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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Things To Catch On iPlayer Before They Drop Off
A couple of entertaining programmes to catch up on before the dreaded seven day iPlayer window closes! Paul Jackson* was for a long time an ITV entertainment executive in a variety of roles across a number of companies. And he’s also a dab hand at making radio programmes. A few years ago he made an…
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WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy
Here’s a timely book. I received my copy of this book on Friday – 4th February. The introduction, penned by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, is dated 1st February! I know publishing speeds have moved on quite a lot, but it’s still pretty remarkable. The Guardian was serialising parts of this book last week. Whoever is…
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RAJAR – Q4 2010
It’s that time of year again. The latest RAJAR’s are out. It’s fair to say that there are few interesting things that come out of it. Overall radio listening remains firm, although there’s a 0.9% decline in listening hours, although listening is actually up 5.9% year on year, so this isn’t a significant change. The…
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BBC Radio Musical Chairs
A bit of switching and changing today at BBC Radio, with Jo Whiley moving over from Radio 1 to Radio 2, while Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie move on to 6 Music. They’re the big stories, but as the graphic above demonstrates (Disclaimer: as I read it from the press releases), there’s an overall shuffling…
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National Portrait Gallery Workshop
Back in November I visited the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. The museum had also put on a number of talks and events surrounding the prize, and on Saturday I was part of a small workshop group there to learn a little more about what makes a good photographic portrait.…
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John Barry
It’ll be for others to write proper obituaries, but I wanted to acknowledge the wonderful John Barry, who’s death was announced this morning at 77. From James Bond to The Persuaders, Born Free to Dances With Wolves, and The Ipcress File to the Midnight Cowboy, Barry’s music was exceptional, and reached hundreds of millions. He’ll…
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True Grit
In 1985, I won two tickets in a local newspaper comeptition to see the new Clint Eastwood western, Pale Rider, at the ABC Enfield (now Tesco). It was the first time I’d been in a cinema to see a western. That was partly because westerns didn’t appeal to a 15 year old boy, and partly…
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The BBC and Marketing Speak
Yesterday a BBC blog entry from Daniel Danker, the Programme and On Demand General Manager at the BBC, caused something of a stir. It referred to a new “product” and there was much gnashing of teeth and concern as a result. I’ve got to say that I think that this probably isn’t the clearest communication…
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Sexism and Sky Sports
Tonight Richard Keys has resigned from Sky Sports following a last ditch attempt to apologise in the form of an interview on Talksport this afternoon (Kudos to Talksport for getting that interview). He joins Andy Gray who’s already gone. There are lots of interesting question raised in this affair. How sexist is the regime at…
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10 O’Clock Live
So what to make of Channel 4’s new “it’s not The Daily Show that we just cancelled” comedy current affairs series? Well it’s not all bad, and it’s not all good. There seemed to be quite a few first night nerves and a generally quite disjointed feel to the programme, but that’s something that will…
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Groupon’s Having a Laugh!
A report in the New York Times recently revealed that Groupon, the social buying site, is looking at generating $15bn in a prospective IPO. We’re surely back in internet bubble days with valuations like that! If Facebook’s valuation of $50bn is questionable, then it’s surely not even remotely credible that a business built around coupons…
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Local TV
Today, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt gave his backing to a new network of local TV stations built around the hub of a national spine. In other words, it’ll be a national service with local opt-outs at various times of the day. Hunt has been talking about this for ages, often with hackneyed references to Birmingham…
Hadrian’s Wall
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