And cue:
“From Global’s Newsroom, this is Christopher England with LBC News / Capital News / Heart News …”
What?
The normal, non-anorak listening public probably won’t even hear that words are being said. Most radio stations are designed to be left burbling away in the background. Whilst some of the songs cause a few seconds of humming along, all the talking bits, the adverts, the trailers, the jingles, all of the ‘non-songs’ are usually ignored and unheard. On Digital Radios all the ‘non-songs’ tend to be a lot louder than the ‘songs’. Despite this, most people manage to mentally ‘tune-out’ during the ‘non-songs’ block.
This is a bit like how most visitors to a website self-teach how to completely ignore the adverts. I mean, right, you came to christopherengland.com and didn’t notice a single ad, didya?
So, included in the annoying 8 minute breaks between songs, the ‘non-songs’ block, is the news. It’s usually on the hour.
For all the radio station networks owned and operated by Global Radio, ‘the UK’s premier radio company’ (Borg), the news starts (and sometimes ends) with the poor newsreader saying, “From Global’s Newsroom”.
Apart from the fact that it might sound a lot nicer, authoritative and more fluid to say “From the Global Newsroom” or “From the Newsroom at Global”, it has stuck at “From Global’s Newsroom”, and appears to be a way of pushing the brand of the single company that owns and operates most of the commercial radio brands across the UK.
However, the ordinary listener who might accidentally catch the phrase from the burble of the ‘non-songs’ block will have no idea that the radio station, sorry, brand, they are listening to is owned and operated and originating from Leicester Square in London.
And, for some reason, whilst the fact that everything comes from London is conveniently forgotten, or, some might argue, ‘hidden’, on air, the fact that the newscasts come from a supposed centralised ‘Global Newsroom’ is important information to share with the listeners.
Why?
Is this the beginning of pushing the ‘Global’ brand in the way that ‘BBC’ is prefixed to most of its radio station names? Or is it a way of indicating there’s an integrity to the content of the newscasts? Or something far more sinister / innocent?
I think we should be told!
England's England 