dosxuk wrote:I'm not referring to a particular audience, I'm referring to *any* audience. The amount of programming put together on the day, by the presenter and his mate, with a rough idea of what's happening that day and the feedback from the 10 people who listened last week is ridiculous. There's no research, there's no planning, there's no idea of who they're actually making the programme for. All they are doing is making a radio programme, because they like making radio, and they're volunteers anyway, so it doesn't matter if things go wrong, don't work out or sound terrible, because they're not getting paid for it and the listeners should take that into account.
I think at best you're being somewhat inaccurate, and at worst, unkind to a lot of these people. I won't deny that it happens to some degree but based on what I know of community radio around Cornwall, the majority of programmes do have a lot of preparation and pre-production done. Now, there are times when you throw some of that away because of something that's happened, and you have to wing parts of your show, but that's part and parcel of doing live radio.
When you talk about not providing a scores service for local teams, because the BBC do that, you completely summarise my issue with community radio. You absolutely should be providing local sports updates. By playing the "well they do that, so we shouldn't" card you alienate your listeners, and you make worse programmes. How many more people would listen if not only could they hear from a local voice, but also get updates on how the local teams are performing? Far more than you'd put off by including a little bit of sports news I'd imagine.
I'm sorry but at this point, you're talking rubbish. If that was an issue at all, commercial radio would not have predominantly stopped covering local sport. It's more than that though. For us as a community station, we do need to promote that these events are happening and encourage peeople to attend them, but covering them on the community station would possibly do more damage than good. We need to be seen to be supporting the community, promoting community events and encourgaing community interaction, and quite honestly, if we can get more people to go to the game, rather than hear updates of it on our station, it will be far better for the community at large. Let's not forget that each of these clubs are minnows in the sports world and they need to get as much money as they can from gate receipts and concessions, so better for us to promote the matches in advance and encourage people to go, rather than cover the events.
Sports shows are a good thing to do, but usually in advance of the action, rather than covering it directly. Besides which, in an area like Falmouth/Penryn, you have a number of different clubs to cover. Falmouth Town FC are in the South West Peninsula League Premier Division, whilst Penryn Athletic are in Division 1 West, plus of course you've got neighbouring Truro City, who are in National League South. Plus you've got local rugby teams in Falmouth & Stithians, so every week, as well as a presenter, we'd need at least 5 volunteer reporters or stringers to cover each team, no matter where they go, and whilst for most teams that's only as far as Tiverton Town, which is far enough, the stringer covering Truro City would need to be able travel right across the Southern half of England to cover the team. That's a helluva lot to ask a volunteer to do.
Far more important than just being a local voice, is making programming that appeals to the local listeners. And I'm yet to hear a community station that achieves that consistently enough to make it worthwhile tuning in on a whim.
What do you mean by consistently enough? Should every hour sound the same musically, be computer programmed and tightly formatted like commercial radio is? I don't think that helps us. I know some stations do, but I don't think it makes communtiy radio that distinctive, if we do that. Better for us to have greater variety of musical styles in different programmes, rather than try to blend it all together into a weird musical sludge.