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.

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.

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?