Day two: another personal conclusion

Exciting two days, a fascinating round of devoted radio makers, thrilling discussions. But questions remain.

Everybody has been talking about multimedia for the past ten years. That was just the wrong discussion. It never was about multimedia. It's about media instead. About stories, thoroughly researched and artfully crafted. Stories told on all channels there are today: radio, TV, the web, games, audio guides, pods and pads, mobiles, virtually any device capable of reproducing sound.

Of course: Radio documentaries are expensive, and budgets are cut down. Yet, the audience will always be in need of good stories, and public radio managers will always be in need of good content. And: There are a number of options.

• There's inventive and participatory projects, there's user-generated content.
• There's viral marketing, social media communication, crowdfunding.
• There's radio events engaging young listeners as well as producers.
• There's new multimedia platforms minimizing the distribution costs.
• There are different backgrounds for radio docs, like classical or rock and pop channels.
• There's collaboration with other feature makers, cross-company, cross-country.
• There's cooperations with other broadcasters, with newspapers, telecom and mobile companies, universities, museums.
• There's new forms and formats, fascinating combinations of radio doc and other art forms.

And above all: There's all those original, weird, fantastic ideas making original, weird, fantastic pieces of audio art. This is what it's all about.

Day one: a personal conclusion

What a relief: The audience still is faithful to crafted radio. Yet, radio doc makers must look for new ways of telling their stories in the multimedia world. Mind the power of the archives: So many documentaries have been buried there to be forgotten - the Irish RTE project of daily publishing archived radio docs online is highly promising.

The web provides what radio doc makers have been dreaming of for decades: the ability of telling stories when, where and how the audience wants. "Whe have not chosen the internet", Silvain Gire (head of Arte radio, Paris) says, "the internet has chosen us". Yet knowing that the business of radio doc being sound, and knowing the internet being a powerful new means of distribution, new media can be more: an open space from which new formats can arise - thrilling new combinations of media (audio, text, photo) that have been separate so far.

Radio is special. Radio is a home rather than media; no other media eventually is as close to its audience. But linear radio consumption is in decline, and multimedia distribution is meant to compensate. On the other hand, the web is becoming more and more personal; nowadays our web browser knows more about ourselves than we do, and narrows our horizon. (Social media platforms may widen it again, allowing discoveries on the basis of our friends' preferences.)

Media making is telling stories. And nobody tells stories better than radio features do. Linear broadcasting, that fantastic discovery machine, is unreplaceable, and yet is has to be reinvented. I believe that virtually nobody can do this better than the best storytellers there are: radio doc makers.

Nutshell: Thomas Weibel

“Radio documentaries are the gems in the gravel of news and entertainment. The earplug culture spoils our ability to listen to the probably best radio can offer: atmosphere, sounds, and voices telling thrilling stories.

Radio makers tend to hang their head. New media kill cultural radio they say. Nothing could be more wrong. New Media provide an ocean of content, of knowledge and of social experience. They are not the danger they are said to be. In the beginning of the 20th century newspapers were said to push aside books, later radio was going to kill the papers, TV was killing radio. None of it came true. New media, I believe, are above all a huge opportunity. New forms and formats arise. One of them is the web documentary. Web docs can be based on photography, on video, or on audio. Last year's Prix Europa winner, an amazing French web doc called "À l'abri de rien" ("Nowhere Safe", www.a-l-abri-de-rien.com), is deep resarch and a piece of art at the same time, a shattering story about people living unter painfully poor conditions, told in their own words. "À l'abri de rien" is photography and, at the core, radio doc at its best.

New media are a new stage for the best storytellers there are: for radio doc makers."

Thomas Weibel, freelancer, associate professor for multimedia production, University of Applied Sciences, Chur, Switzerland

Nutshell: Laurent Marceau

“This is my "view from the bridge"…

Listening habits have changed drastically and very quickly over the past few years. And this new kind of "media consumption" keeps on movin' on… The digital natives are growing up as platform-agnostics and it would be crazy to ignore this. This is the reason why Broadcasters have had/have to change and adapt…

Shall we mention the question of rights? Yes, we should!

What about the Radio Feature in all that?

I suppose there are two ways to look at it: the digital world offers new opportunities, new platforms and democratizes access to content. That can only be good for Documentary makers. For those who want to tell stories, and those who want to listen to them… apps, podcasts, on-demand platforms offer new opportunities. This is the positive way to look at it.

But, what if these Feature productions are gradually phased out of the "normal/linear" slots and end up being found only on these new platforms?

Then one can smell danger…

Not a Nutshell this, more a Bombshell like…"

Laurent Marceau, EBU, head of Eurosonic/radio plus, radio fiction and radio feature, Switzerland