Since late Thursday night, I’ve been distressed. The news, first leaked in the Times on Friday, that Mark Thompson is planning wide-ranging cuts at the BBC as part of a “strategic review”, is deeply distressing. According to the leak in the Times (now more or less confirmed), this will include cutting the BBC website by [...]
BBC blogger nodalpoints has posted up 4 questions he’d like people to answer. The questions concern how people consume BBC content. Seeing as I watch BBC TV, listen to BBC radio stations, and read the various BBC websites, I thought I should respond. The questions seem a little unrelated to each other to me, but [...]
Press release: Channel 4 bid details for new national DAB radio multiplex [PDF] I’m not hugely qualified to comment, but Matt and James have, so I thought I might as well add my own tuppence. Firstly, I’m encouraged by the commitment to speech content with Channel 4 Radio, which would broadcast ‘lively and provocative comment, [...]
Last Friday saw the closure of one of the smallest galleries within the Science Museum: ‘On Air’. Sponsored by Capital FM, this featured a tiny radio studio and had a set of computers with some interactive software. Mostly, if you walked past it, you’d just see a bored-looking explainer (the museum’s term for the staff [...]
Phew, I made it through the Student Radio Spring Conference 2006, where I spent Monday to Wednesday this week running around welcoming speakers, chatting to delegates, and introducing the sessions. I’ll probably write more about the sessions and the organising and thinking behind the conference over the next few days, but first I just wanted [...]
I’m going to be in Paris for the next few days, taking a quick relaxing break. Then next week it’s the student radio conference at Southampton, which I’ve been helping to organise. The schedule has now (mostly) been announced, and I’m really looking forward to it. Hopefully the lineup of speakers and sessions will be [...]
I love listening to BBC 6Music – it’s by far the best music-playing national digital radio station (and that includes crappy XFM and Virgin) – but I’m constantly astonished at how similar to student radio the output often sounds. That’s to say that it features a lot of the good points of student radio – [...]
When a Spanish bar decided to get around the paying of music licensing fees by playing only Creative Commons licensed music, the Spanish collecting society Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE) tried to sue. Last month, the court ruled in favour of the bar, recognising for the first time that it’s possible to use [...]
I had some holiday to use up, so I took Wednesday off this week to go and visit the theme park Thorpe Park. I’ve been there quite a few times before, but they’ve just recently opened a new rollercoaster for this year: Stealth. It’s a ‘launched’ rollercoaster, which sends you from 0 – 128kph in [...]
Yesterday evening I set up a student radio weblog for the Student Radio Association. This is something we’ve been planning to do for a while – as I reckon that it might turn out to be a good way to share experience and knowledge amongst student radio stations, as I describe in the blog is [...]