The Radio Authority had commissioned a report about the potential for a new community radio sector in the United Kingdom. The Authority had no real interest in launching community radio, but it had suddenly become convenient. The British commercial radio industry had lobbied to be relieved of its responsibility to provide local news bulletins on its radio stations. News was expensive, compared to DJ’s playing records. News was unionised and journalists were relatively well paid compared to non-unionised local presenters. After 30-odd years of having had to provide local news bulletins, commercial radio owners demanded to their regulator, The Radio Authority, that this requirement be stopped. But how to succeed in proving that doing less, cutting its services, making journalists redundant, could be argued as good for commercial radio’s listeners? It needed a good wheeze that was believable.
Although there had been demands for a community radio sector in Britain since the 1970’s that had consistently been rebuffed by the regulator and government, thirty years later it was suddenly the perfect time to accept and promote the idea. The plot went like this: new community radio stations would broadcast local news to their listeners, so what was the point of local commercial radio stations also providing a similar local news service? The commercial radio industry cooked up a scheme with the regulator under which community radio stations would be licensed nationwide for the first time. However, those stations would be shackled to a licence regime that denied them the technical resources to reach many people, the financial resources to be sustainable or the ability to generate revenues by selling on-air advertising. As a result, these stations would prove no threat to existing commercial radio owners, either by stealing their listeners or their revenues. Starved of sustainability, community radio stations would likely go bust very quickly. The stations themselves could be blamed for their failures, not The Radio Authority and certainly not commercial radio.
For the commercial radio industry, this was a win-win proposal. This new tier of community radio stations was to be licensed to fail but could relieve them of having to continue the expensive job of providing local news. Their stations could later lobby that they no longer needed to be local at all because they no longer broadcast local news. Their stations could be regional, or even national, cutting their operators’ expenses even further. The British government went along with this bizarre scam. I sat in the front row of a conference and witnessed a government minister argue from the podium that, by licensing a new tier of community radio stations to broadcast local news, commercial radio owners could no longer be required to provide regular local news bulletins. I wanted to jump up and shout “bullshit” but everyone in the audience nodded their heads sagely as if it all made perfect logical sense. Not for the first time, I felt like the upstart in a room of worthies who could not see the reality unfolding in front of them because their only evident skill was having ‘the right stuff’.
It was 2003. I desperately wanted a job working in radio but all my applications for vacancies had been rejected. So here I was unexpectedly working for The Radio Authority. By now, I had sat at my desk for several months without doing any work. That sentence is not an exaggeration. My managers had not given me a single task to do, so I had been able to sit there, getting on with my own projects on my desktop computer, but looking busy. I had no idea why I had been recruited for a job that seemed to involve doing nothing. Now they had commissioned a report on the potential for community radio from an academic. I had had no involvement in the commissioning. Nobody at The Radio Authority had ever asked me anything about community radio, despite the fact that I was the sole employee to have worked in a British community radio station. In 1983 I had been a founder member of the Community Radio Association. I was the only person at The Radio Authority who had attended the Association’s last annual conference. I had circulated to colleagues a short note on what had happened at the conference. Nobody responded.
Somebody in the office shared with me a Word copy of the professor’s completed report to read and told me it was about to be sent to the designers commissioned to put fancy graphics and a cover around it. I read it and realised immediately that the document was not ready to print. Nobody at The Radio Authority had even thought about editing the report, correcting the layout, correcting typos or doing all the little stuff that a sub-editor has to do prior to publication. I had not been given this Word document because it was my responsibility at work or because of my experience as a writer and editor since the 1970’s. A conversation ensued that seemed rather baffling to my colleague. I suggested the document could not be published as it was because it had not been ‘subbed’. Bafflement. I tried a different approach. If the document was published as is, it would prove an ‘embarrassment’ to The Radio Authority. I had already learnt that my workplace only acted decisively when it needed to avoid ‘embarrassment’. It worked. I offered to sub-edit the document prior to publication because I had the skills that apparently nobody else in my office possessed.
During the next few weeks, I communicated regularly with the report’s author whilst editing his document. I was pleased to have something to do that could use my skills and was connected with radio. I knew about community radio, I knew about editing. I had honed these skills over several decades. In the back of my mind, I must also have been thinking that I might be given some actual work to do by my managers at The Radio Authority in editing and/or community radio if I demonstrated my skills with this document. I wanted to be able to use my skills in my job. Until now, I had had no opportunity to show what I could do. After completing the editing of the document, I shared it with the author who was fulsome in his praise for my contribution and commented that I had been the best editor he had ever worked with. I handed back the edited version to my colleague. It was passed to the designers and printed.
I was not even sure that my line mangers knew or cared that I had edited this report. Internally I did not receive any credit or thanks for my work. On the contrary, I was the only employee denied an end-of-year bonus that year. My hope that it might lead to my involvement in the licensing of new community radio stations was quashed when it was announced that the person responsible would be Soo Williams who worked in the same office as me. I had never heard her express any interest in community radio. She was initially charged with organising a large meeting with community groups interested in applying for licences. She seemed fearful and asked me how to organise such a meeting and to suggest a suitable venue. I helped selflessly, once again with the hope it would lead to involvement. She accepted my suggestion of hiring a room at the London School of Economics. The meeting went ahead. I was not invited. I had no further involvement in The Radio Authority’s work on community radio.
In 2019, Soo Williams was awarded an MBE for her services to community radio.
[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/01/what-are-words-worth-2003-professor.html]
Grant Goddard : radio broadcasting expert : media analyst : writer/author 