Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
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How To Incentivise Your Audience to Skip Podcast Ads
If you publish a podcast, your podcast may well take advertising. And if it does take advertising, you probably want people to actually listen to the ads. Your audience listening to podcast ads increases the likelihood of products being sold, and therefore the advertiser coming back to buy more advertising. If your podcast doesn’t increase…
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What Will The Beeb Suggest Shutting Down or Cancelling Next?
Hmm. Cancel BBC2 daytime programming and rebroadcast the BBC News channel during those hours. Essentially close down BBC Local Radio in England with just local breakfast and drivetime shows. Stop broadcasting Wimbledon and F1. What do they all have in common? They’re surely not ideas that are being “flown” to see what the reaction is?…
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Why Merging BBC Radio Five Live and BBC Local Radio Would Be A Bad Idea
If a tweet from BBC Radio Nottingham editor Mike Bettison is to be taken at face value, the BBC is considering some kind of merger between BBC Local Radio and BBC Radio Five Live. This idea mirrors something that James Cridland pondered in a blog posting on his site last year. Except he talked about…
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Radio Silence
Warning – football rant coming… How petulant exactly is Sir Alex Ferguson? He’s like a spoilt child in his refusal to talk to anybody in the media before or after his matches, ever since he got in trouble following comments he made to both Sky and his in-house channel MUTV. It’s the utter lack of…
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Guardian Eyewitness
At Christmas, one of the nicest presents I got was a copy of a new Guardian book – Eyewitness Decade. The book featured photographs taken from The Guardian’s daily doublepage photospread – Eyewitness. Except that the Eyewitness feature only began in 2005 when The Guardian changed from a broadsheet size to a Berliner format. This…
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Absolute Radio – Apps Stats
Absolute Radio – my employer – has started publishing app stats. You can read the first set of numbers here. A couple of weeks ago Matt Deegan challenged the radio industry to do more than just publish the number of installs which, up until now, has been the headline figure most stations (including Absolute Radio)…
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BBC Digital Radio Plans
A quick note to point people in the direction of a digital radio announcement coming from the BBC today. Radio 4 Extra – the soon-to-be-renamed BBC Radio 7 – will have classic episodes of Desert Island Discs, with an extensive online archive of 500 or so shows plus the music choices of every guest in…
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Mrs Brown’s Boys – How Does A Programme Like This Get Commissioned?
Comedy can be a very personal thing. You find Big Momma’s House funny. I disassociate myself from you completely. But there are degrees. I find Catherine Tate personable, but her show was full of overlong sketches that were the same joke week in week out. Little Brtiain became very lazy, again suffering from the same…
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If In Doubt Call It “Real”
A couple of years ago, I wrote about the lazy trope that had invaded television titling meaning that seemingly every factual programme was titled “The Real…”. Since I wrote that piece, we’ve also had: Battle of Britain: The Real Story Britain’s Real Monarch Real Wolf Kids Real Crime Real Housewives of New Jersey Real Rescues…
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The Business of Football
I’m still coming down from an excpetional Wednesday night that saw Arsenal overcome a 1-0 defecit to win beat Barcelona, easily the best team in the world, 2-1. As I sit there dreaming about how Arsenal might maintain that lead in the much tougher return fixture in the Nou Camp a fortnight from now, I’ve…
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Searching Myself
That sounds quite philosophical doesn’t it? Well it isn’t. Earlier today, I just wanted to check whether I’d previously commented on something in Twitter. All I needed to do was doublecheck my Twitter feed and I’d be away. Except that it would have been about a year ago. And Twitter’s river of tweets doesn’t really…
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Prime Suspect – US Style
If you live in Scotland, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen the US version of Cracker – aka Fitz (probably when the rest of the country was watching something STV thought Scottish audiences wouldn’t like – Downton Abbey for example). While the original featured Robbie Coltrane as the overweight chainsmoking Fitz, in the US…
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I’ll Have A “P” Please Bob
You might be seeing the image above – or an inverted version – quite a bit on TV in the coming months. Ofcom has announced that it’s to be shown when a programme has accepted product placement. You’ll get at least three seconds of it at the start and end of the programme, as well…
Hadrian’s Wall
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