Gary Andrews

Friday 27th August: The day the station formerly known as Lantern FM was finally killed off. Outside of North Devon it’s doubtful any tears were shed, but it’s just one of a number of Global FM stations that are disappearing off the map.

It’s a subject I’ve returned to often and one I have an avowed interest in. Lantern were one of the first stations to give me freelance shifts. I can’t say my reporting was that great (North Devon’s never been an area I’ve ever been overly familiar with) but the station got by.

One thing always struck me though: just how much pride North Devon took in their station. Mention you worked for Lantern and you were treated like royalty.

Lantern may have been a very small station in comparison to its sister stations and the news was often less than scintillating, but it knew its target audience and its target audience appreciated with plenty of love and respect.

In many ways North Devon was one of the more unusual patches a station could have to deal with. It’s not uncommon for local stations to be based around one major town or city and cover the surrounding rural area, but Lantern was almost completely rural, with several towns but none of them quite big enough to get top billing.

To the Lantern FM audience, Exeter was a world away and Plymouth may as well have been a different planet. Hyperlocal mattered more to North Devonians than the rest of the county, even if the word hyperlocal hadn’t really been coined back then.

Lantern, so we were frequently told, was a profitable station (I guess local advertising was a pretty good way to reach a high dispersed audience). It was well loved. The RAJARs were decent. But it wasn’t exactly a sexy or enticing station.

So, as part of Global Radio’s plans to make local radio more profitable, Lantern was rebranded Heart FM and had more networked programming inserted into it. A small part of Lantern’s soul died, but listeners could still wake up to breakfast DJs Hopps and Chapple and find out where the roadworks were and if any schools were closed, and any of the other day-to-day essentials.

Then, as part of Global’s plans to make local radio more profitable, it was announced that the station formerly known as Lantern would be closing, along with other stations in Plymouth and the South Hams, and one Devon wide superstation would be created, based in Exeter.

Hopps will be departing, as will Chapple. Plenty of other talented local DJs across the Devon Heart network who live in and love their communities are also departing. There’s more networked programming. Listeners in Ilfracombe will probably, rightly, wonder what the hell this new station has to do with their area and when, or if, their northerly coastal town will ever get a mention on air.

Although it’s dangerous to interpret Facebook groups as a general popular groundswell, there’s currently 3,410 members of three separate groups to save Lantern FM. Not bad for a part of the country where internet usage is lower than the average.

There’s a demand for local radio in a place like, for sure. How to get it to pay for itself is another question completely. Former Lantern DJ Ian Starling has set up his own limited reach community station. It will be interesting to see if this continues to grow as disenfranchised listeners turn elsewhere for their local fix.

It’s a situation that’s being repeated across the country as local radio fans protest about Global’s decision to axe several stations. It’s unlikely these protests will have much effect.

As somebody who’s worked for plenty of local radio stations it’s heartbreaking to see what’s being done to once-loved local institutions.

I won’t disagree that local radio occasionally needs a shake up, nor that they may not always be profitable. But the continuing cuts are straight out of the manual of how to lose and alienate local audiences.

In an age of increased listening choice, local, more than ever, is a USP. More networked shows covering a wider area with little relevance to specific communities isn’t the most inspiring recipe for success.

It’s easy to sneer at the music, but this has never been the important bit of local radio. As long as there are familiar and catchy songs then people will listen. What really hooks them in is a good DJ talking about how much fun they had in Bideford a couple of days ago. Or a great ice cream they scoffed at Westward Ho!

A local councillor once told me that the local commercial radio stations were they first places she called when she wanted to highlight a campaign – because we’d talk to the audience in language they understood and could make it feel important to them, locally, she’d always see a huge rise in phone calls the next day from members of the public.

That was several years ago. I doubt if she gets the same response now.

Hopefully something will spring up to replace Lantern FM. And other local radio stations. And other local newspapers, that are also suffering, through a mixture of shifting readership and management incompetency.

Local media is much-maligned. It’s also the lifeblood of a large section of the community. And well loved too. I’m sad to see Lantern’s demise but not, I suspect, half as sad as a good number of people in North Devon.

written by Gary \\ tags: Devon, Heart Devon, Heart FM, Lantern FM, local DJs, local radio, North Devon

September 4th. Mark that date in your calendar. There’s no Premier League or Championship football that day due to the international break, while England play the night before.

A football free weekend, right? Wrong. There’s still hundreds of non-league matches being played up and down the country that day, and James Doe has come up with a fantastic idea to support them.

James has declared September 4th Non-League Day and is urging football fans who’d normally watch a higher league game that day to head to a non-league match and show their support for grassroots football.

It’s a fantastic campaign and one that’s so simple you wonder why it’s never been done before.

As somebody who got rather fond of non-league during Exeter’s time in the Conference and still watches the occasional non-league game, I think it’s a cracking idea.

It’s also a great way to reacquaint yourself with the real heart and soul of football, especially if you’re in any way disillusioned with Premier League football. Who knows, you may even get the non-league bug.

Ironically, I can’t make it to any game that weekend due to a longstanding prior commitment, but if you’re in footballing limbo that day, pop down and support your local club.

You can follow James on Twitter (@non_league_day) or sign up to the campaign on Facebook. And if you fancy going to a game but aren’t sure where to head to, feel free to leave a comment here, along with your location (roughly), and I’d be happy to suggest a game for you.

written by Gary \\ tags: football, non-league day, non-league football, Premier League, September 4th

Journalist Chris Wheal has written an incredibly moving piece about having to unexpectedly shift to the other side of the fence when his young nephew recently died in very upsetting circumstances. The media picked up on the death and Chris found himself on the receiving end of journalism, some good and some bad.

First off, my condolences to Chris and his family. It’s a horrific set of events and one I wouldn’t wish on anybody.

The journalism side of this got me thinking, and reminded me of a story I had to cover when I was working in local news. It wasn’t a death knock, but it was very close, and, again, a lot of the national media hardly covered themselves in glory. Not, I suspect, that this was of much concern to them. Get their story, go, and never have to visit this backwater ever again.

The story itself was equally tragic. In a nutshell a couple in a very small rural town had split up. The wife had turned up to tell the husband she was going to take the kids and leave. That night, the husband killed the two children before setting fire to the house and killing himself.

Of course we didn’t know that at the time – it was one of those rolling news situations where you’re piecing the facts together at the same time as the police, so there was a lot of rumour and conjecture and not a great deal of facts. All I knew was I got a very early morning call (and you know it’s never good news when you get woken up early by the newsdesk) to tell me to get over to the town as it looked as if two children had died.

I was one of the earlier journalists to arrive on the scene. The local ITV reporter was already there and between him and the police, I soon had a pretty good idea of what was going on.

What was also clear was the locals really didn’t want the media anywhere near the town – and there were only a handful of them at this stage. The ITV reporter had warned me that he’d already got a fair bit of abuse from what he thought were friends of the family, and that going softly around the area wasn’t a bad idea (there was only one main road through the place. As I saw, it was a very small town).

It might be a cliche, but rural communities really do feel these kind of events more than urban areas. There’s a much tighter sense of community. In the city, chances are far fewer people would know the deceased and they’d be more willing to speak to the media.

Not in this place.

The handful of us present did the best we could, chatting to locals as sensitively as possible and chatting to the police officers on the ground (generally, as long as you don’t antagonise them too much, the police are fairly amenable in these sorts of situation. They recognise neither of us particularly relish these sorts of jobs).

We’d been doing ok, bar a rather tense moment in the local pub, and I had nearly enough audio to last for the rest of the day, when the circus rolled into town.

First up was a localish reporter who’d drawn the short straw (his patch was the other end of the county and we were at the edge of the paper’s distribution boundary) and wasted no time in antagonising the locals, despite warnings from those of us already present that the mood was a more than a little delicate, and the street next to the scene was particularly unfriendly.

Said journalist then proceeded to go down said street, half pushing his way into a couple homes, repeat knocking on several people who clearly didn’t want to speak to the press, and eventually having to run out of the street after a volley of abuse from somebody he’d pushed too far. When he got his breath back, his response was: “Fuck them. I’m never going to have to come here again.”

Following this journalist came the national media. It was, in the rest of Britain, what could be termed as a slow news day. And then the fun really started.

There was at least one very angry confrontation with a rather large man who’d already got angry with a few of us earlier in the day and whose temper wasn’t being helped by the very pushy journalists.

The local journalists would routinely get elbowed out the way. I’d been lucky enough to get chatting to one resident who knew a lot of the background to the sad story. They weren’t overly keen on speaking on mic, but agreed to do something after filling me in on the details.

Sadly the quiet corner I’d found wasn’t that quiet and midway through our untaped conversation one of the national TV journalists, seeing I’d got a rare talkative local, ran over with their cameraman, tape rolling and literally pushed me out of the way to get their own question in. The interviewee clammed up at that point and things got tense. We got no more out of them.

Eventually the scrum became too much and, after the police press conference, I decided I’d had (and got) enough and there was nothing at the scene that I couldn’t get from phone calls.

Thankfully I left before they started removing the bodies from the house.

While the national media was doing an impressive job of alienating an entire town (by this stage no-one was speaking) I stopped off at the local primary school – I knew someone who knew someone who knew the headmaster, and as we had quite a good reputation locally, he agreed to a brief interview.

Everybody else got a statement the next day. Later, I heard that most of the media decided to hang around the school gates and corner mums collecting their children from school. Mums who were already edgy and unhappy. Apparently there were tears and some very frank exchanging of views.

One small aspect always sticks in my mind. I’d got back to the newsroom and was busy editing my package for the evening bulletin, with Sky News on in the background. Suddenly they flashed up BREAKING NEWS. A family member had been arrested in connection with the incident.

I knew that, and had done for several hours, but hadn’t reported it. Chances were Sky did too. The police had told me, off the record, earlier in the day. The family relative had arrived on the scene in the early hours of the morning in somewhat of a state and it had got to the stage where the police had locked them in the cells for their own good, and to let them cool down and let off steam for a bit. The police had assured me that the family member was nothing to do with the situation and would be released without charge soon.

Sky, I assume, had been sitting on this information for a good three or four hours before flashing it up as an exclusive. My newsroom got a very urgent message from up high – why hadn’t we got this angle? I patiently explained and refused to run it. I’d no wish to make the poor sod’s day any worse. Sure enough, an hour after ‘breaking’ the story, Sky hastily reported, briefly, that he’d been released without charge.

(Oddly enough, the family member rang me a few days later – they’d wanted to find out which places had reported their arrest so they could complain. I had a good chat with them and ended with a promise that I could call them for updates at any time).

In all, it wasn’t a fun experience. I’m sure the family got death knocked by other media outlets, but I’m thankful I didn’t have to do it. And while I generally have a lot of respect for the majority of fellow journalists, I was less than impressed by the way they managed to alienate an entire town in less than 24 hours.

A few weeks later, I had a conversation with a journalist from a local paper about this, and death knocks in general. He said it was something that any good reporter should be able to handle and was just part of the job – we couldn’t stop and let somebody else get the interview because the family may be upset.

I disagreed, and I don’t think my desire to avoid a death knock made me any less of a journalist. The journo I was having a conversation with such he much preferred big crime or tragic stories as they were usually straightforward, but hated council stuff.

Me, I’d become very adept at going through council notes, agendas, minutes and reports with a pen and highlighter and picking out areas of interest that were probably never meant to become interesting. I don’t think it made either of us bad journalists, just better at some areas than others.

I’m aware that I’ve rambled somewhat. Chris’ post sparked off the memory of this story (and mine is most definitely in no way comparable).

I’ve often thought what it would be like to have to be on the receiving end of doorstepping or death knocking. I don’t think I’d handle it very well, which is why I’ve never been overly keen to have to do it. It’s (one of the many reasons) why I can’t imagine anything more unsettling than being of interest because I’ve been on TV, which is why I’ve never had any interest to go the other side of a TV camera.

My current job and areas of journalism interest mean there is pretty much no chance I’ll ever have to death knock; no chance that I will have to sit opposite a mother who has just lost their child in horrific circumstances and ask them how they feel about this, so I can broadcast their words to all and sundry.

And for that I’m eternally grateful.

written by Gary

If anonymous commenting on the internet had a users guide, then one of the more sensible pieces of advice would be “Don’t do it from your work PC.”

It’s advice a commenter on the previous post would have been good to consider. I don’t make a habit of running Whois searches on the IP address of every commenter but, given that this place doesn’t get that many trolls or sockpuppets, and given the subject matter, I was a bit curious. Turns out the IP address was from one of the (many) PR agencies who’ve pitched me this World Cup.

Fail.

My first instinct was to blog about it. Look at me! I’ve found another PR person not getting online! I can call them out and it’ll add to the legions of PR fails!

Yes, that would have been fun. But what would it really achieve, in all honesty?

I’m not in the habit of naming and shaming – it’s always struck me as a little counter productive. And, frankly, it the grand scheme of things immature PR leaves childish anonymous comment on insignificant blog isn’t really up there with war crimes.

After sleeping on it, I felt less comfortable with the idea of outing the agency. After all, one employee isn’t representative of the whole company.

The thought also occurred that if this had been a piece of journalism for publication I would have at least made an effort to get the accused’s side of the story before going anywhere near the publish button. And if, as I’ve often said, bloggers aspire to be journalists, then they should hold themselves to the standards journalists have as well. Even if journalists regularly fall short of these themselves.

So I emailed the director of the agency, who emailed back promptly, with an invitation to talk over the issues on the phone, which I did.

And I now consider the matter to be at an end, and I’m really satisfied with the response (and no, I didn’t demand any action against the perpetrator. It’s not my place to tell a company how to conduct their own HR).

Why? Because ten minutes on the phone was productive. The director came across as very switched on and took the issues seriously. I came away with a very favourable impression.

What’s more, we both agreed to keep each other’s contact details. They’d contact me if they thought it would be useful, but would also take me off the general mailing list, and I know that there’s somebody at the agency I can contact if I’m writing stories on certain topics, which I may well do in the future.

A win-win situation, really.

So, what’s the lesson (other than don’t try and post childish comments on a blog during work time).

While there’s a lot wrong with PR, there’s also a lot of good, sensible people working hard in the industry, doing their best to make connections with bloggers. And to a certain extent they have to tread on eggshells while doing this.

A wrong move with the wrong blogger, no matter how well meaning or unintentional and you can find yourself passed around Twitter, mocked by all and sundry. There’s no guarantee that if you catch the blogger on a bad day with a bad move, they won’t take umbridge and blog about it.

Not that there’s anything wrong with calling out bad practice, when appropriate.

But it did make me stop and think. How many bloggers have burned bridges or got themselves a reputation for being difficult for happily blogging PR fails.

Yet could they have improved things and actually developed a good long-term relationship with a good contact if they’d taken a step back and tried to resolve things behind the scenes first. It’s not as if anybody was going to beat them to publishing it, in a lot of cases.

One line from an old news editor of mine always sticks in my mind – “[Competitor x] may be first. But we’re always going to be right.” In other words, I’d always prefer to take a while longer to establish and verify the facts rather than rush to publish. Today was no different. I’m glad I did.

I consider today’s conversation confidential, although I think it’s worth quoting one line from my conversation. As an agency, I was told, we’re committed to treating bloggers the same as journalists.

I like that, I think it’s a good attitude. It’s something I’ve said roughly the same in the past, although you obviously have to make allowances for the different medium you’re working with.

And although bloggers are very good at calling out bad journalism, both blogs and journalists can be even quicker to call out bad PR – whether it’s justified or not – or calling out anything they consider wrong in general.

I’ve seen plenty of examples over the last couple of years where bloggers and PR have got into very public spats over something that has always struck me could have been dealt with without having to go public.

There’s a lot to be said for making an effort to build contacts and relationships rather than losing it quickly (although equally you can say that PR in general could avoid a lot of these issues if people from the industry didn’t continue to make elementary errors).

I’ve always maintained that others should be treated with the same respect you’d hope to be treated. I’d like to hope that, God forbid, should I make a similar fail one day, that the blogger has the good grace to contact me and give me a chance to talk over the issue before hitting publish.

I’d be interested in hearing your views on this one. Do you think bloggers hit publish too quickly? Should they blog first and ask questions later? Or is it only fair? What would you have done?

I don’t think there are any right answers, personally, but I’m very glad I took the time to contact them. Given the chance I’d much rather try and work on developing a relationship rather than kill it before it had the chance to succeed or fail.

written by Gary \\ tags: blogging, journalism ethics, pitching bloggers, PR

Ding! Another day, another poorly worded and conceived pitch arrives in my personal inbox, and my heart sinks a little further towards despair. If it weren’t for the Germans, and Portugal’s goal fest against the North Koreans, I’d have received more useless pitches than goals this World Cup.

Quite simply, judging by the majority of pitches than have landed in my inbox, general PR from companies looking to take advantage of the World Cup has ranged from poor to truly shocking. Most have made no attempt to remotely engage.

At least one email has been so laughably bad, I’ve sent it on to friends and colleagues so they can marvel that, yes, some agencies are still much worse than had previously been imagined.

I’m not in the habit of naming and shaming, but at least one agency has come close to me breaking this general self-imposed rule. Not that they’d know – judging from their emails I’d be shocked if they’ve even ever bothered to read anything I write.

Here’s a few selected highlights:

• An email starting with the words: “Hi, we’ve created some virals for your blog.” No, no you haven’t.
• An fairly obvious copy and paste email email urging me to cheer on England three days after they were knocked out.
• A general assumption that I was a fanatical England fan. I support Wales. This is fairly obvious.
• An email asking me to send a copy of my publication to agency x if I ran a piece on the product they were hawking.
• The PR who sent a pitch during the opening game. We had better things to do at that stage.
• Several emails that had nothing to do with the World Cup, other than a hastily added sentence to include a reference. You’re fooling no-one here.
• All bar two emails started with ‘Hi’. Not ‘Hi Gary,’ or any attempt to make it personal. Just ‘Hi’.
• One insinuating I would be so desperate for content during a two day break of football that their pitch was the only way I could keep my readers hooked.
• Hardly any emails made any reference to the fact I write for half a dozen places at the best of times. It was always ‘for your blog’. Do they mean this place and its five readers?

There have been two exceptions to this general trend – two well-crafted, engaging pitches where the PR had clearly read the type of things I write about, read my profile and made a general effort.

They were the only two I replied to – and if they’re reading, you know who you are, and I’m sorry I’ve not been able to write about the information in your pitch. It was simply a case of lack of time. But I really did appreciate your emails and the personal touches. If I was using good examples of how to pitch to bloggers, these would be among them.

Speaking to other bloggers, the trend seemed to be depressingly similar. They too had received endless pitches from PRs labouring under the illusion that we were so excited about the World Cup, we’d write about any old tat that mentioned it.

They were half right. We’ve all been very excited about the World Cup.

I’d even go as far as to say that once the World Cup kicked off, unless the pitch was something very pertinent to the general narrative of the tournament, then football bloggers should have been the last people to pitch to.

The reason: we’ve all got more than enough to write about. With three games a day for the first two weeks, and then a couple more a day for a week after that, it’s really not as if any football blog is struggling for content during the World Cup. And as most bloggers generally have day jobs, unless it’s a pretty spectacular, the pitch is likely to be deleted, assuming it even gets read.

The really smart PRs – and there have been a few – would have got their campaigns and pitches in at least a couple of weeks in advance of the tournament. That stage is a bit of a deadzone, with a lack of any content or decent talking points.

And – on a small tangent – twofootedtackle’s Chris expressed amazement that I’d received so many general PR pitches. I’m such an infrequent writer, and aren’t fixed to any specific publication that I’m not an overly easy writer to target. Quite often the editors of the places I write for receive the same release, which is a bit of a waste of an email. There’s really not a great deal of point sending me a general release at the moment.

I’d like to stress that I’m definitely not PR-unfriendly – quite the contrary, if it’s a well-written, personalised and targeted pitch then I’ll make an effort to write about it, although this isn’t always possible. I’ve written some very interesting and enjoyable pieces off the back of good pitches.

But as somebody who has done plenty of blogger outreach, and still does the occasional bit in this area, I’m far less tolerant of badly done pitches, especially because I know that this stuff really isn’t rocket science and really isn’t hard to do well.

And at the end of the day, I can just hit the delete button. The guys at the brand who’ve paid for blogger outreach – and have no doubt been told that x number of blogs have been hit – are throwing thousands of pounds down the drain for incredibly bad PR and probably don’t even realise it.

UPDATE:

And the day this is published, the PR company I’ve already requested remove me from their mailing list, sends me another email inviting me to something I don’t want to go to. In Manchester. Next weekend. It’s fairly obvious, that I don’t live in Manchester. Or Birmingham, where the same thing I don’t want to go to is happening, but the weekend later. I have plans both those weekends. Exactly how many bloggers do they expect to get to this event? Or are they just box ticking?

My bad. I misread the email. They’re not inviting me to go to the events. Just write an enthusiastic blog post about them. Which is even less appealing.

Also, Chris O, as a final post on the excellent – and soon to be departed – Some People Are On The Pitch blog has done a list of every company that’s pitched them to write about brands that, if you ever read SPAOTP, you’d know they’d have little or no interest in writing about.

written by Gary \\ tags: football bloggers, pitching football bloggers, pitching to bloggers, PR, PR and bloggers, World Cup, World Cup PR

For the first time, and quite possibly the last, I’ve written that an action in a football match erred on the side of a utilitarian rather than a deontological (in the strictest Kantian sense) decision. Well, that and other stuff.

Luis Suarez’s handball on the line in the dying moments of Uruguay’s quarter final against Ghana struck me as fascinating in so many ways that I sat down and wrote a rather large essay on it.

That essay can be found at Pitch Invasion. It contains ruminations on moral philosophy and football, economics and football, and what the sport can learn from rules from other sports.

Unsurprisingly, it says a bit more than just Ghana woz robbed.

written by Gary \\ tags: football rules, Ghana, handball, Luis Suarez, moral philosophy, Uruguay

Last week’s news that Global Radio is to shut half of its local Heart stations is thoroughly depressing, not least if you’re in my old area of Devon, where the five local Heart stations in Barnstaple, Exeter, Torquay, Plymouth and the South Hams will be merged into one Devon-wide station based in Exeter. My thoughts go out to my former colleagues who will face a battle to keep their jobs.

Let’s put the sentimental aspect of a former GCap employee out of the way for a moment. This is a further blow to teenagers and graduates wanting to start a career in broadcasting.

Local radio, especially commercial radio, is an excellent breeding ground for new talent. In part because of the lean operation that most commercial stations run, anybody on work experience can be expected to get a chance to really immerse themselves and get proper practical experience. It’s great for inspiring a passion in broadcasting.

Similarly, for broadcast journalism graduates, local radio is a fantastic place to start your career (and indeed continue it).

Again, due to the lean operation, you get pitched into everything competing against other local media with far greater resources. It’s one of the best ways to learn the craft in a very short space of time.

As you can guess, I’m a huge fan of local radio. It may have plenty of faults and detractors, but when it’s done well it becomes an essential part of community.

Yes, I’m biased have started my career in local commercial radio, but it was one of the most enjoyable parts of the job when people told you how much they enjoyed listening, how much they appreciated the local chatter and the support for events that other media may well ignore.

And what really made it worthwhile were the times such as when a local councillor told me she’d always make a point of speaking to us first as when we covered an issue, she always had a surge of enquiries on the topic. Local radio can make a difference.

Obviously I’m coming at this from a journalism point of view, but everybody – the DJs, marketing team, everybody, played their part in making a station a hub and barometer of the community.

And that hub has gradually been eaten away at over the past few years.

Yes, we know times are tight. Yes, a parent company of a commercial organisation will always want to do what’s best to protect its bottom line. But that has increasingly come at the expense of what makes these stations unique: local content.

Without it, why would a local audience tune in to a station that plays the same pop music they can find elsewhere yet has little-to-no relevance to their area.

A well-run commercial radio sector is good for the industry, but a sector that cuts back and cuts back, takes away the most unique aspect of their offering and then complains that regulation favours their competitors isn’t going to win fans or listeners.

Interestingly, during my time in the South West, we were always told that the Devon stations were profitable and that they had the greatest local reach, especially in the more rural areas.

Quite whether that’s still the case, I have no idea. And commercial radio is always a lean operation that has to fight to make money.

And there are some DJs with a great local touch who, along with the journalists, know and care about their patch and connect with the audience. A ‘personality’ in a studio in London (or even Exeter, if you’re in Plymouth or Barnstaple) doesn’t quite have the same relevance.

I fear for the future of my old colleagues.

written by Gary \\ tags: commercial radio, Gemini FM, Global Radio, Heart Devon, Heart Exeter, Heart FM, local radio