MULTIMEDIA MEETS RADIO

10 ideas for a successful multimedia strategy

Here are my thoughts on how news-based radio stations can rise to the challenges of multimedia convergence without overstretching finite resources. The key is sustainability.

1) Play to your strengths
The starting-point is your core product: the audio that you already produce and broadcast on the radio.

Make it available in a digital format like MP3 for users to listen to or download from your station's website. Podcast highlights of popular programmes and longer (complete) versions of broadcast interviews.

2) Start a conversation with your audience
Your website is not just a place for programme schedules. The easiest and most effective way to create interactivity is by having a weblog.

For more idea about using a weblog, see this post by the Bivings Group.

3) Listen to your audience
Try to respond to comments and always answer direct questions - giving your audience a voice only makes sense if you are prepared to listen. Make your audience feel part of the editorial process by soliciting ideas for future broadcasts/blogposts.

4) Don't bite off more than you can chew
(Pseudo-) multi-platform authoring is a good way to achieve sustainability. For example, with a bit of tweaking, the (carefully written) scripts that accompany your radio programmes can become your online articles/blog posts.

5) Make your podcasts interactive
Use free software like Odeo, Evoca or Voicethread to allow your listeners to leave messages on your website. Edit the voice messages for use on-air and in podcasts.

6) Don't reinvent the wheel
Whenever possible, use existing applications/platforms to build and foster communities. Not only do they work, but the best social software is often free.

Upload your videos to YouTube and then embed them in your weblog. Hopefully, you will attract comments and reactions on both platforms.

Create user groups. Put some of your photos on photo-sharing sites like Flickr  and encourage your audiences to share their pictures.

7) Create a multimedia culture
Winning over your staff may be your biggest challenge, but most will come round when they start feeling that they are engaging in a genuine conversation with their audience.

Make short films of your presenters at work and of any studio guests. This will interest your audience and also boost morale in the newsroom because everybody likes seeing themselves on video.

Encourage your reporters to take pictures and shoot videos to enhance online storytelling. As Howard Owens suggests, this does not necessarily mean investing in expensive, state-of-the-art equipment.

8) Cross-promote
Regularly remind listeners about your web address and talk about your online content. Use your weblog to preview upcoming stories - begin a conversation about your reports before they are broadcast.

9) Link to your community
Provide editorial guidelines online and link to the blogs of members who agree to abide by the rules. They may even link back to your website.

10) RSS feeds
Make your blog posts available as RSS feeds. This will make it easier for your audience to keep up-to-date and aware of new content on your website.

Never mind the quality, feel the length?

Broadcast quality - does it matter? That was the rather playful title of a conference I attended here, in Geneva, last week.

For the record, the answer appears to be yes, but in true Lord Copper fashion, only up to a point. In the real world, broadcasters must balance quality against more mundane considerations, like the availability of spectrum, bandwidth and the cost of providing new services.

As always, the important thing is keeping your customers happy, which sometimes means that low quality is not even an issue. Punters watching football on their mobile phone TVs, for example, do not seem to mind the grainy images.

But somebody who has just forked out thousands of euros for the latest monster-sized HD TV, will have higher expectations and demand crystal clear pictures in perfect resolution.

DAB radio is another case in point.

EBU Technical Director Phil Laven told last week's conference that as far back as 1976 he had expressed concern to his then bosses, at the BBC, that digital technology would force broadcasters to change their attitudes towards quality.

He recalled arguing that quality and quantity would become tradable. As quality costs money, he had reasoned, accountants would insist on quality reductions to make savings.

At the time, he was laughed out of the room and told that the BBC would never compromise on issues of quality. But history appears to have borne him out.

When the BBC was preparing to launch DAB services, in the mid 1990s, many engineers saw it as an opportunity to offer very high quality audio services. They estimated that 256 kbit/s would be needed to provide a high quality stereo broadcast signal.

But when the multiplexes came along, sights needed to be lowered as they had a maximum bit rate of 1152 kbit/s each. It was decided that the best way to exploit what was available was to provide five stereo services at 192 kbit/s and two mono services at 96 kbit/s.

Most people seemed to be happy enough, apart from those blessed, or possibly cursed, with "golden ears". BBC Radio 3 listeners, who are a discerning bunch with not a tin ear between them, were dismayed that the Beeb was not delivering on its promise of CD-quality sound.

Nor could you accuse them of being unreasonable, since even a BBC Technical White Paper observes that at 192 kbit/s, "it is relatively easy to hear imperfections in critical audio material."

However, dismay turned to disgruntlement this summer, when Radio 3 cut its digital broadcasts from 192 kbit/s to 160 bit/s. This further degradation of quality opened the floodgates to a torrent of complaints.

"The DAB sounded dreadful," wrote one fan to the informal Friends of Radio 3 pressure group. Others called it "absolutely dire", blasted it as "rubbish" or lamented what they felt was "a miserable situation".

The BBC Director of Radio and Music, Jenny Abramsky, finally relented under pressure, reversing the move to cut back on nearly a fifth of Radio 3's bandwidth. The original idea had been to extend choice by making room for the Radio Five Live spin-off, Sports Extra.

Few would argue that the real reason for DAB's success has been the wide range of services on offer, rather than anything to do with quality. Some commercial stations are even managing to run services at 48 kbit/s, which is roughly AM quality.

Londoners can now listen to more than 50 DAB services, many of which are not available in AM or FM. Yes, quality is important, but apparently not as important as allowing listeners to find relevant and interesting content.

It is a strategy that has enabled DAB to become a genuine story of triumph. Such is the phenomenal success of DAB that Britain's leading electricals retailer, Curry's, decided recently to stop selling analogue radios.

Perhaps because I am not an engineer, I think vastly extending choice is a fair trade off against quality, especially where speech radio is concerned. But it is vital that broadcasters strike the right balance .

Some people would like to see regulators getting involved in specifying minimum bit rates. But I do not think that is the answer.

As Friends of Radio 3 can testify, public service broadcasters will always listen to their audiences. It is worth mentioning at this point that the Beeb has been lobbying the British regulator, Ofcom, to allocate more spectrum for digital radio.

Potentially, more spectrum could be used to improve quality, but we shall have to wait and see. Whatever the outcome, though, we are unlikely to see broadcasters ever again promising their listeners CD-quality sound.

The last radio station to make that claim, Jazz FM, was ordered by the Advertising Standards Authority to withdraw it from its promotional campaign.

How the IBC helped me beat the airport blues

I had flown into Schiphol Airport the previous evening, but my overnight bag had stayed behind in Gatwick. As I sat down for an IBC conference session on digital radio, I was unshaven, tired and still wearing the same clothes I had walked around London in, 24 hours earlier.

I was struggling to keep my temper as each time I had tried to call the airport baggage handlers, I had been put on hold and forced to listen to what seemed like hours of muzak, interrupted only by recorded messages about busy operators. You could say that I was in one hell of a bad mood as DR's Ole Mølgaard prepared to open a session called "Digital radio - yes, but which one?"

Above all, I did not want to hear empty platitudes - a string of slogans bereft of any real analysis. You know the sort of thing: the future is multi-platform and content is king.

One line that really gets my goat is the argument that radio is somehow special because you can do other things while you are listening - read the paper, wash your socks or build model aircraft. Well, actually, you can listen to the TV without watching it - many people do.

South Koreans wonder around listening to their mobile phone TVs and one of the session speakers, Glyn Jones, confessed to listening to Breakfast TV when cycling to work "because they have more interesting guests." Audiences do not care about the medium: they just want good content.

Italians, who had pretty much given up on radio, recently started switching their sets back on, when the public service broadcaster, RAI, began offering innovative and compelling programmes on Radio Due. Suddenly, there is a buzz around the medium again.

According to the EBU Technical Director, Phil Laven, content is also they key to the uptake of digital radio. He urged broadcasters to follow the examples of Britain and Denmark by giving customers a reason for ditching their analogue sets.

Simply replicating services already available on FM was, he claimed, a recipe for disaster.

"Customers don't buy radios because they're digital - they couldn't care less. They buy radios because they want to listen to content and the digital radio services we offer must be attractive."

In a moment of mea culpa, Phil suggested that media organizations had lost the bigger picture by worrying for too long about phenomena like system performance, spectrum efficiency, spectrum availability, transmission costs and receiver costs. He dismissed it all as "engineer speak" and accused broadcasters of losing touch with their audiences.

"A lot of it is about choice," concurred Glyn Jones, Director of Operations at Digital One. "In the UK, we have got about twice as many radio stations with digital radio as we've got on FM and AM, so for consumers there really is a reason to go the shops and to buy."

If French consumers were not enjoying the same degree of choice, said Yves-Francois Dehery, it was because the authorities had wasted the last 20 years on inconclusive studies and pilot projects. He said there had been "an excess of technological solutions" while "professional actors had failed or neglected to understand the market."

Blame it on the stress or fatigue, but the situation in France reminded me of a scene in Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly". A gunman surprises Eli Wallach's character in his bathtub, but makes the mistake of explaining the motive for his revenge.

Wallach finds the gun he has hidden in the foam and shoots the intruder, muttering the words, "When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk." Certainly, there has been a lot of talk in France over the past two decades and very little in the way of action.

I suppose it is tempting to see the whole debate over the future of radio as a western film, with the rival standards shooting it out. Tempting, but wrong.

The speakers all agreed that no single standard will emerge victorious. Rather, different countries and regions are likely to adopt different solutions.

And they may not even all be digital. Earlier in the day, Jonathan Marks had reminded delegates at his session that countries in the developing world were only beginning to discover the opportunities offered by local FM analogue radio.

Yes, the future was multi-platform and content was still king, but my mood improved and I ended up enjoying a very nice debate. Indeed, it was so good that by the end of the session, I had almost forgotten about my missing bag.

Reporting Iraq

What are the risks, restrictions and possible rewards of what has become arguably the most difficult assignment?

The great Italian journalist, Tiziano Terzani, once told me that you cannot speak about a war unless you are prepared to face the danger and feel the fear of being on the front line. Put more crudely, you need balls.

Nowhere, in more than half a century, has the resilience and courage of reporters come under greater strain than in Iraq.

More than 90 journalists and media assistants have lost their lives since fighting started, in March 2003. The figure is from a study by Reporters without Borders, which describes the violence in Iraq as "the bloodiest for the media since World War II".

The violence poses a moral dilemma for news organizations, who must weigh up the benefits of sending reporters against the risks. Editors have a moral responsibility for the safety of their staff.

The price is high in financial terms too, since news organizations must invest heavily in security to provide adequate protection. The BBC is wealthier than most - it has spent five million dollars in Iraq, over the past two years - and even employs its own full-time security advisers.

Jonathan Baker, the BBC's Deputy Head of Newsgathering, told delegates, "If you can't protect your people properly, then you shouldn't be sending them."

The stringent security measures inevitably means there are restrictions on movement. BBC reporters, for example, spend much of their time holed up at their headquarters in Baghdad, in a heavily guarded street, which is barricaded at both ends.

But Jonathan denied that BBC correspondents were little more than dish monkeys, filing regular rooftop reports. Their presence, he claimed, made a difference.

World Editor Patrick Howse said it was about being able "to feel an atmosphere." He gave a vivid description of the "poisonous" aftermath of the destruction of one of Iraq's holiest shrines, in Samarra.

Patrick said that when the news broke, he saw "the blood drain from the faces of our translators". Angry Shia mobs chanted for the death of Sunnis, Americans "and anyone else they could think of."

Following the attack, the BBC was able to use its presence on the ground to prove that the official casualty figures were understated and came nowhere near reflecting the full extent of the carnage. For once, the BBC team broke their own rules and left their base to visit the morgue at Samarra's Yarmouk Hospital.

In the space of just 25 minutes, they witnessed three cars arriving with fresh corpses. The morgue was overflowing with bodies and many more were loaded onto an articulated truck parked just outside the hospital.

The pictures captured by the BBC team and the conversations they had with hospital staff showed beyond doubt that the official death toll of 340 was "preposterous".

Urban Hamid, a Swedish-Iraqi freelancer who provided the Iraqi footage for Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, shares the BBC's conviction that he can only report Iraq by being there. Like Tiziano Terzani, he takes calculated risks. 

Urban therefore saw red when Swedish Radio decided, for safety reasons, to pull their people out of Iraq and for ethical reasons not to use stringers.

Urban told Swedish Radio Editor-in-Chief Staffan Sonning, "If I had rotten tomatoes or eggs, I would throw them at you." He was joking, but you could tell there was real anger behind the smiles.

Urban decided to stay put in Iraq, despite the fact that Swedish Radio's decision left him without any insurance coverage for several weeks.

He rejected Staffan's arguments about safety and an editor's moral responsibility. Urban, whose father was from Basra, told the conference that he exploited his network of relatives not only to gain access to stories, but also for tip offs about which areas to avoid.

Urban argued that his Iraqi roots and experience - he is in his late 40s - gave him an enormous advantage over many other foreign journalists. He likened them to the naive and accident prone tenderfoot in western films.

According to Mariusz Borkowski, the Deputy Chairman of Polish Radio, there was no question of his station pulling correspondents out of Iraq: they would stay for as long as Polish troops remained.

Mariusz said that covering Iraq was an essential public service, which also highlighted what he termed a Polish "paradox". Seventy per cent of the population opposed the war, but there was massive public interest in news from the region.

Reporting the world

Do the media give enough space to international events? What are the special responsibilities, if any, of public service broadcasters?

The former CBS news anchor and arguably America's most famous journalist, Dan Rather, has urged US networks to devote more time to foreign news. Rather told a session at this year's RTNDA/NAB:

International coverage will continue to shrink unless those of us who believe in it and believe it's important can make the case to the leadership and the ownership that this is a public serivce. It may not help the demographics and the ratings, and it may get you cursed out of the country club, but it's the kind of coverage you need if you're going to have integrity.

Public service broadcasting is about integrity, but at a time of budget cuts it is always easier to close a foreign bureau than risk losing a service closer to home. Audiences need to know why they should be interested in developments in sub-Saharan Africa.

Carmen Buergo, Radio Nacional d'España's international editor, said the key to selling international news to audiences was keeping it short and relevant.

Pascal Delannoy, who is the director of multimedia at Radio France, launched a withering attack on the French media. He said there was an identity crisis in France. The media were seeing things from a wholly French perspective and failing to shed light France's place in either Europe or the world.

He described a vicious circle, where audience apathy had resulted in reduced coverage of international events. The lack of correspondents and foreign bureaux meant there was nobody on the ground to provide context and background, so that there was nobody to tell audiences why they should be interested in a particular story.

Pascal said that compounding the dwindling numbers of correspondents was an ignorance about the outside world. The referendum on the EU constituion spawned the myth of the "Polish plumber" - a symbol of cheap foreign labour - that became a catchphrase during the campaign.

He said it was the duty of the media to find a religious conscience and explain the case of the cartoons. There was a lot to be done.

The French media had to explain Europe and educate people about why the Polish plumber was not a threat. On a more positive note, Pascal said the no-vote had triggered an editorial debate in France about how to present opinions, as well as underlining the need to present different points of view.

Sidestepping a question about how he would cover the "myth of the Polish plumber", Polish TV reporter Piotr Gorecki admitted that international news made audiences reach for their remote econtrols. Piotr said that while it was easy to identify and cover the big international stories, there was no clear policy on which other foreign stories to report.

Krzysztof Mroziewicz, a well-known Polish newspaper journalist, agreed that the media did not give sufficient space to international stories. But he said that the problem was not exclusive to Poland.

Hosam El Sokkari of the BBC highlighted the problem of young people are turning away from news. He said that the real challenge facing news organizations was how to win back a lost demographic by insisting on the importance of international news.

A cartoonist's view

We're off!

The Radio News Specialized Meeting is taking place in a rather formal, but comfortable conference room in the headquarters of Polish Radio. Our hosts have been very kind and have done a splendid job of organizing things.

The events of the next two days will be blogged here and by Kevin Anderson.

The opening debate is about the global furore triggered by the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad.

"Something's going on, but you don't know what it is, do you Mrs. Jones?" said Lisbeth Knudsen, the Editor-in-Chief of Danish Radio and TV, quoting a Bob Dylan song.

As a kid, I was more into Motown - sorry Lisbeth, but I never really liked Dylan - and the song that came to my mind was Aretha Franklin's "Respect". The song became a civil rights anthem in the US.

Lisbeth said that the affair known in Denmark as the "Muhammad crisis" had underlined not only the importance of free speech, but also that freedom had non-negotiable "ethical limits". But this did not mean that there was no room for constructive debate, she argued.

The insider's view came from the Head of the BBC's Arabic Service, Hosam El Sokkari. No, he was not speaking as the man, or editor, from the Arab street, but as someone who started his career as a cartoonist for a daily newspaper in Finland.

Hosam made the very important point that the Danish cartoons first appeared in an Egyptian magazine in October last year - months before the riots. Was he suggesting that religious leaders and Arab governments may have exploited the affair?

Cartoons deal in stereotypes, whether the Prophet with a bomb under his turban or Hosam's Finnish skinheads - the subject of his first published cartoon. But Hosam stressed there was a wide-ranging debate in the "Arab world" and that dishonest reporting in the West, rather than freedom of the Arab press, was the real issue.

Many Arabs accused Westerners of double standards - after all, they argued, cartoons denying the Holocaust were unacceptable in the West and would not be published by the MSM. Quite simply, it was a question of respect.

Staffan Sonning, editor-in-chief of Swedish Radio, made the case for press freedom. He said that accepting that Jyllandsposten had the right to publish the cartoons did not mean that you condoned them.

Fr. Koprowski of Vatican Radio said the outrage over the cartoons reflected what he described as a crisis within Islam, as Muslims struggled to reconcile the past with the modern world.

Hosam accused Fr. Koprowski of over simplifying and making generalisations: fundamentalists did not reflect the mainstream, he stressed. And he denied that democracy and technology were irreconcilable with Islam.

Arthur Landwehr of Germany's ARD highlighted the cultural differences between Moslems and Christians and suggested that Muslim immigrants were changing tradional Western liberal values.

Arthur cited a recent example, from Germany, of a satirical version of the Lord's prayer, which replaced the religious content with football terminology. He said that the public service broadcaster had eventually dropped the "prayer" following a number of complaints, but that the affair had never really roused passions in the Christian community.

I wanted to ask Arthur if he felt that was maybe because the satire was confined to one community. It is the same reason why Jews tell the best Jewish jokes - when somebody else tells them, they often come across as racist.