Senior producer, programme manager, controller, organiser or director, the producer’s boss comes in a wide range of guises and titles. His or her essential job is not so much to make programmes as to make programme makers. Whether responsible for a programme strand, a station, or a network, this senior editorial figure is there to listen to the output and provide feedback on it to the producers. A handwritten note left on the producer’s desk – a habit of former BBC Managing Director of Radio, David Hatch – is particularly effective. This head of programmes will also lead the programme meetings where there is a systematic discussion of the output – there is more detail on this procedure in the next chapter. The purpose of this is continual improvement through professional encouragement and evaluation, critique, discussion of ideas, programme development, and so on. Without this, the output stagnates.
This senior role also has the job of ‘gatekeeper’ – the person who says yes or no to programme suggestions, who takes risks with new ideas, who spots talent and encourages new presenters – or gets rid of them. In his or her mind all the time are questions such as:
• What is the purpose of this station?
• What are my success criteria?
• Are the current programmes achieving these?
• If not, how can I improve – the programmes?
• – the presenters?
• What stops the output being better in my terms?
• How can I overcome this?
• What is my competition doing?
Finding answers to these questions is what should be driving the station forward. This doesn’t have to be a lonely quest, for everyone can be involved. Perhaps the first lesson for any executive is that while they might make the major decisions, they are not the only person with good ideas.
The executive producer has to combine the two aspects of the job – the people and the task. To concentrate solely on the people might make for good relationships but what is the quality of the work? On the other hand, to put the whole emphasis on the task may create an unduly work-driven atmosphere in which no one really thrives. The balance is seen in a management style that bears fruit in the creative work done by motivated people who enjoy being part of a team.
The primary tasks are fourfold, to do with (a) maintaining all the necessary relationships with people outside the station, (b) finding, recruiting and training new staff and talent, (c) keeping to a budget of income and expenditure, and (d) running the station – actually keeping the show on the road.
Figure 24.1 A form of the Blake–Mouton Grid illustrating the likely outcome of management concentrating on the tasks as opposed to an emphasis on the people. To do both fully can result in highly motivated teams
Something of the complexity of the first of these is illustrated on p. 19, where management is shown as a coordinating focus. Finding good programme people is often difficult with risks to be taken, but minimised through proper training. An additional problem is that when you have good creative people, they so often want to spend more than you can afford!
A useful shorthand of what management entails can be set out in four steps.
1 Decide what you want to achieve. Have a clear objective in line with your overall purpose for the station. This requires a sense of direction and some clarity about priorities.
2 Decide the means of reaching your objective. The process of getting to your goal will depend on the resources available – money, time, people and their skills, equipment. It requires planning and organising ability and perhaps some persuasion or negotiation with others involved.
3 Integrate the effort of the team. Lots of communication so that everyone knows what’s expected of them, and by when. Team building and motivation are important.
4 Monitor progress and provide feedback. Keep across things and evaluate how the task, the money and the people are going. Resolve any conflict, change things if necessary, and encourage success.
This is not by any means always easy. Time pressures alone may mean that insufficient attention is given to any part of the job. Clear priorities and good delegation certainly help.
Inherent in the business of management is the whole area of developing the people you are responsible for – a matter very much in the remit of the executive producer. This will include the process of annual appraisal – taking time formally to review a person’s work over a period of time to assess the problems, difficulties and successes, asking how it could be made better, more rewarding or challenging. This can lead to a personal development plan for each individual. But improving people performance should also happen all the time in many more informal ways. For example, giving feedback on programmes, as discussed in the next chapter, and holding meetings to analyse specific problems or to extend the knowledge and understanding of current issues. Some stations form groups that meet to confront problems together and share ‘best practice’. A scheme called SONAR – Sharing Opportunities in Nations and Regions – operates among groups of linked BBC stations as a forum to discuss solutions to particular questions. Visiting another station and, if necessary, buying in specific expertise for a day can contribute much to personal learning and confidence. Not as formal as the skills courses discussed in Chapter 26, such experience adds to the process of making sure that your staff are increasingly better equipped to do the job.
Some would describe the drawing up of a good programme schedule as perhaps the highest art form in radio. Certainly there are schedulers who seem to have just the right knack of placing programmes and people where the target audience most appreciates them.
The basis of a schedule that works is (1) deciding the role and purpose of the station – what do I want to say, to whom, and with what effect? and (2) knowing the needs, likes and dislikes, habits, work patterns and availability of the intended audience.
The first of these comes from perceiving a gap in the market and supplying what is needed – rock music, pop, classical, news, speech-based programming, phone-in chat, community services, etc. No station can do everything and deciding the limits of programme provision is crucial. The second is discovered by audience research in whatever form possible. This may be available from the national regulator – FCC, Ofcom, etc. – or there may be a specialist organisation set up to do it, from whom you can commission or buy the information needed. In the absence of such a facility, it is possible to infer the information from other sources, e.g. government statistics, newspaper circulation figures, population breakdown by socio-economic groups, etc. The scheduler ideally knows what the target audience is doing at different times of the day – and night – and at the weekend; what time the intended audience wakes up and goes to bed; when the home of the intended audience is busy – typically at breakfast time – so as to keep items short, with plenty of time checks; when the home is quiet and the listener available for more extended listening; when the typical listener is likely to be travelling – by car – ‘drivetime’; when the time is right for news or relaxation; how to capitalise on a popular programme by following it with something really appropriate for the inherited audience.
Audience habits and therefore listening habits are very different at the weekends. Broadcasters to Muslim communities know that this mostly applies to Friday and Saturday, while Sunday is generally a normal working day. The schedule also needs to recognise special days – anniversaries, holidays, the New Year, Christmas and Easter, Hanukkah, Ramadan and other religious festivals.
Figure 24.2 A simple method of illustrating the schedule – for publicity purposes – when the daily programmes are stripped across the week, with variations at the weekend (Courtesy of BBC Radio 3)
Television schedules make much use of library material – feature films or repeats. Radio may also be able to do this, depending on the format. For example, a live programme recorded off-air in the evening may be usefully repeated for a different audience in the morning, or during the night, in the same week. Schedulers have to remember that habitual listeners to any programme do not like change – a change of presenter for a holiday break is understandable, but a new presenter may take months to be accepted. A change of timing for a programme might mean that the regular listener cannot then hear it at all. This should, therefore, only be done after extensive and conclusive research. Continual tinkering with the schedule simply irritates, giving rise to the cry from the audience – ‘who do they think this station belongs to?’ – a good question.
Sooner or later an event occurs that will cause the cancellation of the planned schedule. This may happen in one of three ways.
First, in the short term, following the death of a national leader or other eminent person it might be appropriate to play ‘solemn music’. This is especially so when the death is unexpected or is violent. But what does such music mean within the context of the station’s format? How should the station react to the assassination of a head of state as opposed to the anticipated natural death of an ageing president? Standby music of an appropriate kind should always be available for such emergencies. However, with the best will in the world it may turn out to be quite wrong – like the music station which, on the death of the Pope, found that its first standby track was a non-vocal version of ‘Arrivederci Roma’!
The second, longer-term rescheduling applies either when a death requires a longer period of mourning or in the event of a major national disaster such as a serious terrorist incident or outbreak of war. This becomes not simply a matter of solemn music, but of revising the whole output, perhaps to allow for additional news slots, and of changing programmes. This was certainly the case in the days following the catastrophe of 9/11, on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in India after the assassination of Prime Minister Gandhi, and on many occasions during the Iraq and Syria wars. It is also necessary to advise presenters on how to be sensitive to the public mood, for it is here that off-the-cuff remarks or anarchic humour can cause great offence among the audience.
The third circumstance for rescheduling requires special vigilance. It most frequently occurs after a one-off event of significant national or local impact – a tragedy at sea or an air crash, a particularly brutal killing or terrorist bomb. In itself the event might not justify the cancellation or suspension of the planned schedule – but these things have a habit of coinciding with something in the output that is quite inappropriate in the new context. Programme titles – even song titles – have to be scrutinised to avoid the unfortunate juxtaposition.
So much management time is given to short-term crises – ‘putting out fires’. But it is essential also to take a broader view, for one of the roles of senior editorial staff is to give a sense of movement to the output – that this year is not the same as last, but things have moved on. The station is not only up to date in the sense of being topical, but it is also advancing in its technology, its skills and its relationship with the listener – this in particular is a current preoccupation – to become more personal with the individual listener.
Strategic planning requires a response to such questions as:
• Where do I want this station to be in five years’ time?
• What do I want to be known for?
• What should we be doing that’s new?
It is armed with a sense of vision, that the strategic planner begins to glimpse new programme ideas and, in discussion with others, slowly turns them into reality. A nice definition of ‘vision’ is: a compelling picture of the future that is better than today. So, we have a three- to five-year plan not simply in the business sense but one that envisions programme development.
Even with a single programme strand it is possible to think strategically. For example, an educational series is an obvious case of leading the listener to a point at the end that was not the same as the beginning. The idea is to cover a body of knowledge or skill that the listener acquires – understanding a period of history, or learning a language. But this concept of ‘taking the listener somewhere’ need not be confined to formal education, it applies to all leadership, i.e. the idea of having a vision of where you want to get to, and enabling the listener to get there. Competitive quiz programmes begin with initial rounds and semi-finals, culminating in a final. DJ programmes can be designed so that they move towards a live pop concert or festival.
In such ways the output, although consistent, is not the same week after week and year after year. It is changing and developing, and extending the audience as it does so – not in a haphazard, accidental way but as part of a planned strategy. Even the public servant may exercise such leadership.
A radio organisation might not produce all its programmes in-house. It may approach an outside production facility or programme supplier to fill part of its schedule. How then does it ensure that it gets the programming it wants – that the programme will be appropriate for the audience listening to the station at that time?
The commissioning of programmes varies widely in different parts of the world – not least in the matter of money, of who pays whom. Some organisations will specify what is wanted and pay a freelance producer or independent production facility to supply it. Others will offer airtime to a programme maker who then buys it in order to reach the audience which the broadcaster is targeting – the producer recouping the cost from a sponsor or other donor agency. The danger here is that the schedule could become a patchwork of unrelated, independent programmes with little or no continuity. However, even when airtime is sold, it is possible to create a coherent schedule through a positive commissioning procedure.
The Programme Commissioning Form illustrated on pp. 352–53 is a simple basis for the procedure used in an African context.
Retaining editorial control means that the executive producer has to specify with some precision what is wanted. Programmes are commissioned within the framework of a known and agreed editorial policy. The purpose of the programme or series has to be stated, not in great detail, but sufficiently to evaluate the result in terms of its intended audience and desired response.
For example, a farming programme in East Africa might be specified as follows:
A 30-minute programme in the Hausa language designed for the working community to enable them to make more efficient use of the land, and to promote self-sufficiency through improved crops by the better use of simple tools, seeds and other agricultural products, in line with government policy. The speech-based programme format may include scripted talk, interview, discussion or drama. No commercial sponsor shall dictate programme content.
The specification for a comedy programme in the UK could be:
The purpose of this late Saturday evening programme is to amuse and entertain especially through the satirising of the events of the previous week in the world of politics and publicly reported news. The format may include talk, sketches, songs, dialogue, etc. using a variety of voices. The programme must be self-regulating in matters of libel, good taste, etc.
Essential details regarding cost, technical specification and programme delivery must also be negotiated. To ensure that the agreement is as watertight as possible, a Programme Commissioning Form is drawn up. This will be given to the programme supplier, together with any other statements of editorial policy and a legal contract.
The BBC, when commissioning programmes for Radio 4, is very keen that programme suppliers describe what the listener will hear – not simply the proposed programme technique and content, but how it will sound on radio. To help with correctly identifying the target audience, the Commissioning Guidelines include audience profiles for different times of the day and each slot has a detailed commissioning brief, with a profile of the audience at that time – the age, proportion of men and women, social groups, and what they are likely to be doing – together with a broad description of the genre and some detail of the programme wanted. Audience need is the key factor, linking what radio can offer to listener lifestyle. Full details of the BBC commissioning process are online.
A possible danger of commissioning exists when the process is applied to too much of a station’s output. The station begins to lose its own in-house expertise of production, and simply becomes the broadcaster of other people’s programmes.
The executive producer is the guardian of the programme output, ensuring that it does not fall foul of the legal necessities placed on broadcasters. But it is not simply libel and race relations and the other laws of the land that have to be considered. We have mentioned before the mass of regulatory constraints or Codes of Practice – some voluntary, some not – which come with a station’s licence to broadcast.
As we have seen, the national regulator will lay down its own Codes of Guidance – on Fairness and Privacy, on Taste and Decency and general programme standards. These are useful documents of which all broadcasters should be aware (see pp. 81 and 385–86).
The UK Broadcasting Act (1990) says
nothing shall be included in programmes which offends against good taste or decency or is likely to encourage or incite to crime or to lead to disorder or to be offensive to public feeling.
The problem, of course, is in the interpretation of this requirement – it is difficult to challenge or provoke without offending someone. No one wants blandly soporific radio. The Codes usefully distinguish between rules and advice in attempting to define and pinpoint likely matters of contention:
• sexual explicitness;
• blasphemy;
• the portrayal of violence;
• bad language, especially in programmes for younger listeners;
• the danger of misleading people through simulated news bulletins and reconstructions;
• the interviewing of children or criminals;
• appeals for donations;
• the whole area of the occult, including horoscopes and hypnotism;
• rules for lotteries, competitions and so on.
The Codes also raise issues such as the need to avoid suffering and distress when interviewing people involved in personal tragedy, the use of hidden microphones, about not causing offence against religious sensibilities – or the bereaved. They outline the care needed in areas such as drugs, alcohol, race, gender stereotypes, people with disabilities or mental health problems, etc. They draw attention to the lyrics of songs that glamorise crime or invite aggression.
There is always a balance to be struck between the broadcasters’ right to freedoms of speech and expression and the listeners’ right not to have their own liberties infringed. While programmes should be creative and perhaps experimental, challenging convention, they also need to recognise their responsibility to different audiences. Radio is not for on-air graffiti. It is not an anonymous communication, but always signed and attributed. Suffice it to say that since ignorance of the law is no defence, senior programmers should essentially acquaint themselves with this part of the professional infrastructure – designed as much for the protection of broadcasters as for the public. Knowing where the boundaries are means that it is possible, when necessary, to test and challenge them.
When the broadcaster is thought to be ‘wrong’ the listener tends to complain in one of three categories:
1 on hearing something that affects the listener personally, such as what they believe to be an incorrect news report in which they were involved, or a lack of balance in reporting a particular argument. They are aggrieved at being treated unfairly;
2 a historical inaccuracy, a wrong date, or a misquote – an error of fact;
3 when they are offended by something said – bad language, overtly sexual comment, inappropriate humour – a matter of taste.
While all media attract the inveterate letter writer or tweeter, especially seeming eccentrics, a station that takes its audience seriously should regard what a listener says with some importance. People like a feeling of having some control – at least that their complaints are taken note of, that their views matter. They therefore need a reply, preferably on the air in the same time slot as the item that caused their offence. An error of fact requires an apology and a correction; a difference of view requires an explanation while, at the same time, respecting the other opinion.
Research indicates that listeners and viewers have clear images in their minds about the channels and stations they use. Many complaints arise because a programme was at odds with their expectation of it – a family programme was found to be offensive or shocking, perhaps because it was broadcast at an inappropriate time of day, or a provocative programme was too tame and did not sufficiently challenge or provoke. The complaint is often not in the deed but in the unexpected or uncharacteristic. A station, a programme, must live up to its promise. It must satisfy – if possible exceed – the expectations the listener has of it. In the event of serious complaint, the executive role is to calm the anger or allay the fears of the listener; it is to defend the producer, and deal internally with the cause.
Senior station staff have to decide what kind of presence they want on the Internet and what resources to devote to it. Undoubtedly, the dissemination of the audio output in this way is a part of broadcasting, as is distribution by cable – many stations, of course, use the Internet as their only means of transmission.
The complexity of a site is governed not so much by the amount of information provided or the number of linked pages but by the rate at which page content is changed. Categories of increasing complexity and therefore input effort and cost are as follows:
1 a single static page with details of station name, logo, frequency, address, coverage area and purpose statement. Seldom needs updating;
2 a page that is updated periodically, e.g. to show variations in the weekly schedule. It may also carry advertising;
3 page(s) that are changed continually to give the latest news and weather together with other information, using text, pictures and symbols;
Figure 24.3 A station website illustrating the channel with programme details and pictures, together with a ‘Listen Live’ button and links to other parts of the organisation (Courtesy of BBC Radio 3)
4 a website that provides an audio output of the most recent news bulletin and news updates, plus station promos and announcements;
5 provision of the continuous live audio output;
6 a fully interactive site that offers access to live camera output of the studios, the ability to re-hear recent programmes, and keyboard text discussion with users in real time.
The possibilities for website design are virtually limitless. They include links to presenter pages, sound clips of recent news output – with pictures, podcasts, a tour of the station, webcams looking out of the window at the traffic or weather, special announcements, coming events, classified ads – jobs and cars, chart music listings, details of music played, interactive opinion-seeking questions, advice pages, etc. In order to attract new viewers to your pages, they should be ‘search friendly’. That is, their main title should avoid obscure or descriptive words, and instead use the key words that people will use when searching. This is called Search Engine Optimisation – SEO – attracting search engines. Headlines that begin with the proper names of people in the news are an obvious starting point.
The more complex the design of the home page, especially with regard to pictures and animated graphics, the longer it will take to download, and therefore the greater the potential for frustration and the user not completing the connection. When this occurs, the casual surfer is unlikely to return to the site. There is therefore much to be said for making the first entry page relatively straightforward, giving the basic information and a menu of links, designed in bold colours with succinct text reversed out on a dark background.
Inputting data – text, graphics and audio – is a relatively cheap process, but the greater the rate at which it is changed, the faster and more expensive must be the data connection with the service provider. Before starting a website, the webmaster should explore other radio websites, be prepared to negotiate over costs and if necessary seek specialist advice.
A list of some useful and interesting radio websites is given on p. 387.
• What of the output should be kept?
• In what form?
• How should it be catalogued?
Decisions regarding the archives inevitably fall to the senior programme staff – producers themselves have a tendency to want to keep everything.
It may be that the whole of the station/network output is automatically kept on a digital logger. But why keep archives anyway? This will depend considerably on the nature of the output. A music station may want to keep very little; a news station, potentially at least, will want to keep most things in the short term since any story has the capacity to grow. Keeping news items for a week or two is sensible, either to follow a developing story or to produce a pull-together of the week’s news. When archives are stored on computer, storage space limitations may mean it is necessary to transfer less frequently accessed material to some other medium, such as local high-capacity storage devices, or ‘the Cloud’. This transfer of material will also act as a reliable ‘back-up’ to the valuable archive resource. But of course, the indexing must be detailed and thorough – by date, subject, title and producer/presenter name – to allow for efficient searches and speedy retrieval of specific items when required in the future. It should not be forgotten that the purpose of an archive is not storage but retrieval.
In the past, many archives built up a substantial number of programmes recorded on quarter-inch tape which could progressively be transferred to digital format. If this is impractical, special care is needed in the long-term storage of tape. The enemies of any magnetically sensitive medium, including audio, DAT and cassettes, are excessive heat, damp, vibration or banging, and external electrical or magnetic fields, for example from some microphones. For the long-term storage of tape the recommended temperature is 10°C (50°F).
All archived material should ideally carry the following information:
• subject matter;
• name and address of speaker, musicians, performers, etc.;
• location of recording;
• date of recording;
• details of copyright material;
• duration;
• catalogue number or category.
Items designed for the archives should be labelled in this way before archiving as a matter of routine, whatever the recording medium.
Without encouraging the hoarding of unnecessary clutter, stations should also consider the keeping of certain categories of paper – schedules, concert programmes, posters, publicity leaflets, public appeals and so on. It is simply another way of keeping track of where the station has been.
Good decisions about archives and a sensible system will mean that repeats, year-end programmes, anniversaries and other retrospectives are easy to produce and satisfyingly representative. The station then deals not only with the ephemera of today but becomes the repository for the community or nation – the guardian of its oral history.