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ftm Radio Page - week ending September 6, 2019

Listeners come and go, trees are forever
"listen and do something good"

Climate change occupies decidedly increasing popular conversation and, with that, media attention. Big German private radio broadcasters Antenne Bayern and RS2 are jumping into green branding with separate initiatives to, literally, plant a tree for each listener. Antenne Bayern serves the southern German state Bavaria and has about a million average day listeners. RS2 has about 100,000 average day listeners in the German capital Berlin. The tree planting will begin ahead of next summer in each station’s broadcast area.

"We are a family channel and we owe it to our listeners, the future of our planet and our children," said RS2 channel program director Armin Braun, in a statement, quoted by radioWoche.de (September 3)."Together we protect the future of our children," said Antenne Bayern managing director Felix Kovac. "And we make it so easy: listen and do something good automatically."

Antenne Bayern is joint venture of RTL Group, Axel Springer and Hubert Burda Media. RS2 is principally owned by Regiocast and Nordwest-Zeitung. Participating with the RS2 initiative is the German Association for Agroforestry. (See more about media in Germany here)

Climate and environmental initiatives have received strong support in Germany, particularly Bavaria. This past spring a petition to preserve endangered species - referred to as “save the bees” - received a 1.75 million signatures and was adopted into State law. In elections last October the Green Party received second-most votes.

Dutch radio station Sublime orchestrated a tree-planting in 2017, noted radio.nl (September 3). The effort was crowd-funded.

Some broadcasters increase news output, some don’t
"blind spots" appear

In many jurisdictions, privately-owned radio broadcasters are required to follow certain terms and conditions for continued licensed operation. Broadcasters, generally, dislike what they see as restrictions on their behavior or, and especially, profit margins. But regulators stuck in the old school idea of public interest access to the airwaves are resolute.

Switzerland’s media regulator Office for Communications (Ofcom/Bakom) regularly takes a look at the news content provided by private local radio stations, which are all licensed to serve local communities and, thus, required to provide local news. This is separate from the regional radio channels operated by public broadcaster SSR-SRG.

A study for Ofcom/Bakom prepared by research institute Publicom, released August 29, showed some private local radio broadcasters providing more news content than others. In itself, this is no surprise. What raised attention is that private local stations in the French-speaking region seem to provide more local news than those in the Swiss-German or Italian speaking regions. "Local radio stations in the French-speaking region are performing much better on the concession-based mission than the radios of other linguistic regions,” said the report.

Private local radio stations in the French-speaking region, on average, provided 33 minutes per day of regional news, roughly twice as much as radio stations in the two other linguistic regions. Further, the daily amount of news provided by radio stations in the French-speaking region rose since the previous survey in 2016 while news content declined in the other regions. As part of their license commitment private local radio stations are required to provide at least 30 minutes of local news each day. From next year the news content requirement will be based on individual stations.

The study also showed the appearance “blind spots” with “little access to journalistic reality.” In other parts of the world this is referred to as the “news desert,” but there are no deserts in Switzerland. These “blind spots” have appeared, said the report, due to “the increasing focus of private radio stations on the urban and political centers.”

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