I was speed reading somewhere else and noticed that somebody had put into the public domain that Radio Jackie was suffering from major operating losses, and is currently owing nearly three quarters of a million Earth Pounds, propped up solely by its main owner funnelling his money across to pay for things.
How long can this last, and what next for Radio Jackie? Will it mean having to sell out to other groups or investors? Will it mean having to start networking other programmes in, or automating large dayparts?
Radio Jackie has a special place in a radio enthusiast’s heart as it was one of the more famous land based pirates, surviving up to the early 1990s when the authorities closed it down. Eventually the organisers of the original pirate bought out a failing radio station operating in the pirate station’s North Surrey / South-West London service area, and renamed it Radio Jackie. For radio enthusiasts at least, it was as if the station had never been away.
I realise that for a long time, well, forever, the station has been propped-up by artificially low operating costs because of the radio-anorak factor – people going the extra mile for less dosh because of what the station once was – but what will happen when the money runs out and the anorak factor is not enough? Will it mean that eventually Jackie gets assimilated by the Borg (the huge radio groups that have spent the last decades hoovering up stations, sacking everyone and making them relay one set of programmes for somewhere else) and becomes ‘Heart’ or similar? (Shudder).
Also, why is it running at such a massive loss? Is it just the recession hitting potential advertisers and so them not providing the level of income previously expected? Or is it the lack of audiences or RAJAR ratings figures attracting the advertising (The last available in 2003 gave the station a 0.5% market share with only 2% of the TSA tuning in – I happily stand corrected if there are more up to date figures)? Or the operating costs being unrealistically high?
Would Radio Jackie benefit from a re-think about presentation style and format and an attempt to build a bigger more modern audience?
So many questions. But, what can be done to stop this ‘heritage’ station inevitably disappearing into the oblivion of Borg assimilation?
What BBC Radio 1 or Radio 2 are doing isn’t ‘risky’ as such. It’s fairly bog-standard stuff and not too far from what the commercial radio sector used to do back in the days when it had the sort of audiences that only the BBC gets these days. Commercial radio has backed itself into a corner because of the accountants. They want virtually no expenditure in return for their income. They even calculate that it’s ok to reduce the listeners they would have got with personality based programming (like they used to provide) down to a ‘core’ number that will listen to an mp3 player and boring announcements, or at least have it on even if they are not really listening. They calculate that it gives them more profit to have less listeners whilst spending nothing on programming.
What’s happened that the commercial sector wasn’t expecting is that listeners are wise to the blocks of adverts and so will press the button and leap to another station when they are signposted. Also, ordinary people now can do their own versions of what commercial radio is doing, and do it better, because everybody now has their own mp3 player, and that has no commercials and it has a skip button if they don’t fancy the current track. Worst of all, advertisers are wise to what listeners do and so know their ads are being mainly played out to nobody and so want to spend elsewhere.
So, to attract people away from their mp3 players, radio has to do something that the mp3 player can’t. That’s what Radios 1 and 2 are about. That’s why Absolute is making radical changes to its music only evening dayparts and putting in personality presenters with ‘stuff’ going on rather than just a drone of oldies being meaninglessly segued. I suspect any commercial radio that wants to survive will have to follow suit.
I listened yesterday to Radio Jackie between 5pm and 6pm. It was mainly non-stop music presented by a female voice who didn’t say much more than “This is Jackie”. In addition to her there was on a couple of occasions a bloke talking. His voice was mainly drowned out by the music which he didn’t bother to dip whilst he was talking. Maybe that’s so nobody would notice he was talking. I didn’t catch his name, probably because he didn’t say it, but he appeared to be there to read a sponsored competition, first barkering for callers and then talking to a caller who then won a meal at the sponsor’s expense. His other function was to introduce the news and travel people. Why? Surely they could have introduced themselves? He also told us what the news reader would be telling us in 5 minutes time. So why bother with the news reader? He also probably bothered to mentioned the title and/or artist of 2 or 3 of the songs that were being played that hour. One can only assume everybody at the station hates the songs so much they just don’t want to mention them (A contrast indeed to Radio 1, for example, where the presenters are passionate about the music being played and will happily tell the audience what’s being played). Again, the times when voices spoke were at regular intervals, in ‘blocks’, over the introduction to a song or with loud backing music by way of signposting a commercial break. There was no real interaction with the music, as I say, no passion. A bit odd when you consider that music makes up the majority of the output. There also seemed to be nobody there for me talking to me, encouraging me to listen. If anything I felt I was intruding on somebody suffering from bored indifference to me, their listener.
If my reaction is typical, could this be why nobody is listening to this kind of commercial radio format any more and why Radio Jackie will have to radically change to stand any chance of survival?
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