Radio Reviews for Ratings Period Two of 2007
August 8th, 2007 at 10:52am
The first week of the second Canberra radio ratings period for 2007 is well and truly under way, and it is therefore as a good a time as any for me to inform you about my plans for radio reviews.
Anyone who has been reading this blog since the last radio ratings period knows that my previous round of radio reviews was a disaster. Allocating time blocks of one hour to each station and then spending longer than that reviewing it was an interesting way of taking a snapshot of the station, but didn’t do an awfully good job of comparing stations…and I never found the time to review most of the stations. A number of those reviews have been postponed (again) until after the current ratings period to avoid confusion.
I have a new scheme which should work an awful lot better than the previous scheme. Canberra, conveniently, has a four-week ratings period, and it is generally accepted that there are four sections of the day during daylight hours, breakfast, morning, afternoon and drive. I will be reviewing each of those sections at a rate of one per week and the following times have been allocated to these sections:
Breakfast: 6am-9am
Morning: 9am-Midday
Afternoon: Midday-3pm
Drive: 3pm-6pm
Each section will be reviewed as it is going to air, and each of the nine stations involved in the ratings will be reviewed during this time. This will work based on a rotating roster, with each station being assigned a random number from 1 to 9, and given a set of four minute segments. So, to give you an example, in the afternoon shift the roster would look like this:
Midday: Station 1
12:04: Station 2
12:08: Station 3
12:12: Station 4
12:16: Station 5
12:20: Station 6
12:24: Station 7
12:28: Station 8
12:32: Station 9
12:36: Station 1
12:40: Station 2
12:44: Station 3
***etc etc etc***
This way each station will get five segments over the course of four hours, effectively giving each station a 20 minute review in direct comparison with every other station. I could have used five minute timeslots, however this would have led to some stations having more access to the :00 and :30 marks than other stations which would be quite unfair as these tend to be the times that the news is broadcast.
Over the course of four weeks, each station will get a different spot in the rotating roster, and each station will get an effective review period of 80 minutes. It will not be possible to guarantee a rating for individual components of the broadcast such as news, music, general talk etc as I can’t guarantee that the sampled segments will contain all of those things, so an overall rating will be used instead. Each segment will get a rating out of five, those ratings will contribute towards an overall rating for each day part, and an overall station rating.
Reviews will be released at 9am on the weekday following the review, and will be faxed to the program director of each radio station involved in the reviews.
I should emphasise that these reviews are my opinions of the stations. I don’t expect you to agree with them, in much the same way that you wouldn’t expect a film reviewer to hold the same views as film watchers, or even other film reviewers. These things are personal opinions.
Good luck to all stations involved. Whilst I hope that radio stations and listeners alike will find my reviews interesting and possibly even useful, I’m sure that it will be the official ratings, and not my reviews, which the stations and the majority of listeners will take notice of.
Samuel
Entry Filed under: TV/Radio/Media
