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.

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.

Nutshell: Else Barrat-Due

“In Norway we now often call radiodrama “sounddrama” because radio is only one of several means of distribution. And probably not even the best one, because it is authoritarian. We tell the listeners: We decide when and for how long you must listen. Not very tempting for a young audience. Streaming and podcast with apps – that’s the future, or rather the present, right now. Technological innovation is happening so fast these days that yesterday’s truth is obsolete tomorrow. What we can observe is that more and more people walk and travel with a white cable from their pockets to their ears. Our ambition must be to fill that cable with as much sounddrama as possible. So there are at least three primary challenges: Content and distribution – and the connection between them. And production. In our horizons we don’t think budgets for sounddrama will increase. So we need to find ways to produce smarter, quicker, cheaper.

The challenge is to find the younger audience, our future audience. We have tried to find them through a project called “Horron on the net.” An interactive deal where the audience write the scripts. These small sounddramas has been free to be podcasted due to special rights for this project. So far more than 100 000 have podcasted them which is considered to be very good.

We have also a dramatic writing community, a laboratory for developing new texts with both established and younger writers. The challenges for the future are among others linked to rights, formats, leaders understanding of the necessity for means, and most of all awarenesbulding in the audience."

Else Barrat-Due, NRK, director/producer, Norway

Nutshell: Else Barrat-Due

“Our audience, especially the younger generation, is leaving the good old radio. When they listen, they find what they want on the net and most of all: on smartphones and iPods. The listening experience is liberated in time and room. This gives another kind of freedom to the listeners. Just like in the music industry it is important that our sound expressions can be found on itunes, spotify, youtube, etc.

What challenges does this fact give us?

That distribution on new platforms is important. We need to find new ways of reaching people where they actually are.

The problems of meeting this development is tied to getting the rights from the artist’s organizations.

Another question: Will distribution on new platforms demand other kinds of production, other types of genre, other types of drama? The media is the form? That we do not know yet.

What the net can offer and which might be of interest is the interactive possibilities with the listeners, which again can affect the form.

Also, all the affectionados now have access to equipment to record and edit radiodrama. And they have the means to distribute it. This might lead to competition, but also to a renaissance for the radiodrama."

Else Barrat-Due, NRK, director/producer, Norway

Nutshell: Kari Hesthamar

“There is a big hunger for radio journalists at NRK to do crafted radio and to have the tools for this, both in every day production and in longer formats. Our impression is that the focus on this has become stronger the past years. The radio feature group at NRK have a yearly course that runs over one and a half weeks where we train people in the basics of storytelling on radio; interviewing techniques, dramaturgy, narration and sound. We also do a lot of teaching both in house and at the institutes of journalism. This results in crafted radio documentaries and in better radio also in shorter formats aired daily. Our strength and challenge is our long format of 45 minutes, which has a build up that demands concentration. We are today not allowed to podcast documentaries that contains more than 3 minutes of music, which is a great problem for us. We discuss our future in the web world a lot. Our documentaries are in general published on the front page of NRK.no, which is the second largest website in Norway, because they see what we make as exclusive stories told in a way that the public want and that newspapers and other websites can’t offer. We also publish all our features on facebook and twitter. We have an increasing number of listeners, but see the opportunity to listening on demand as crucial for our future. Our experience is that the radio documentaries are popular among all ages, but for the young to listen we are especially dependant on podcast and online listening. In short - the way of distributing the stories is in rapid change, but the interest for good stories and important topics never change."

Kari Hesthamar, NRK, editor, Norway