Rajar Day
Anyone who runs a radio station in the U.K. will tell you that there are four days every year when you can face a rollercoaster ride of emotions; Rajar days.
is the organisation that researches audience numbers for the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and commercial radio, and every three months they provide a report that goes out to all stations. As a station manager you are sent a secure website link which is activated at 5.30pm on the dot. You then download a file and within minutes you're looking at the data. The latest figures came out last night but you're not allowed to go public with them until seven o'clock the next morning.
So there I was at 5.30 last night, hunched over my PC and trying to ignore the happy chatter coming from a birthday celebration happening in the office next to mine. Then, as if I wasn't nervous enough, my boss came in and looked over my shoulder as I downloaded the information. To be fair, she was there to offer support, but if the figures had been bad I would have needed a few moments alone to wipe away the tears and re-do my make-up.
As it was, we were over the magic million mark and had gained about fifty thousand listeners since the last report. Phew.
But spare a thought for my colleagues in television. They get figures within hours of any broadcast. That means they could go through this kind of stress every night. I wonder if they get used to it.
There are moves afoot to change the way we measure radio audiences and new high-tech devices might give us more meaningful and up-to-date information about our programming decisions. I wonder if that will lead us down a path of reacting too quickly when a programme seems to be doing badly. In radio, new formats often take a year to get noticed and be accepted by listeners.
And for the ´óÏó´«Ã½, which aims to provide a wide variety of programmes, raw listening figures tell you very little about how a programme might be valued by the audience.
I'm struck, for example, by the e-mails we've been receiving in response to our Write Here, Right Now project. Many people are telling us how much they value the support and encouragement they are receiving as they attempt, finally, to write the novel they've been putting off for years.
That kind of real contact with real people can never replace charts and statistics.
