Radio from the printing press

Audio used to be the property of radio. But these times are gone. Newspapers are crossing the borders. Francesca Panetta (The Guardian), head of audio, has been a radio maker for a long time, before she went to the Guardian five years ago. Today she and her team produce 30 minutes podcasts ("intelligent high quality audio") of all kinds, including documentaries. Successfully: The Guardian website counts 375.000 listeners a week.

Usually the print journalists come up with the ideas and topics, whereas the radio journalists do the audio and video programmes. Multimedia is a growing part of the company (costs: £ 3M/year), Panetta says, and their task is to implement the Guardian's "Digital First" strategy. Multimedia projects, audio slides, an IP TV channel, long format TV - "the Guardian, 190 years old, is a very agile company", as Panetta puts it. "They are not afraid of failures. When I came there was just a newspaper website. 'Launch something else', they said to me. And we do. It's a really exciting place to be."

Go web young man

Gisela Krone (ARD online) presents the ARD radiofeature, the central platform of Germany's seven feature departments built in 2010. The site provides an easy-to-use feature gallery providing information on the piece, the author, a preview audio teaser as well as the full broadcast for downloading together with the manuscript. The documentary player provides a large timeline and additional material such as photos, illustrations, charts, texts, or links. The site focuses on a small number of elaborate and investigative radio pieces.

Dokublog is the web 2.0 platform of the SWR feature department built in 2008. Dokublog is a platform "for sound hunters and feature makers", as Dokublog maker Wolfram Wessels puts it, inviting them to submit their pieces as well as all the sounds they recorded. Selected productions are broadcast in SWR's feature broadcast "Mehrspur". The site can be browsed not only by features, broadcasts, recording locations or authors but also by sounds. Any feature or sound may be re-used for new productions. 1800 recordings and features have been submitted so far.

Wikileaks made in Sweden

"SR Radioleaks" is radio closing in on Wikileaks. The idea was a really quick starter: In December 2010 the idea was presented to the SR director, and the day after (!) the press releases were out. "Radioleaks" is a website allowing whistleblowers to securely transmit their information. Once submitted to the SR, the information will be evaluated, checked, researched, and finally the stories are made. "Many people know about the abuse of power, about corruption and misconduct, but they have no connections to the media", says Rolf Stengard, editor in charge and former head of the Swedish radio news department.

"Radioleaks" started in March 2011. 600 hints have been submitted so far, leading to 50 news stories (corruption, tax fraud, careless construction). "Radioleaks" is about to go local, Stengard says: All of the 25 local radio stations will have their own whistleblower platform.

The paintbrush microphone

In 2002, Silvain Gire founded Arte radio ("reportages, témoignages et bruits pas sages"), a radio on demand website produced by a small team. "Arte radio", Silvain Gire says, "is a box of chocolate" - no music, no format, no photos, but a dedicated web-based feature channel. Every week there are three to five new productions, either to be podcast or downloaded.

Producers (from beginners to professionals) are paid for the productions, but Arte radio basically being a website there are no distribution costs. Young authors are being trained until their ideas have turned into feature projects. In the end the pieces are free for education use, as well as for non-commercial broadcasting. Gire: "We believe in radio as an art form, and we use the microphone as a paintbrush to do a painting of the world".

Gire else presents the award-winning project "Á l'abri de rien" (nowhere safe) having won the Prix Europa 2011. "À l'abri de rien" is a web documentary on shockingly poor housing conditions in France which 3.6 million people are suffering from. Samuel Bollendorff and Mehdi Ahoudig did the deep research, careful to keep the respect for the men and women who opened their doors to the cameras. "À l'abri de rien": 15 three-minute stories told in breathtaking photos and monologues.

Radio feature assembly line

Lisbeth Jessen (head of a TV master school), formerly working for the DK feature group (see below), presents Denmark's new urban FM channel Radio 24seven established to be a competitor to Denmark's DK P1. Radio 24seven, among many other (old-fashioned) formats, has started producing radio features according to a new concept called "Raw Tapes": Young producers do recordings, seven hours long, which then will be broadcast, one hour each night. Meanwhile the feature producer grabs the material and turns it into a full-blown radio feature which, in the end, will be broadcast at daytime. "Raw Tapes" brought Radio 24seven into contact with a whole lot of unknown, young, and promising producers.

Denmark's third ear

2007 the danish public broadcaster DK closed down the radio documentary department. Tim Hinman, eager to add a bright chapter to a sad story, founded "The Third Ear" in 2009 (overall cost: € ~250.000) - a project not only meant to be about art, but to be art itself. "The Third Ear" is a multimedia art magazine. 20 issues have been produced so far, issued monthly, and providing long audio features and art videos: Artists are filmed doodling and drawing while the user listens to the audio documentary on that artist. "Audio on the internet is growing, and it's here to stay", Hinman says.

Hinman's team startet with literally no users at all. There was no PR at all, but there were personal connections, there was Facebook, and in the end there were the press and TV. Du to a lack of further funding, the project had to close down.

Makers quest 2.0

In 1988 10 freelance radio producers met at a kitchen table on Murray Street, New York city, and founded the association of independents in radio (AIR). AIR, counting more than 800 members today, aims at identifying and attracting talents. AIR provides mentorship programs, scholarships, media awards, publications - and a so-called "inner sanctum", a high traffic web forum.

Public media in the U.S. were established not until 1970, and till 1988 there was a phase of experimentation. By about 1980 the public radio audience started to grow significantly. By 1998, the percentage of listening to nationally produced programmes grew from 49% to 62%. In 2000, half of all listening to public radio was generated by 53 programs; in 2005 by 19. Now, Schardt points out, public radio in the U.S. is in a phase of paradox: "The stations have been so successful and are so busy doing their 24/7 programmes that they hardly find the time to experiment with new forms and formats the future demands."

The MQ2 (Makers Quest 2.0) project aimed at diversifying public radio content, of new participatory ways of telling stories. Eight talented producers, five months, $ 40.000 each - in the end there were seven catching stories, told on innovative websites, in sound, text, photos, videos, interactive maps. There are five ingredients for successful media innovation, Schardt says:

• Leadership
• Entrepreneurial talent
• Building on a legacy (infrastructure, mission)
• The right assignment
• Tracking and expressing the impact

Radio feature on top

"It's nice to be part of the future", Kari Hesthamar and Berit Hedemann (Norway's NRK, radio feature department) say. The future is this: Three years ago NRK started publishing their radio features on top of the NRK front page, the second biggest website of the country. A win-win situation: The radio documentaries are being featured on top, and the NRK front page gets the most precious of all contents: well researched and carefully told stories.

These stories are packaged, so that the front page articles (including the radio piece) can be updated on a daily basis, by side stories, extra material, photo galleries, interactive maps, even by news on the topic. Take the topic first, then expand it by additional stories and news: This makes it kind of news journalism in reverse. "It's great for us to be useful for the NRK website", Hesthamar and Hedemann say. (And above all it's great for a national media website to be useful for the radio documentary.)

NRK's radio doc editors made experiments trying to combine photos with the audio, "but they didn't really work together", Hesthamar and Hedemann admit. Which does not mean it cannot work: Radio features combined with stills will not make any video nor a film. At the core it will remain radio documentary, but in a new, innovative form requiring new talents and skills.

Is the screen a space for features?

Radio feature makers are storytellers. The recent death of Kodak is a great story, Simon Elmes (BBC, radio documentary/creative director) says. Kodak has been obliterated by the "creative destruction" of the digital age. In short: Kodak was slow, conservative, and became obsolete. How about the radio documentary?

The good news first, according to Simon Elmes:

• Classic radio doc is in good health.
• Features and feature-type programmes are still plentiful.
• Craft standards have risen.
• In recent cuts, speech radio largely escaped unscathed.
• Production time has been protected.
• Audiences are rising.

But as to the audiences, there are challenges.

• shortening attention-span
• permanent multi-tasking
• impatience with programmes that "don't deliver quickly"
• loss of "radio culture" amongst key future demographics (15-35 year-olds)
• many of this group don't own a radio, or even a DAB set
• absence of radio devices smartphones

In a noisy marketplace and in times of poor funding, the quiet seriousness of sustained feature-making of up to one hour in length is necessarily going to be a luxury that fewer people will consume. The responses: short forms, packages, magazine programmes. The dangers: a loss of culture, de-skilling.

As a possible response Elmes presents an experiment called "Don't log off", a BBC project meant to be a source for feature material. Fans of the "Don't log off" Facebook page were interviewed via Skype and told their personal, touching stories which were recorded, combined to narratives of life and loss, and broadcast. The "Don't log off" Facebook community lives on, its members keep communicating with one another. "A kind of real life reality soap", Elmes says.

"The web throws the basic parameters of professional feature-making into question", Elmes concludes. "Anyone can assemble and disseminate. Everyone talks about personalisation - what form does a personalised feature take?" The big questions remain: Is the screen an art space? How do we fill it for features? visualisation? slide shows? complementary feature content? do-it-yourself content?

Audiences on the move

"No media ever dies", says Gunnar Garfors, president of the International DMB Advancement Group (IDAG), Norway. TV, web, papers and radio are still going strong. We spend 7,5 hours on the media daily, and according to the audience listening to the radio is still very important. Today FM car radio usage is even stronger than normal FM radio usage.

A couple of years ago telecom companies aimed at offering any kind of data services in order to earn more money. Today, broadcasting networks are overloaded, and the whole industry is waiting for the new Long Term Evolution (LTE, 4G) technology which is hoped to solve all the problems. It won't, nor will the internet, Garfors points out, for 16 reasons:

1. Heavy usage can take down the internet.
2. The internet is a playground for gatekeepers (access providers, Apple, governments, IT companies).
3. Broadcasting networks are hard to hack.
4. Wifi/3G/4G chipsets consume a lot more energy.
5. Radio and TV provide too much data for the internet, and costly too. If Norway's public broadcaster NRK would distribute their TV and radio programmes on the internet costs would increase by € 150.000.000/year.
6. Internet access is not free of charge.
7. There is not enough bandwidth available.
8. Broadcasting works at high speeds.
9. Rural areas are not well covered by high speed internet.
10. Broadcasting is not onl for live radio and TV (also map informations, bus stops etc.).
11. Net neutrality is threatened (media, ISP, users).
12. Broadcasting covers big areas effectively.
13. Only one distribution channel means no backup (transactions, electricity, phone, radio, TV, traffic information, filecasting, broadband, emergency communication).
14. Anonymous media consumption is only available via broadcasting thanks to the data retention act that has been passed across Europe.
15. Double distribution is not effective, economical nor wanted.
16. Ordinary web traffic is already increasing extremely fast (by 2015 15 billion devices will be connected).

And now? Broadcasting and internet - the combination is king, Garfors says. Combining DAB/DAB+/DMB broadcasting with data layers allows

• new formats, services, and revenues
• an increasing dialogue with listeners/viewers
• a cost-efficient combination of live and on-demand content
• touch screen shopping (smartphones, pads, even GPS devices)

Radio must go digital, Garfors concludes. The technology (DAB/DAB+/DMB) is available, cost-efficient and mature.

"Radio feature is paying its way"

RTE Ireland (documentary on one) produces 50 documentaries a year, aired quite irregularly. So "documentary on one" was in need of other ways of publishing, as Liam O’Brian (head of features) points out. Platform coordinator David Timpson presents RTE's "platform agnostic" new media concept:

• mpeg-4-on-TV broadcasting
• desktop on-demand player
• iOS/Android mobile apps

In 2011 the RTE radio docs accounted for a total of 14% of all the RTE radio podcasts (all channels) - a much larger audience than they would have reached on FM.

Timpson presents the "loswal" (listened on same week as live), a post broadcast aggregate of all new media platforms (radio player online, mobile, doc site streams, podcasts, windows media streams, real audio streams etc.) RTE metrics show that a radio doc aired at 18:00 on Dec 3 2011 reached 29k listeners. The aggregated multimedia platforms reached another 29k; this parity of loswal and FM was a huge surprise.

RTE also started publishing documentaries from their archives, one every day (O'Brian mentions an astonishing fact: A piece published before 10am will be downloaded twice as much compared to publishing at 4pm). "The radio feature is paying its way, both on traditional and on newer platforms", the RTE makers conclude.

Since radio documentaries do not only need an audience but also money, O'Brian and Timpson think about adding radio advertising to their features - not very appealing, Timpson admits, but probably RTE's next step.

The multi-platform future

Let's talk about technology: It is new technology that changes radio. In March 2005 the headline of the  "Wired" magazine read "The end of radio". Nothing could be more wrong. Radio appears to be at pretty good health: 90% of the audiences in the UK listen to the radio at least once a week. "Radio is massive", James Cridland (Media UK, managing director radio futurologist) says. People still discover music mainly through radio, either on AM/FM or on the web. Why could "Wired" be so wrong?

The radio world is highly fragmented; there are very few real radio brands. Broadcasting technology is fragmented as well - FM/AM, Internet, mobile phones, DAB/DAB+, DTV... "The world is getting multi-platform", Cridland says, "and radio is going multi-platform as well." Still 2/3 of the radio consumtion is by FM/AM, yet there is DAB (BBC radio 6 music), or even TV (BBC radio 1xtra).

The most important radio platform, Cridland says, is the internet. Yet, every station has got its own player and distribution technology - the only exception being the UK radio player replacing all the different players the stations had built before. (Its usage is exactly the same as it always was: When people are getting up they tune in, either on AM/FM or on the web, and they keep using the radio player the whole day long, until late at night.)

The second most important platform is the mobile, especially the iPhone, a device that has done so much better than any other mobile device. Accordingly the question should be: How can we do the same with radio? By means of crowdsourcing and user-generated content. An remarkable tool for getting the audiences' voice on air is AudioBoo.fm, a mobile app that lets people record and hand in their recordings with a single tap. The industrial revolution called internet can also change the process of radio making. Instead of of costly radio studios you just need a free software like Audacity or an iPhone/iPad/Android app to create high quality audio pieces.

Publishing programmes on the web, Cridland says, will let much more people listen to them than just by broadcasting. Cridland's conclusions:

• The future of radio is multiplatform.
• Radio needs to concentrate on the user interface and discovery.
• Media is changing from consumption to creation.
• Recognise the power of the brand.

Public service radio: Still going strong but declining

"In terms of reach and market share, public service radio broadcasting is still going strong, but on the long run it is declining", says Alexander Shulzycki, head of research, European Broadcasting Union. Even though the reach still is remarkably strong across Europe, a long term erosion has become obvious. On the other hand, Facebook, Twitter and video-sharing sites are increasing fast. On average public service Media are present on three social media platforms. Services like Spotify.com dominates the online listening with younger generations. Yet, 71% do not make their broadcasts available online due to copyright problems.

Media surveys in the U.S. shows a slow but steady growth of online radio consumption over the past eight years (Pandora.com, an algorithm-driven online music service not available in Europe, dominating online listening). U.S. audiences listen to radio via mobile phones (mostly downloaded music, also podcasts and simulcasts) and iPads.

Knowing that traditional market research can hardly predict what is ahead of us, Shulzycki's 10 to-dos for public service broadcasters are:

1. Use storytelling and dramatury in order to enhance audience interaction.
2. Split your content on different platforms.
3. Enhance on-air, online and on-site cross-media interaction.
4. Ensure your presence on the platforms where your listeners are.
5. Protect your channel brand and bring your listeners back home (to your website).
6. Personalise and create narrative content.
7. Take advantage of user-generated content (UGC) and the "collective mind" of the listeners.
8. Pay attention to on-topic posts published by listeners and fans.
9. Pay attention to the social media manager (a key success factor).
10. Make creative and experimental use of social media.

But change you must

Andy Parfitt (formerly head of BBC 1, now Saatchi & Saatchi Fallon, executive director of talent EMEA) starts by looking back to the times when radio feature making basically meant cutting audio tapes. Sitting there with all the material, the core of the editing process was exactly the same as it is today: to bring clarity and simplicity to the stories to be told.

"Public broadcasters tend to be afraid of young audiences. They fear not to understand them", Parfitt says. Yet, catching young audiences are the true challenge. How bridge the gap? "Brand thinking is very relevant to feature making in the Facebook age", Parfitt says. A brand is a promise, an experience, and a memory. So if a radio station thinks about using other ways of distribution such as the web or social media, brand values become even more important. Parfitt's lessons learnt:

• Consistent values and content
• Success makes change hard, but change you must.
• Producers are very often very unlike audiences.
• Radio people mostly have humility. Which is wrong.
• Whatever you do, make it more than broadcasting - make it as much as it can credibly be. "BBC Radio 1", Parfitt says, "is an idea, an idea about youth, about music - and everything done on air, on the web, on mobiles, is congruent."

Parfitt's "new creative agenda": event-driven participation and playfulness. The world has changed:

• Young radio listening hours (audiences younger than 35) in the UK are in decline.
• Mobile web on hi-definition screens sees exponential growth.
• Social Networks in the UK increase bei 400% in 4 years.
• Try asking for a radio in a Tokyo electronic store...
• Public radio continue continue to commission thousands of audio features.
• There's more "listening" than ever.
• Speech radio audiences commute by car (journeys are getting longer).
• Apple has sold its one-hundred millionth iPod in 2007.

There are only 13 years between the first Netscape browser and the iPhone 4 - an industrial revolution beyond imagination. Today, Parfitt concludes, the opportunities for innovation are plenty.