The Australian is reporting on a rather peculiar statement from Macquarie Radio (Sydney’s 2GB and 2CH) chief executive Angela Clark.
Ms. Clark claims that Deborah Cameron’s success this year on ABC 702 Sydney’s morning show is “a survey glitch”. She is referring to the latest survey in particular where Ms. Cameron had the attention of 10.1% of the Sydney audience, putting her in second place behind 2GB’s Ray Hadley who was in the ear of 13.7% of Sydney listeners.
Ms. Cameron is relatively new to the airwaves, having taken over the morning show at the beginning of this year as a replacement for Virginia Trioli, leaving her newspaper journalism role to do so. It has been widely noted that Ms. Cameron doesn’t come across as a “polished” radio presenter, and perhaps that is part of her charm and part of the reason for her success. In many ways I think talk radio presenters sound more credible when they sound like they are ad-libbing rather than reading a piece of paper.
Anyway, back to my point. Angela Clark claims that the latest survey is a glitch, but I would like to know what she makes of the trend.
The clear trend here is upwards, and if there was a “glitch” in the data used in survey four, then I would have expected survey five to deliver a lower percentage, not a higher one. To explain, the metro markets such as Sydney generally use two reporting periods per survey. Survey one only has one reporting period, but that is shared with survey two which uses reporting periods one and two, survey three uses reporting periods two and three, survey four uses reporting period three and four, and so on. If reporting period four was abnormally high, then it should have been balanced out by reporting period five, but it wasn’t, so the trend is an upward one.
This all makes me wonder what Ms. Clark expects me to make of 2CH’s unexpected success this year, especially considering that Macquarie have publicly expressed their pleasure with 2CH’s results:
Survey 1: 5.6% (9th)
Survey 2: 5.4% (9th)
Survey 3: 6.7% (7th)
Survey 4: 7.3% (6th)
Survey 5: 7.1% (6th)
The trend here is an upward one, and for a station which works with a minimal budget and virtually no promotion, it’s an impressive jump, especially considering that they are now ahead of six of the eight other music stations.
That said though, if 2CH’s trend isn’t as strong as Deborah Cameron’s trend, and Ms. Cameron’s trend can be written off as a glitch by Ms. Clark, surely Macquarie should be wary about praising 2CH’s wonderful upward glitch. Or does the goose live under separate conditions to the gander?
I managed to stump Jim Ball with this around 5am and I was going to post it here at that time, but decided to get some sleep instead. Probably not a bad idea after being awake for 33 hours.
So, today is the 13th of August, and it is a most wonderous day in the history of radio. Without cheating and going to wikipedia for the answer, would anybody like to guess?
If you need a clue, it happened in 1954.
There’s no prize on offer…to see the answer, simply highlight from here
Answer: On August 13 1954, for the first time ever, the Pakistani national anthem was broadcast by Radio Pakistan, Pakistan’s official broadcaster. The next day, they celebrated their seventh birthday.
If this year was 2004 and we were celebrating the 50th anniversary of that amazingly wonderful day, I might consider playing the Pakistani national anthem myself. Can somebody remind me to do that in 2054?
to here.
You didn’t know the answer? Well, you should have been listening to Jim Ball’s show this morning. Tsk tsk.
From tonight’s AFL coverage on Channel Seven. Bruce McAvaney was talking about Collingwood.
Bruce McAvaney: A month ago we were wondering if they would get in to the top four, now we’re wondering if they can cling on to a spot in the top eight.
Umpire (on field): Nooooo
One wonders if they commentators are hooked in to the same mix as the audience and are therefore able to hear the umpires. I only wonder because the commentators didn’t seem to notice the umpire’s comment, and I would have almost expected Dennis Cometti to inform Bruce that “you have your answer”.
Livenews.com.au brings us some good news written by Alan Jones’ fill-in presenter Jason Morrison:
The prostate cancer operation for broadcaster Alan Jones has been a success, according to his family.
A statement released by his niece Tonia Taylor says;
“Alan’s operation has been successful. His surgeon, Professor Phillip Stricker, is happy with the way it went.
“Alan is comfortable and resting.”
Mr Jones remains in Sydney’s St Vincents hospital.
He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in May and decided to go public with his medical condition to encourage men to take the threat seriously and have regular checks.
He will be away from his 2GB radio show for several weeks to recover from the surgery.
Mr. Jones went under the knife on Saturday according to 2GB rugby league commentator Andrew Moore and I’m pleased to hear that the operation went well. I would imagine that he will be housebound for a few weeks while he recovers, so I wonder if his doctors and the management of 2GB will entertain the idea of having him broadcast from home towards the end of his recovery period if he requests it.
Yesterday my copy of The City Chronicle arrived in my letterbox. I’ve been concerned about the seemingly dropping journalistic standards of this weekly paper since its parent company Rural Press merged with Fairfax a bit over a year ago. Unfortunately this week’s front page confirmed my fears.
Click image to enlarge
For those of you who aren’t aware, The Chronicle is a free weekly (except for a couple weeks over Christmas) newspaper produced by the people who produce The Canberra Times. It comes in a tabloid format and is delivered to approximately 128,000 households and workplaces across Canberra and Queanbeyan, and read by approximately 178,000 people. Editions of the paper are produced for each region across Canberra and Quenabeyan, with content differing slightly between these editions.
So, back to this week’s front page of The City Chronicle, and the lead story is about older buses in ACTION’s fleet struggling in wet weather.
Click image to enlarge
The story comes complete with a digitally altered image of an older bus sitting under an umbrella which seems to be floating in mid-air. The sky has also been altered to be a more menacing colour.
But what about the article itself…surely many many buses must have been off the road for this to warrant the front page of a weekly publication, especially when the story doesn’t relate to a particular region and could theoretically be used on every edition (I’m still checking up on that).
Out of action
Older buses struggle with recent rain
By Rebecca Thistleton
CANBERRA’S recent damp weather was too much to handle for some of Action’s older buses.
Last Monday, 13 buses were unable to operate because of wet weather.
A Territory and Municipal Services spokeswoman said this was 3.9 per cent of Action’s fleet of 339 buses, and was caused by “heavy rain and inclement weather.”
Gosh, so many buses off the road because of the rain…and such an unlucky number too. I wonder what could possibly have caused the buses to have so much trouble in this batch of rain when they didn’t have this much trouble with the last batch of rain?
“Action believes there is an increase due to issues such as the irregular use of windscreen wipers,” the spokeswoman said.
So, thirteen buses mysteriously had their windscreen wipers stop working on one day? Surely Ms. Thistleton thought there was something fishy about that figure and asked some questions about the number of buses which were “unable to operate” on previous rainy days…or was she just being taken for a ride by the good folks at ACTION Public Relations?
On a normal day, the average number of buses unable to operate properly was 2.7 per cent - that’s about nine buses out of action every day.
Nine buses out of action every day…wasn’t there a figure about the number of buses out of action last Monday earlier in this article?
Last Monday, 13 buses were unable to operate because of wet weather.
Um, doesn’t thirteen minus nine equal four? Does that mean that, in reality, The City Chronicle is running a front page story complete with digitally altered photograph, about four older buses having a windscreen wiper problem? Perhaps…let’s read on and find out.
One of the buses to break down on Monday was a newer, compressed natural gas model, the rest were older diesel models.
So, that’s actually only three more older buses off the road than usual. It’s hardly, as the sub-headline suggests, older buses struggling with recent rain. And it’s not as if there weren’t more important stories in the last week. Pages 14 and 15 contain a double page spread about Jon Stanhope’s ideas for a light rail network…surely a story like that deserves more prominence than a story which can only fill a column if the journalist quotes and paraphrases a TAMS spokeswoman droning on for three paragraphs about standard procedures for when a bus breaks down.
If The Chronicle keeps this up, I’m going to start to think they’ve hired all of the (freely distributed daily News Limited publication in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane) MX journalists. The writing and sensationalism is almost as good.
Now, just in case you’re interested in this awful beat-up of a front page lead story, here it is in all its glory…and if you’ll excuse me, I have an email to write to the good folks at Media Watch.
WIN News anchor Jessica Good happily showed off the perils of putting commas in the wrong place on the autocue during this evening’s pre-recorded weather update.
“Hello again isolated showers, [forecast continues]”
Whilst it was much more amusing than the correct “Hello again, isolated showers [forecast continues]“, unfortunately it sent me in to hysterical laughter and as such I haven’t the faintest clue what the weather forecast is. I don’t even know if “isolated showers” applies to us or some other region.
That said, if you know somebody named Isolated Showers, you might want to ask them to watch WIN Television for the rest of the night. Jessica Good seems to have a message for them.
I’m almost certainly going to be howled down for this post…I can see the usual suspects dismissing me as a fanboy already, but hear me out because there is actually some substance to this.
This year, from the perspective of somebody like me who happens to like the two commercial AM radio stations in this town and takes note of what frequency various radios are tuned to, has been fairly disappointing. Apart from my own, I’ve struggled to find a radio which isn’t tuned to an FM commercial station. I’m not sure where all of the 666 ABC Canberra listeners are though, because I’ve barely spotted any of them.
The last month of so has seen a rather interesting turnaround though. Mix 106.3 lost Mark Parton, one of their rather popular breakfast hosts (the rumours have been flying about that ever since then). It’s fair to say that Mark had a unique style…he was never my cup of tea but a lot of people liked him, and his replacement, FM 104.7 presenter Cam Sullings, is a very different presenter. The two stations, despite a few similarities, really attract two rather different and mostly incompatible demographics…replacing Parton with Sullings has had a predictably mixed reaction from the audience, sending some in search of something else. Some of those listeners will be back simply because they like the rest of the station’s format, but others who desperately dislike Sullings won’t be back…and if they dislike Sullings then they’re not likely to enjoy FM 104.7, which doesn’t leave them with a lot of other possibilities. In music radio it leaves them with 2CA and a couple community stations who want to emulate a lot of Mix’s format.
In the short term Mix aren’t likely to gain as many listeners as they lose due to the breakfast change, mainly due to the fact that people who are listening to other breakfast shows don’t have any incentive to change. In the long term the changes at Mix may work well for them, but in the short term, with a survey period only a couple weeks away, the timing isn’t great.
In my opinion, if any station is likely to gain from Mix’s change of breakfast lineup, it’s 2CA as they have the closest music format to Mix 106.3 of any Canberra station, although where listeners end up will depend on their individual music tastes and not which station has the closest match.
Moving on to a few practical examples. In recent weeks I have spent more time in other peoples’ vehicles (be they private or public) than I have done in a very long time. With the exception of one bus driver who was listening to ABC NewsRadio, another who was listening to FM 104.7 and one who didn’t like the radio at all, all of the bus drivers (the number in this category would be close to twelve) have been listening to 2CA and 2CC. I’ve noted that the Steve Price Morning Show on 2CC is particularly popular among Canberra’s bus drivers, and it seems to be difficult to catch a bus between 9am and midday and not hear Price’s voice emanating from a speaker.
I also never thought I’d see the day (I was going to use the phrase “live to see the day”, but given recent posts on this blog, it may convey the wrong message) when people on The RiotACT would write about how much they enjoy listening to 2CC’s breakfast host Mike Jeffreys, and how 2CA’s playlist is enjoyable. (See the comments on http://the-riotact.com/?p=7932, http://the-riotact.com/?p=7831 and http://the-riotact.com/?p=7849). I was also surprised to see a YouTube video of a 2CC program end up on The RiotACT. For such a long time RiotACT has had a habit of attracting an awful lot of 666 ABC Canberra listeners…perhaps that’s the real reason for former (and now once again) RiotACT editor Johnboy returning to Canberra and the site, he wants to steer them all back to the ABC.
Another example of good signs for the commercial AM stations in Dickson Seafoods, (not surprisingly, a seafood shop in Dickson). For as long as I’ve been frequenting there (late 2004) they have been a Mix 106.3 shop. Their radio has been virtually araldited to Mix 106.3. Imagine my surprise yesterday when I walked in and heard a voiceover from Ron E. Sparks informing me that I was listening to 1053 2CA. I didn’t probe the staff on why they changed station, but it did occur to me that, considering the number of students from Daramalan College and Dickson College who frequent the store, this change of station is a mini-coup for 2CA.
A few paragraphs ago I mentioned that the next radio ratings survey period is about to start. It runs from August 3 to August 30, which means that each calendar week of the survey period contains the Beijing Olympic Games. There are only two stations in Canberra with the broadcast rights to the Games, 2CC and 666 ABC Canberra. The news services of both stations (which also serve 2CA and the ABC network respectively) have access to the Olympic broadcast material, but the FM commercial stations are lumped with the usual onerous broadcast restrictions for non-rights-holders. Whilst they are allowed to report scores and results, they have to deal with some pretty hefty restrictions on what else they can broadcast.
2CC and the ABC on the other hand have full access to commentary and pretty much whatever else they want from the games, which will make their news services much more appealing, not to mention the fact that the stations will be the place people will turn to for coverage of the games in many vehicles and offices around the city. This survey will be skewed in the favour of 2CC (and 2CA to a lesser extent due to their access to news and being the only music station near an Olympic broadcaster on the dial) and the ABC, and because of the way radio ratings work in Canberra, that skewing in favour of 2CC, 2CA and the ABC will be “official” until at least February next year, probably later. When you consider that the ABC don’t accept advertising, the only people to truly benefit from the skewing of this survey are 2CC and 2CA, and that of course will be at the expense of Mix 106.3 and FM 104.7 who make up the rest of Canberra’s commercial radio market.
If 2CC and 2CA can not only retain listeners after the Beijing Olympics but also use the extra advertising revenue effectively, then the games could be precisely the lift they need to be a very strong and effective competition against Mix 106.3 and FM 104.7
The next few months in Canberra’s radio landscape could be very interesting indeed.
I was watching the replay of the Western Bulldogs’ victory over the Melbourne Demons on Prime Television in the early hours of this morning, and was quite amused by Dennis Cometti’s description of one of the Melbourne players:
He’s built like a fire hydrant, which is good unless you’re playing the ‘dogs
Next week the Bulldogs are up against competition leaders Geelong and I’m going to be out of town at the time. 2EC are the 3AW Football relay station near Wollongong, covering much of the South Coast on four frequencies. It looks like I’ll either be delaying my return to Canberra or enjoying a lengthy detour so that I can hear the full match, as called by Rex Hunt and Dennis Cometti.
(Oh, and congratulations Dennis, your amusing quote is the reason for the two-thousand-three-hundredth post on Samuel’s Blog)
2CC’s new website was launched earlier this week, almost in conjunction with the updates station imaging that I was expecting but couldn’t say anything about. Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to write anything about either of these things this week, but I will do shortly.
Anyway, today for a bit of fun, Mike Welsh is running a competition, asking people to submit a fabricated history of him. The reason for this is that a listener suggested that the presenter profiles should have a bit more biographical information, and Mike decided that it would be more fun to have his listeners invent a biography.
I submitted an entry earlier this hour, purely for fun:
The history of Mike Welsh
Mike Welsh was born somewhere in remote Tasmanian bushland during the mid-20th century, in what is rumoured to have been the result of immaculate conception. To this day, scientists have been unable to pinpoint the exact location of the birth, but have narrowed the area to a set of crop circles which spell “2cc”.
Mike’s school life was made difficult by his natural tendency to talk a lot. One day in 1967, Mike’s teacher Mrs. Arquette Polonium told him to go outside until he stopped talking, however Mike did not stop talking and started terrorising the entire state with his incessant chatter. The Tasmanian government, in a desperate effort to rid their state of this menace, set fire to the state, a move which forced Mike to swim to mainland Australia.
Mike has been taking over radio stations across the country since then, with 2CC the latest station to be called “the home of Mike Welsh”.
When Mike isn’t busy giving the transmitter grief, he can be found writing songs about talking, and producing documentaries about the people who talk to him.
If you think you can out-talk 2CC’s smallest big-mouth Mike Welsh, you are invited to call him on the open line…but be warned, if you get him talking, there is no way to make him stop!
Incidentally, I noticed that one of 2CC’s new promos mentions that it is the “home of the Mike Jeffreys breakfast program” and the rest of the day’s lineup through to Stuart Bocking. I’ve always wondered about this phrase of a station being the home of someone…it makes it sound like they live in the studio. I like the phrase, probably because it always brings a smile to my face. I suppose that’s one way to make sure that the message sticks in my head!
I could turn in to A Current Affair here and claim to have “exclusive, behind the scenes, never before seen by the public, pictures” but to be fair, anybody who has landed on this website in the last few hours by searching Google for:
mike welsh “ben fordham”
(and a handful of people have done just that) could have seen it, as the fourth result on Google at the time of writing this is for a page of the new, yet to be released, website.
It’s almost an annual tradition for 2CC to launch a new website, and so often they seem to release a seemingly circa 1995 static HTML website, thankfully this time around it looks like they’re actually using a content management system, and have a dynamic database-driven website which they might actually manage to maintain for more than a couple weeks. I’ve got to say, the new website looks pretty impressive.
At long last they have a “Now, next, later, then” system and some useful information about the station on the homepage. It’s certainly a vast improvement over the current website:
Having had a look around the website, it’s clear that there are a few bits of content that need to be modified before the website can go live, such as open line numbers, email addresses, the fact that you need to prefix text messages with “2cc” etc, but overall the website is quite impressive and seems to suit the image the station is trying to portray.
It’s also good to see that, unlike the current website, 2CC have taken new photos of their staff and are no longer relying on the existing photos which are at least four or five years old.
Each presenter now has a readable page, unlike the previous “one solid block of text each” site, and although it’s not visible within the screenshots, each page has a comprehensive summary of regular guests and segments:
Even the newsroom get their own page (although I do recall an old version of their website containing a picture of James Goodwin when he was their afternoon newsreader).
It looks like 2CC have also managed to source the staff photos from 2UE which were used as the basis for the photos on the 2UE website (although the versions on the 2UE website mostly contain a modified background)
Unfortunately there is no sign of online streaming, so it looks like that’s probably not happening. I have reason to believe that the website will be launched in conjunction with a very noticeable and (I would consider it) major change to the station…unfortunately I’m not allowed to tell you about that just yet (you hear things inside buildings that sometimes you just have to keep secret) but suffice to say, I’m making some recordings for before and after comparison.
When will the new website be launched? Well that’s anyone’s guess. I’m not going to post a link to it in its pre-launch state. If you’re really desperate to have a look, then you already have enough information to find it yourself.
The amusing thing is, whoever is developing the site could very easily have locked access down to a few select IP addresses or password protected it. Even a simple robots.txt file would have stopped Google from indexing it…clearly they weren’t too concerned about “sneak peeks”, which for me at least is probably a good thing, because I’ve been trying to work out what they’re doing with their website for a while now…they haven’t been attempting to update the old one for ages, and the new one explains why. Mystery solved, and my head can go back to working on the 15 million other mysteries I seem to ponder at any given time.
I must have been really out of it for the last few days to miss this rather sad news.
Actor Don S. Davis, arguable best known for his portrayal of Major General George Hammond on Stargate SG-1 (and the odd appearance on spin-off show Stargate Atlantis) passed away on the 29th of June after suffering a heart attack. He was aged 65.
Davis will still appear in the upcoming direct-to-DVD film “Stargate: Continuum”.
I would like to take this opportunity to post two videos, the first is a brief profile and interview of Don produced for the first season of Stargate SG-1.
The second is a tribute to Don, put together by a YouTube user going by the name of edison700
This afternoon a bit before 5pm, A Current Affair’s Ben Fordham rang 2CC’s Mike Welsh to take exception at something Mike Said yesterday. Ben made the call after reading a Media Monitors notice which said that Mike referred to Ben as a bully.
2CC have placed the somewhat peculiar exchange on YouTube:
As I said to Mike when I spoke to him a bit later in the day, I don’t know what Ben thought he was exposing because it was blatently obvious that Mike had not seen the video when he spoke about it yesterday, as the video had not gone to air, and Mike had been referring to Ben’s boasting on the Steve Price morning show.
I also have to wonder if the whole thing was a strange attempt by Ben to plug Channel Nine as much as possible.
2GB breakfast host Alan Jones has just announced at a press conference that he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and will be off the air for the next few weeks for a few weeks when he has surgery, which is expected in a couple weeks.
More details shortly.
Update 12:33pm: I had to step away from the computer for most of the press conference, but I managed to record it anyway.
It lasted two weeks longer than I expected, but that’s made up for by it being axed effective immediately.
Channel Nine’s awful attempt to revamp Wheel Of Fortune by sticking the words “Million Dollar” in front of its name, having the tackiest set and version of the wheel that the show has seen in decades, and finding the worst possible host for the show, has finally met its fate.
I caught glimpses of the first show, forced myself to sit through the entire second show and attempted to watch it again in the second week to see if it had improved at all, and the result was my personal bewilderment that:
1. Somebody at Channel Nine actually thought that it was a good idea
2. Fremantle Media, who own the rights to Wheel Of Fortune in this country, allowed the format to be degraded and tarnished in such an awful manner.
Even though Channel Nine wanted a show to compete with Deal Or No Deal and give their news a better ratings lead-in, they shouldn’t have so blatantly targeted the show at a young adult audience. Wheel Of Fortune has never been a show aimed at a young adult audience, the key demographic is older, and if done properly it will attract others as well. Part of the key to this is the host, Rob Elliott was very good at it, so was John Burgess, the same thing applies to Andrew O’Keefe on Deal Or No Deal…they know how to host a game show and to interact with the guests in (at least what appears to be) a natural manner.
It also helps if you actually have a set which doesn’t look like you brought in the team from (the now defunct game show) Changing Rooms to decorate it, and having a wheel which lights up was just plain odd. Speaking of the wheel, why Nine had to revert to having the wedges cling to the pegs is beyond me as it made it noticeably difficult for the contestants to remove special wedges, and made the whole thing look rather cheap and nasty. I don’t know for sure, but it looked like Seven’s wheel had magnetic wedges as they weren’t connected to the pegs and were much easier to remove.
Also, and I doubt this affected the ratings at all, why was the wheel flat? Seven worked out many years ago that the wheel is easier to work with from a camera perspective if it’s tilted…it looks better on the set too as you can look across at the contestants and read the wheel at the same time.
Personally, I think Nine would have been better off with a more experienced host, a different timeslot (probably 7pm, much like Sale Of The Century/Temptation), and a less deranged production team. Originally the show was (apparently) promised to John Burgess (click here to hear Burgo’s version of events, as told on 3MP Breakfast, March 25 2008), he probably would have made a good host reprising his former role, or perhaps Bert Newton who is still on Nine’s books.
Sadly, Nine botched the show badly, and now after a less dramatic failure with Larry Emdur and Laura Csortan on Seven in 2006, Tim Campbell and Kelly Landry will be known as the hosts who finally managed to consign Wheel Of Fortune to Australia’s “Do not touch with a ten foot barge poll, lest you face the wrath of the ratings” television show bin. Wheel may return somewhere, at some stage, but after this disaster, you can be guaranteed that no television executive will be brave enough to go near it for many years to come.
2GB’s continuous call team are, for one technical reason or another, not currently being distributed via satellite. I wonder how many network stations are doing the same thing as 2CC and rebroadcasting 2GB’s webstream as a stopgap measure until the satellite feed returns.
One thing I really like about 2GB’s webstream is that it is almost broadcast quality, unlike many other radio station webstreams which sound like somebody decided to run some string between some tins. I’m sure the network stations appreciate the sound quality as well. Although if the person panelling at 2CC could just increase the volume on the webstream channel that would be great, because you are a very long way below normal levels at the moment.
This reminds me of a satellite failure a few years back in which 2CC rebroadcasted 2UE’s webstream overnight. Unfortunately, despite the better sound quality of the webstream being used this time, the sound quality of 2CC’s broadcast is roughly the same due to the levels being very low and the sound being partially obscured by static. Hopefully the satellite will be back shortly.
The other unfortunate thing about this outage is that the webstream is a bit behind the live broadcast, so it’s rather difficult to have the radio on and watch the match on television as the two don’t come close to syncing up. I might have to do what I do when I listen to 3AW’s AFL coverage online, and use a PVR to delay the television footage by the appropriate number of seconds.
Update 7:50pm: Somebody at 2CC reading this per chance? Thanks to the panel op for fixing the audio problems, that’s much better! End Update
Further update 7:55pm: I just went to synchronise the television with the radio coverage and found that they are already in sync. Obviously the satellite feed has returned. End Update
