MULTIMEDIA MEETS RADIO

MMR07: a new way to learn sign language

Words like inspirational and motivational have become cliches when applied to speakers, but I can think of no other way of describing Gunilla Wagstrom. She works for the Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company, UR, where she became the world's first-ever deaf TV producer.

Gunilla was born deaf in a hearing family and first saw sign language when she started school at the age of seven. She was a teenager before she met a deaf adult and realized she would not grow out of her disability, as until then she had always believed. 

At school, deaf children learned signing for communicating with each other in the playground, but once back in the classroom they were forced to sit on their hands and lip read. They had to speak Swedish.

Fortunately, all that changed in 1981 when the country's parliament passed a law recognizing Swedish sign language and supporting the goal of bilingualism for all deaf children.

Today, sign language is becoming popular among hearing people. Indeed, such is the level of interest that there is a shortage of teachers and places to learn.

This gave Gunilla and her colleague Ingeborg Swartling the idea to do something on the Internet. Surprisingly, this was virgin territory with no existing sites that attempted to demistify, popularize and teach signing.

Gunilla and Ingeborg developed a website around the very simple and effective idea of a subway map because it would be easily recognizable.

They used Flash because of the flexibility and freedom it provided in terms of translating their design online and realizing their goals. The result is Teckensprak, an elegant and attractive website which is very easy to use. 

The different lines and stops on the subway map correspond to difference themes and topics. Visitors can learn how to sign by watching videos, which often feature Swedish celebrities, including actors, singers, politicians and sportsmen, 

Gunilla and Ingeborg called on the EBU to do more in the area of access services to help other broadcasters to produce similar web services. I had always thought that signing was international, but in actual fact every country has its own distinct sign language.

This means the Swedish site has a limited audience.

The EBU Technical Department has already done a lot of work in this area and has published recommendations and guidelines on access services. Much more remains to be done. 

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MMR07: is your orientation audience-centric?

At this year's Multimedia Meets Radio, Greg Lowe of the Finnish broadcaster, YLE, suggested that public service broadcasters could learn a great deal from the business technique of customer relations management. According to Greg, these are the questions that broadcasters should be asking themselves:

• Do you have a customer-driven strategy, based on truly knowing customer needs?
• Do you have a routine processes to identify the needs – and opportunities?
• Do you have customer goals for all service elements (music, news, presenter, etc)?
• Do you have a strategic framework for customer acquisition, retention and development?
• How good is your relationship strategy? Excellence depends on three maturity factors:

1. Do your development projects require collaboration with customers?
2. Will this build loyalty through satisfaction with products and services?
3. is this clearly focused on guaranteeing great customer experiences?

• Do employees recognize the value of your customers for their success? (This mission is not only a job for managers.)

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MMR07: the opportunities and challenges of podcasting

Eighty per cent of podcast users are under the age of 40, while 63 per cent of them are men. That is the situation in Germany, according to figures supplied by MDR's Reinhard Baerenz, but it is much the same story everywhere else.

Mads Fink said Danish Radio had received a letter from a 94 year old lady thanking them because podcasts had enabled her to clean her attic while listening to her favourite programmes. Generally, though, Danish grannies are as unlikely to own iPods or MP3 players as old ladies in other countries.

Switzerland's mx3 is certainly not aimed at the regulars of Darby and Joan clubs. The service allows unsigned Swiss bands to upload their music onto a special website.

It has been phenomenally successful for a country with a population of just seven million. More than 1000 bands had signed up to mx3 within a week of its launch.

It now boasts some 4700 bands and 12,500 songs. According to Samuel Vuillermoz (RSR) and Dominik Born (DSR), on an EU level that would be proportionally equivalent to a quarter of a million contributing bands.

Samuel and Dominik put the success of the application down to an attractive design, an intuitive GUI and fast-loading pages. It offers users powerful search and caegorization tools, personalization, a recommendation service and the opportunity to share with friends.

The bands like it too. They can link to online shops that sell their music and more importantly, they know they can get their songs played on the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation's (SSR-SRG Idée Suisse) radio stations.

Much of the focus of the podcasting session at Multimedia Meets Radio, though, was on rights. Several broadcasters gave details about the agreements they have negotiated with the record industry.

DR has a two-year deal that allows them to pay one fee upfront to use the music on all platforms. It covers both streaming and downloading and has enabled the Danish broadcaster to podcast programmes with 49 per cent music content.

Belgium's French language broadcaster RTBF has a more complicated rights agreement. It is based on paying per download, according to the percentage of music in the podcast.

It is not clear whether this is a sustainable model, especially since RTBF is committed to not passing the additional costs on to users. RTBF believes passionately that public service radio should continue to be freely available.

On the other end of the scale, mx3 has no digital rights management and makes MP3 files available in reasonable quality 128kbps.

Several people in the audience urged the EBU to do more to help leverage better deals from the music industry.

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MMR07 - what's the big idea?

EBU Radio Director Raina Konstantinova opened MMR07 by thanking the more than 100 people who had travelled to Geneva. She noted that this year's edition had attracted the biggest audience yet and she suggested this was because the event was practical and relevant.

"It does not discuss the sex of the angels," she said.

Raina observed that technology was advancing at such a fast pace that words such as blogging, podcasting and wikis, which were little known just a year ago, had now passed into the mainstream. But she also had some words of warning about the pitfalls and challenges of Web 2.0 applications such as Wikipedia.

Raina quoted a recent article in the IHT by Alex Beam that pooh-poohs the notion that crowds possess any wisdom. Public service broadcasters, she said, were encouraging their audiences to express themselves, but also had a crucial role to play as trusted and reliable sources of content, including news.

Guillaume du Gardier of Edelman PR was next up and he confessed that nowadys he spent most of his life online. He said that he had a very real feeling that he was witnessing the birth of something dramatically new - a revolution, rather than an evolution.

The Internet, Guillaume argued, was always meant as a platform for sharing - not only for reading, but also for writing. Now technology had finally made that possible and a genuine conversation was taking place online.

The old top-down model, based on a one-way model of communication was disappearing, he said, as media organization learned how to listen to their audiences. 

Guillaume stressed that media organizations had a tremendous opportunity to build a new relationship with their audiences. Broadcasters could easily find new talent while encouragining, involving and inviting audiences to co-create.

My colleague David Wood noted that according to Google most people who uploaded videos to YouTube were indeed hoping to be spotted by mainstream media organizations.    

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Why video is a must for radio stations

Managing change is always a serious challenge and nowhere more so than in a radio newsroom. Journalists are a conservative lot: hidebound, inflexible, technophobes and whingers by nature.

Not surprisingly perhaps, I count myself among the exceptions and have never been able to understand the Neanderthal mindsets of some of my colleagues. Whatever else they might say, no-one would ever accuse me of being a Luddite.

Newsrooms have been transformed over the past decade. Never before have we had access to such a fantastic array of tools for newsgathering, editing and storytelling.

I was a broadcast journalist in the mid-90s, when digital editing became a viable alternative to slicing up magnetic tape with razor blades. My older colleagues hated it and some of them went as far as refusing to learn the new skills.

At the time, I felt sorry for them and could understand why they felt threatened. Some of them had been doing their jobs for 30 years without experiencing any change in their working environment.

A few years later, I had less sympathy when my then colleagues started looking down their noses at the Internet. They argued that they were radio journalists, as though this somehow made them superior.

But what really surprised me was that age no longer seemed to be a factor. My younger colleagues were among those whining loudest.

It took a fair amount of cajoling and in some cases nothing short of bribery to persuade them to take any interest in the corporate website.

That's why it doesn't surprise me that blogging is only now starting to gain a grudging acceptance in newsrooms. If it hasn't taken even longer, a lot of the credit must go to the bosses who communicate their enthusiasm for blogging via daily "mind bullets" to their colleagues.

Anyhow, the debate has moved on and the new mantra is that radio journalists don't do video. Apparently, it's one thing to encroach on the territory of print journalists by producing text for the website, but they draw the line at video.

That's TV, they claim. Sadly, they still haven't grasped multimedia and don't understand convergence.

Web video is not television - the grammar is completely different. But don't take my word for it, check out the video segments that TV news stations are shovelling onto the Web - a lot of it just doesn't work.

But if done properly, online video can target niche groups and exploit the long-tail in ways that are impossible for traditional broadcast media. There is a smilar relationship between podcasting and traditional radio.

For more on this topic, Paul Bradshaw identifies four types of online video journalism. Kevin Anderson provides insight into why newspapers are making videos, but most of his points are equally valid for radio.

Broadcasters have been forced to embrace the Internet and must now produce video if they want to survive and stay relevant. Young people in particular are turning their backs on radio and TV in favour of podcasts, or video sharing sites like YouTube.

BBC Five Live is rising to the challenge by providing images to accompany many of its sporting programmes. I have heard that they are turning Mark Kermode's film reviews into video podcasts.

No doubt, some of my colleagues will accuse Radio Five Live of making "cheap television." Pay no attention: for the most part, they are the same people who predicted no-one would ever read a news article online. 

The 'size zero' broadcasting diet

A senior editor - let's call him Prendergast - recently confessed to me that he was assailed by doubts about the future of broadcast journalism. Prendergast claimed that his employers, like many other media organizations, were behaving like teenage girls on a crash slimming course.

"It's bonkers," he complained, "as an organization we're being forced to go on one of those size zero diets."

Prendergast was at pains to stress that he was not talking about the latest wave of redundancies to hit his company. Like it not, he said, there were usually solid financial reasons behind decisions to trim the labour force, be it budget cuts, diminishing commercial revenues or, in his country, a failure to collect license fees.

No, that wasn't it.

Prendergast was losing sleep over moves to embrace user-generated content. "We are pouring more and more editorial resources into sifting through pictures of kittens playing with balls of wool."

He said that it was turning his company into the editorial equivalent of a skinny model with a disproportionately large head. "Even if we come to our senses, I'm scared that we will have irrevocably damaged our health."

Prendergast was unimpressed as I tried to argue the case for UGC that I have blogged about several times before, including here and here.

I believe that by empowering audiences to tell their own stories, a UGC strategy adds authenticity to news output. Text, photos and video sequences from your audience can enrich and complement the analysis, context and background provided by your journalists.

Think of all that amateur video that captured the devastation wreaked by the Asian tsunami, or the eyewitness accounts of the July 7 bomb attacks in London. Quite simply, these accounts are more powerful than the cutting and pasting, or ripping and reading of Reuters news ticker that sometimes passes for journalism.

It enables you to engage more directly with your listeners, viewers and readers to build a genuine, two-way conversation.

Prendergast remained unimpressed: "Yes, but at what cost?" he demanded.

Then I remembered the BBC Manchester blogging project, which I believe offers a sustainable model that other broadcasters should explore. It started from the premise that sifting through e-mails, reviewing thousands of pictures of kittens, building message boards and creating community platforms is an expensive business.

The cost is not just financial, as it also exposes broadcasters to legal and moral risks. (I remember when the chat room on a website I was responsible for was taken over by a neo-Nazi group.)

The Manchester blog project, which is run by Richard Fair and Robin Hamman, turns the conventional BBC way of doing things on its head.

Instead of using sub-editors to review and approve UGC, Richard and Robin simply keep an eye on where contributors are publishing their content online. And rather than building new applications, the project team is helping people to create content on existing platforms, such as Flickr, YouTube and blogger.com.

Participants are invited to attend a series of workshops, the first of which takes place on 22nd February. Speakers will discuss production values, as well as offering practical advice on how and where to create content.

The BBC Manchester blog keeps in touch by subscribing to the RSS feeds of each participant and by highlighting interesting content, in return for a promise to abide by the BBC's editorial guidelines.

I told Prendergast that while the aim of the project was to stay slender, he should think of it as more Jeff Jarvis than Posh Beckham.

Richard and Robin will be visiting the EBU on 29th and 30th March to discuss the Manchester project at the Multimedia Meets Radio event.