How the medium is changing the message

April 2016 5 5

arely noticed, outside a few articles

recalling its early days as pirate sta-

tion Phantom, alternative music

radio station TXFM announced at the

end of March that it will shut down

before year's end.

Unfortunately, despite a recent rebranding,

TXFM was never able to attract more than 19,000

listeners according to JNLR surveys, a number

which made it unsustainable as it could not

attract advertising revenues. Even Denis O'Brien

and Paul McGuinness cannot afford to subsidise

a loss-making music station forever.

The problem TXFM faced was a simple one.

When its potential audience can programme

Spotify or similar apps on their smartphones to

cater to even the most eclectic of musical

tastes, why would they listen to a radio station

where the music is constantly interrupted by a

stream of adverts, DJ patters, weather and sta-

tion idents, and news bulletins? No matter how

mission-focused a station is, those interrup-

tions, to raise revenue and satisfy Broadcasting

Authority requirements, are a necessity of

business.

TXFM is a straw in the wind for other radio

stations. "Smart" as in "Smartphone" is almost

a redundant term for millennials. A Google

survey last year showed 97% own a Smart

phone. As podcasting becomes more

accomplished, growing out of the same garage

roots romanticised in Phantom FM obituaries

into swanky professional studio surroundings,

it too will challenge over-the-air broadcasters.

From the Irish Times to the New York Times

publishers are adding audio offerings to their

websites. And while most products remain stu-

dio-bound and indistinguishable from the radio

broadcasts they compete with, the best are

moving out of studios and exploring new for-

mats a public-service bureaucracy like RTÉ

cannot easily adjust to.

Sponsorship opportunities; sponsored-

content podcasts - embracing advertorials and

commercial features; and new software allow-

ing easier advertising inserts and listener

measurement, all make it likely that the current

generation of talking-heads podcasts will ﬁnd

itself quickly moving into the territory of drama,

location reporting, and edited news and docu-

mentary packages. The medium even lends

itself to a renaissance in ﬁction drama, and

comedy, and access to niche audiences rarely

catered to at present outside the community-

radio sector.

But the disruptive impact of "phones" goes

beyond radio and podcast.

Newspapers, having ﬁrst adjusted to the

death of in-depth and at-length reporting as

their readers moved from print to computer

screens, have spent the last decade learning to

cater for attention-scarce readers. So it is we

see brief news reports rarely going above 300-

400 words - roughly the number of words that

can ﬁt on a computer screen without scrolling),

and increasing use of listicles, quizzes and

click-baiting headlines.

And yet, just as news outlets have adjusted

to the new paradigm, a new report from the

American Press Institute (API) shows that

phones are changing how readers consume

news once again.

Readers checking the latest headlines on

their favourite news websites on a computer

screen are typically doing so at work. Behav-

iourally, they feel they are "stealing" some time

from their employers to catch the latest update,

whether that's an Indo or Irish Times column,

an RTE news report or a Broadsheet joke.

According to the study, readers minimise their

guilt over this "stolen time" by only catching up

on news in quick bursts.

When it comes to phones though, that behav-

iour changes. The phone belongs to the reader,

not to an employer and so when readers choose

an article there they are much more willing to

invest time in a longer story. Stories longer than

1,200 words, got 23 percent more engagement,

45 percent more social referrals and 11 percent

more pageviews than shorter stories in the API

study.

Similar research ﬁndings may be behind the

decision by the Sunday Times/Times of London

to abandon "Breaking News" on its website,

instead recreating an old-style emphasis on

"editions", with new stories updated three

times a day, at 9AM, midday, and 5PM. It cannot

be a coincidence that those times match the

beginning of the workday, lunch-break, and the

end of the workday: the times when people are

most likely to check their phones.

Of course, not everyone will get off the news

carousel. The Times, already one of the more

successful paywall sites, can afford not to

chase every click, while advertising-only free

sites will still tumble over each other to be the

ﬁrst with breaking-news ﬂashes and hot takes.

But, combined with an audience already willing

to invest more time in individual stories, it may

herald a widespread return to considered and

in-depth reporting.

How the medium is

changing the message

Podcasts, smartphones, Spotify and the implications

of advancing technology, new commercial

opportunities and modern work habits

by Gerard Cunningham

12 Characteristics of Future Media

1. Connected 2. Data Driven 3. Pervasive

4. Borderless 5. Viral 6. Personalised

7. Participatory 8. Immersive 9. Interactive

10. Mash-able 11. Multiplatform 12. Creative