As chairperson of Craol and certified anorak – I get to visit radio stations and actually have a valid excuse to enjoy it!
This December I had the chance to visit Together FM which is online 24/7 from Ballyfermot in Dublin 10. Located in the spacious civic offices Together FM also boasts a satellite studio in nearby Cherry Orchard.
I got a tour of the Ballyfermot studios and met the keen and dedicated staff. The station are working hard to get a broadcast licence in 2025.
Studio One
With very accessible studios -they are bright and air conditioned! The only window is to a control room (not pictured) where the editing and main station playout happens.
Studio Two – with AMARC charter on the wall.
Together FM broadcasts across the week with a concentration of first air programmes at the weekend. The programmes are all prepared in advance and are broadcast as live (or with minor edits) at the scheduled time.
After the studio tour I had a great in depth discussion with some of the board of management of the station who told be of their plans for getting licenced and growing the station within their local area.
From what I have seen Together FM are busy and dynamic about their project and they have many of the characteristics of an exemplar station already adding social benefit to their area. I wish them the best is their quest and I will be back for their famous South Dublin hospitality in early 2025.
This version of the radio player is branded for Craol and lists all Full and Parttime stations and is sympathetic to http and https streams. Not all streams have shifted to https in this sector.
In October Charity Radio closed after more than 10 years online. I will write up a longer post about this great station over the Christmas break.
One of the missions of Charity Radio in its earlier years was to give voice to charities and their fundraising.
As a hat tip to that mission started by its founder Mark O’Toole (RIP), here is a dynamic auto curation of the latest charity podcasts “sounding great and doing good”.
Let’s be honest RADIO is a medium that was traditionally heard but not seen. The creativity was in story craft and radio imaging (the acoustic identity of the station, jingles, sweepers, liners, beds etc.) But as convergence hits radio the need to look good as well as sound good is something radio either does well or avoids like a plague.
Some stations like Dublin Digital Radio really get the image of radio well. Too well for some radio traditionalists. They have artwork per show done with such detail it could well be album art, and sometimes the art is per episode of show with new funky art expressing the vibe of the show. Think about it, if your favourite band’s latest LP was a white label in a black cover (think New Order – Blue Monday with no colour) well you wouldn’t be impressed would you? and if every other LP or Single had the same bland image? not good.
So why do it? Radio is converging. You generally do not get radio from a traditional radio set anymore (note: 1). I know this will piss off radio purists who tell me radio comes from a transmitter and is heard on a receiver and that is the only radio that is radio. Wrong. Radio is a word. Like Cinema Films Movies Flix Cineplex are all words for big screen entertainment. Radio is one word for Transmission, Mode, Apparatus (TX & RX), Content, Industry & Style. It is not confined to broadcast radio, radio style that is presented like a broadcast but delivered online live or on demand, that’s radio too. This radio has options for art work, as does DAB+ on modern radio sets. Websites and Social Media (not seen before 1992 and 2002) are ideal places to promote radio with pictures.
Radio – the old traditional set – no images required
As the loss of artwork hurt music as we moved from LP to CD so too does lack of images to support radio. It diminishes the impact radio can have in a converged media world. Online radio is a URL. Each URL used is a vote for that link in a world with billions of links. Why does this matter? in the past your radio on the dial was in a city was competing with 20 or so other stations that were allowed to be on the dial through licencing, congestion or distance (geography). Nowadays the competition locally is only limited by those that want to compete with you and 40,000 other radio stations online around the globe. You need to look good while sounding good. And its not just once off, outsourced artwork, its the everyday ability to look good.
@925phoenixfm daily social posts inform listeners about upcoming content. Created in Canva Pro.
As radio content gets valued for its low cost of production, friendly presentation and loyal following it is making its way onto TV screens. BBC Two Television on the UK 9am – 12pm is a relay of BBC News most of the year, TV is expensive and news is plentiful. RTE Radio 1 is on the RTE News Channel multiple times per day, radio on TV is effective and cheap. So expect radio studios to scrub up as they get seen more on HD TV screens.
an older RTE Radio 1 studio pre TV days
While some radio will always be better suited to being “theatre of the mind” and heard but not seen, media budgets will dictate that quality radio content must get an outing on TV and Social Media. Some radio stations are merging into TV productions like France Inter or Sud Radio both in France (the later allowing 12 hours of roll back radio).
modern day RTE Radio 1 studio that is TV ready.
And its not just Radio on the TV that is happening, News Channels that were TV are doubling as radio and vice versa. Think GB News and Talk TV in the UK.
If you are looking to improve your radio project take a look at your album art and your visual opportunities (I am thinking BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge). There will be more ways to express your brand, image, identity, attitude, logos and your supporters images too.
Finally allow convergence in. Being a purist has its advantages – but if you remain true to ideals long discarded by the audience you might have an Ivory Tower to transmit from but nobody with a radio set to hear you.
Notes:
1. JNLR shows radio sets have a 70% reach of and connected devices have 56% reach. While these number vary from my own experience, there is a distinct variance in cities to rural when it comes to hours / radio / non radio audio content so I would expect variance in device too. All my local anecdotal evidence is more than the opposite of the JNLR figures. And an 8% rise for connected devices would reverse the JNLR lead for radio over connected devices. Such a rise would be over 6 device categories, Smart Phone, Smart Speaker, PC, TV, Tablet, Other. Smart Speaker ownership is rising 8%+ YOY.
From Bowling Alone to Upswing (but perhaps the books should be read in reverse order) Community needs people to join clubs. Why are people joining less clubs. Is it all down to TV viewing. To understand how society need community to work, how the big state or small state needs people to be active in their communities to avoid the chaos that would descend if we all stayed at home. Join or Die is now on Netflix and is long listed (eligible) for an Oscar.
Community Development needs Community to work. Media as a toolbox helps people build their Community. For Community Media to be strong, Community needs to be strong. Joining is better than Dying. Join today.
I want to form a media literacy “book club”, where the the book can be films like this, or TED Talks or podcasts. Media to be discussed. A 2025 not so side project.
Also transmitted on 107.3FM. With high production values it sounds very BBC national speech radio, the content that flows through the station is mediated – so interviews flip between Q&A with the interviewee and presenter continuity that puts the interview into the situation and into the community. The focus is people then story then news in that order.
The website serves the daily content, recent content and evergreen specials in a no frills, stylish way, a bit like the audio, it is well crafted. https://thisisalfred.com
Located in Shaftesbury, population 9,146. The town is famous for Gold Hill used in the 1973 Hovis Television Commercial.
UPDATE: having written this post as St. Ita’s returned to Mixcoud they then announced they were closing the FM 89.5MHz on November 30th as the licencee (the HSE) was not renewing the licence.
Pirate.ie published a post to mark the occasion with an archive gem of a recording of the station in 1986 (which I recorded, seemingly) and a 2019 interview I did with station manager Tom Noctor.
Ita’s started back in 1988 before the legislation for independent radio was published but with the minister for communications from the same parish, Ita’s was not part of the big switch off in 1988 as they had permission to stay on air.
Plurality in media is important. It can cover the content and platform. Is the content shown in Irish media from a large variety of sources in society? or is it from a few sources?. Also is the platform the media is delivered on owned by a few big companies or is a wide diversity of ownership available?
from the BAI policy on plurality.
Diversity of Content means the extent to which the broad diversity of views (including diversity of views on news and current affairs and diversity of cultural interests prevalent in Irish society) is reflected through the activities of media businesses in the State, including their editorial ethos, content and sources.
Diversity of Ownership means the spread of ownership and control of media businesses in the State linked to the market share of those media businesses as measured by listenership, readership, reach or other appropriate measures.
Is your media more or less plural these days? Media Ownership Ireland is a database tracking who owns media in Ireland. As old media matures competition leads to buyouts and more and more media is owned by less and less companies. Is this ownership deficit offset by the public’s access to new media platforms? Does the ability to “broadcast yourself” on social media outweigh the importance of plurality in the media?
The ability to reach billions of people with messages online does not equate to the ability to broadcast to a nation’s airwaves given that broadcasting is the incumbent and dominant mass media platform where a few transmit to the many. Social media silos of content where users select their preferred catalogue of content, like subscribed podcasts or Netflix watch lists does not have the same effect on society as broadcasting. Therefore the share of ownership in media remains important across all media and in particular in the broadcast sector.
Media Ownership Ireland database tracks ownership across Online, Print and Broadcast media in Ireland. But one sector it fails to track is Community Media. This sector is owned by the communities it broadcasts to. This means that this sector has a unique strength above all the other sectors that are listed. The strength is that the the media entity is owned by its public. Control and direction of the media is down to the people within the community. This goes a long way to demonstrate the lack of plurality in commercial and public media, which is evidenced in the content on air and access citizens have to their media.
Community Media which is recognised as the third sector in Irish media legislation might not yet be a large enough sector to rebalance the deficit in plurality in Irish media but if the sector was to grow to being in every town and county in Ireland (like pirate radio was in Ireland in the 1980s) then it could begin to be the necessary counterweight to large commercial multinationals owning and controlling Irish media.
With 30% of Local Radio owned by companies outside of Ireland, plurality in radio broadcasting in Ireland is rebalanced by the existence of community radio (another reason the sector should be listed in the Media Ownership Ireland database) . 100% of community media in Ireland is owned by its community. The ownership model transfers to the content on air, which on community media is as varied and diverse as the community it serves, unlike the formatted commercial offerings from local and national broadcasters.
Parity of each of the sectors of Irish broadcasting in legislation is required to make sure that the sector that values and spotlights the marginalised the most is not marginalised itself when media codes, policies and legislation are being drafted. Equal recognition of each sector will allow for future funding and growth to happen and therefore allows community media to continue to out perform in areas on diversity of content and plurality of ownership.
Following the recent death of Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh (June 25th 2024) it reminded me of a post I wrote when he retired in 2010.
Irish Overseas Broadcasting was written in September 2010 for the website ilikeradio.net now archived here on radio.ie
It is still a good read and a bit dated, but it guessed the demise of DAB where RTE put Mediumwave funding after it closed that service to the UK (March 24th 2008) . In general it takes a look at RTÉ and how they are slow to move with new technology and are really bad and serving the Irish abroad, although their plan to put RTE Radio in UK cities with small scale DAB is now a legal reality, if though RTÉ may now not have the cash for this venture any longer.
Since the article was written RTÉ pulled the plug on DAB (March 31st 2021) and Longwave 252 (April 14th 2023 minutes after President Joe Biden gave a public address from Ballina Co, Mayo). These 2 broadcasting withdrawals were seemingly unrelated to the other controversies that have engulfed the national broadcaster. Now RTÉ has a 5 year plan and 3 year funding to continue in a slimed down state.
The internet is a healthier place for delivering content in a technical capacity, but as this medium has matured it has also become a more difficult place to disseminate content due to rights issues and geo blocks.
It takes vision to see beyond the roadblocks and see and hear the diaspora, so they can see and hear Ireland via its national broadcaster. Irish Overseas Broadcasting or content delivery is still much needed and there is a wonderful archive of content in RTÉ that should be on the RTÉ Player or opened up to be on any Irish Player that cares to serve this content with new context.
If other groups see a market in the gap to serve the largest national diaspora on planet earth, then every assistance of our national broadcaster should help make it happen, after all, we all fund RTÉ, it is our public service channel.
Technical changes means integrated streaming and broadcasting players which are truly cross platform (such as DVB-I) can deliver Irish content to wherever people want to see and hear it.
