my consumption. It’s the only time of the day many of us are now letting these decisions be made by others.

There are a number of example of automated filtering services online that are based on recommendation and database “intelligence”. Last.fm/pandora for music [automated]. Digg taps the wisdom of the (mostly tech) crowd [human].

I would argue that the radio producer is already one of the media ecology’s best filters. From Jimmy Saville to John Kelly, the DJ too is an original filter and filterer. There is a natural role here for radios to play in being society’s live content filterer.

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Remix culture - beyond the airwaves
It has never been easier to take existing cultural artifacts, songs, images, video, and combine them to create new culture. Dangermouse’s Grey Album (the worlds of Jay Z, the music of the Beatles) is the oft-name-checked pinnacle of this remix culture. It could be argued that 2008 was the year of the remix presidential campaign; Obama Girl could never have been created by a campaign themselves, but when mixed and remixed by amateurs.

The same remixing culture has taken hold on websites and databases all over the internet. Flickerverse.com was a personal favorite. It took photos uploaded on Flicker, peeks at their geo-tags and maps them in realtime on a Google Map of the world, sadly it is no more. Twitterverse does the same for tweets against geographical location.

Can we mash-up real radio stations. What would that look like?
Radio stations touch local communities. Police forces and media outlets all over the world are starting to produce Google Maps mashups of crime data against city maps. Does a news and talk based radio format have a job to do here. Can it in fact own this data (ownership in the curatorial sense).

Visualize, Visualize Visualize.
This may sound counter intuitive for a radio station. But open source data and the open APIs of visualization tools have led to a new wave of online services. Here’s a map of Chicago crime data. Surely this is something local radio should be all over.
(Check this map of Twitter conversations about the Superbowl out). And remember, these services aren’t necessarily there for on-air talent to direct.

Questions:

• Can a radio station OWN some of these services within its “broadcast area”?
• Radio is part of the fourth estate. The four estate’s job is in part to keep an eye on the third estate?
• Is there a job to do to aggregate politicians’s expenses, blogs, twitter accounts. Keep an eye on them all?

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So some practical suggestions if you reached this far

All I wanted was some website advice?
I haven’t  spent much time thinking why someone would want to go to a radio website. I love radio. I never go to radio websites unless it’s to listen live or on demand.
Ten years ago we would have stuck a picture of DJ BigShot on the front page and had another page devoted to him. And nobody who ever visited it would ever go back. And most galling of all a design and build agency would have walked away with a decent sum of money for their brochure-ware.

Can we do something smarter that that around the talent? Instead of using the website as a shop window let’s use it as a set of open doors. Let’s figure a way to start the relationship. Or rekindle the relationship.

One of the best examples I’ve seen of this in recent times is Stephen Fry’s ClubFry page. This isn’t his homepage. And it’s a lot more than a shop window. Fry has flung the doors open and is asking people to come inside. He’s opening himself up in as many ways possible, with twitter, with replies, with email newsletters, with podcasts, with photostreams. And he’s done this using existing networks that his audience are already on.

Another interesting campaign recently is Skittles. The crunchy chewy confectionary ditched their website entirely and instead pointed the URL skittles.com at various web 2.0 sites. These included a Twitter search page on the phrase “skittles” to the newly created Facebook Group page on Facebook itself. This was Skittle telling their customers, we dwell amongst you, not on an artificial construct you have no interest in visiting. The online equivalent of running a radio show from Bewleys café perhaps.

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Conclusions
This piece is long enough as it is. Drawing up practical applications to the ideas discussed here will take up twice the space.

• Radio CEOs and owners can’t hide from a digital strategy of some sort. The format, audience demographics and geography are going to dictate the size and scope of this to some extent. Taking wallpaper But there are some clear directions imo.
• Radios can become content filters. Their websites can play important roles in telling people where the best, most important content is.
• Visualizations and mashups of crime and of happiness indexes.
• Listening to our audience. How can we aggregate their discussion better. I’m thinking of the like of Seesmic etc. here.
• Google. How are users finding the radio station. The content. can google drive this.
  Or live twitter search. Live search is being billed by people like Batelle as key. And it ties really well into radio.
  Interesting idea here. Radio stations can have twitter feeds that are meant ONLY to capture search, not friends for ego-following’s sake.
• Radio website should aggregate the personalities, not brochure-ware them. Like stephen Fry’s twitter page.
• Radio’s don’ need websites to communicate with their audience. They need digital strategies and friend feed / skittles type things

Future of Radio: We assume relationships and communication between radio and audience. My big question to the radio industry is what is your role in the relationship between your audience and your audience.