Different types of radio stations

Different types of radio stations

·         Public

Public ownership of a radio station is like the BBC. This is where it is a license paid service with your TV license. Every month every TV license pays out £2.08 per house towards radio. Every year £670million is spent on radio from the money that they get from the TV license alone. This means 17 % of the TV licence fee is spent on radio.
Around 35 million people listen to radio in the UK alone. There are 59 stations worldwide that are owned by the BBC with different pop up stations such as BBC radio 2 Eurovision and BBC Olympics.
BBC Radio includes

·         On Radio 1, 1Xtra, Radio 2, 6 Music and Asian Network is mainly music and presenters talking with around 10 minutes of news around about every hour.

·         On Radio 4 it is speech, drama and the arts.

·         There is classical music and jazz on radio 3.

·         News and sport on 5 live and 5 live sports extra.

·         There are over 40 local stations that try to mix in some of everything.

·         There are 6 dedicated radio services for all over the UK (Radio Scotland, Radio nan Gàidheal, Radio Ulster, Radio Foyle, Radio Wales, Radio Cymru)

·         Comedy, drama and children's programming on Radio 4 Extra

·         Private

Most of the private stations that are in your local or regional area are most probably owned by one of the three companies if not all. These are Global, Bauer and UTV. The company Global owns 106.4 capital FM as it does with many other of the Capital stations there are in the UK. Bauer owns TFM Radio, Metro radio and many more in different parts of the UK. Finally UTV owns heart which used to be the radio station real radio. These companies don’t just own Radio stations they own magazines and TV stations. Such as Karrang, 4 Music and EME.

·         Community

Community Radio stations are run just in local areas e.g. Middlesbrough with CVFM, which stands for ‘community voice FM’. These types of stations are non-profit companies but they do have advertisements. 50% of the company is funding and the other 50% advertisements but all the money that is made goes back into the radio station. Everyone who works at the radio station are all volunteers even the presenters. They normally only cover up to a 5km radios such as small towns such as Thornaby and Middlesbrough. They don’t specifically cover a certain type of music. They cover a mix of cultures and interest, but some do cover particular areas of interest. In 2004 Ofcom awarded the first community radio licence. Since then many new stations have launched in areas all over the UK.

Speech Programming:

There are two main types of speech package news and factual.

News Packages are most of the time are informal depending on what radio station you listen to. E.g. Radio 1 News beat it informal, it is supposed to feel like he it just talking to you as a friend as he is telling you hard hitting news but also very soft news stories such as gossip about celebrities. They also have current affairs which are stories happening at the moment, in the world or even with celebrities. There are some longer news programmes that are more formal e.g. BBC World News. These will have more formal language and a lot of facts. The purpose of these is in-depth reporting by informing you about the major things that are going on in the world right now.

Examples: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldserviceradio

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006wkry/episodes/player

Factual Programming

This is mostly discussions between different subject such as magazines, music, documentary and investigative. The purpose of these packages is to inform you on different subjects and also sometimes to inform. I have created a small factual speech package on online dating which different voxpops of people opinion on it, some info about the subject with facts and finally a piece of audio that is from the TV show catfish where people try find is who they have been talking to online is real. One of the most popular radio stations to have facual speech packages is radio 4. This is for people that like to listen more than hear music and also for the older generation of people.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/programmes/genres/factual/player/episodes

Producing a speech package

First of all one of the first things you need to do is find of the demographics of your target audience so you can have a clearer image of what you’re going to say and to who. You need to find out the age range you are going to be talking to, what genders will listen to it. E.g. If it is a football or sport show there might be more boys listening to it than girls. Also social class because depending on the social class of the person depends on how they have been brought up so they might take things in a different way to other people. Ethnicity, with taking this in mind you need to be careful of what your say as you do not want to offend any people. Interests and psychographics need to be took into consideration because depending on peoples interests depends on if they will listen to you show or not as it might not be something that they are interested in.

 

You need to decide if you are going to do it live or pre-record it. When creating a factual package it is best to pre-record it so that you know your structure and how it is going to sound at the end, also you need to get all the facts first to add them in to and also you need vox pops and you can edit them to the specific bits that you want. Whereas when it is live, anyone you talk to may swear or offended people which you want to ovoid at all costs.

You need to think about your contributors. All the people you either interview or get vox pops from are reporters. Experts are also contributors as they will be giving you information on the subjects. Finally the reporters, correspondents and also the presenter are also contributors. Anyone that has done anything such as contributed to the show is a contributor.

The final thing you need to produce a speech package is all the sound you are going to use in the package such as sound effects, music beds, TV clips and other radio clips. If you’re trying to make your speech package funny you might want to through a few funny sound clips in to your radio package. Also to make it sound more professional you might want to add a music bed over the sound of your presenter.

Ethics and religion

 There a certain guide lines that producers ar set to work at to ensure that no harm on offence is inflicted.

e.g.

·         Stereotyping – Reporters do not single people out they need to make sure they appeal to  wide range of people so that more and more people will listen to the show.

·         Privacy / Confidentiality (Crime Reporting) – When reporting a crime on the radio, if the family has asked for things to not be said those things will not be said because it is against the law and they could get sued for a lot of money or even worse closed down.

·         Fair representation – Whenever someone is talking on the phone they cannot agree with one person and not the other or even in a debate they have to have a fair representation for both sides of the argument.

These rules and regulation that different radio stations need to follow by are OFCOM- Broadcasting Code and the BBC Trust- Editorial Guidelines.

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/broadcasting/broadcast-codes/broadcast-code/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/editorial_standards/