Om, Mike, and Robert are on the phone

Chris, nobody is going to argue with you that the best talk radio isn’t razor sharp and crystal clear.

But good talk radio doesn’t have to be the best, it just has to be good and that means that it can afford to and often does get some things wrong, so long as it gets enough things right.

The Gillmor Gang was the only decent ‘news radio style podcasty thing’ that I ever listened to (I listened to hours of it, but by no means every episode) and it was often very patchy and almost always very messy.

But when it was good, the good stuff was as good as anything I have ever heard on talk radio, or attending real world conferences on the subject matter they were discussing.

I have over 40 years of (what is now called) BBC Radio 4 listening experience, a station which is exclusively devoted to intellectual speech content, with an audience of about 10 million listeners.

This (Radio 4) is an extremely (perhaps the ultimate, highbrow) script-driven broadcast phenomenon, where proposals for increases in informal ‘call-in-style’ talk show programming (with the exception of a single programme (they don’t call them ‘shows’) are received with sufficient levels of national disdain as to cause questions to be raised in parliament.

So I’m prepared to stick my neck out and say that my credentials for judging whether ‘comparatively sloppily constructed radio material’ can work (if certain other factors appertain) are not entirely inchoate, otiose, or nugatory.

I know what slick programming sounds like.

I know how to edit stuff so there is nothing in there but the best.

Nobody is saying that this treatment doesn’t improve the content.

But the key factor in this type of content is throughput.

The stuff being discussed here is being both created and consumed at the same time, in real-time.

People know that they have to be more tolerant of imperfect presentation if they want to get something akin to a live feed.

The closer you get to the dynamics of a live feed (and newsy podcasts aren’t live but they aren’t far from it) the more the listeners respect the spontaneity.

When I was listening to the recording we are discussing right now, there were references to things happening which were only hours old.

Listeners who valued the content will use their recognition of this ‘dimension of immediacy’ as a key feature of their ‘viral drivers’, the basis upon which they will ‘pass along and recommend’ the content.

Part of that viral distribution and recommendation process will inherently include considerations of ‘patience requirements’ and ‘rough quality toleration’ of the recipients futher down the chain, so that a messy and informal unedited podcast of people discussing even the most pressing metablogosphere issues of five minutes ago will only be commended to those whose interests are not exclusively restricted to early rennaissance architecture or those blogosphere denizens who confine their online listening experience to finely crafted expositions of journalistic morphology.

The will always be a job for an editor, scriptwriter, director, light and sound crew in the online audio and video content market, because there will always be a contingent of the audience which would only tolerate content of ‘professional quality’.

But as audiences go futher and further into nano-interest niches, the subject matter relevance level expectation climbs so high that attention becomes much easier to maintain and quality issues, whilst they are never entirely eliminated, are often transformed, often even reversed (so that sudden introduction of slickly produced content in such environments produces a suspicion-arousing contrast, producing concerns about an informal, credible forum becoming ‘polluted’ by ‘vested interests’: imagine you were having a conversation in a small group when suddenly two members of the group started saying things in such a smooth and coordinated fashion (maybe with perfectly appropriate and synchronistically faded in and out backing music) that it sounded like a professionally produced infomercial, would you feel that the flawless clarity and coherence of their dialogue increased the value that you attached to what you were hearing? or would you and the rest of the group feel a strong urge to move away from these shills and get back to hearing a real conversstion?

doesn’t have to be the best, it just has to be good

Ratings really determine that factor, what I or you think is pretty much irrelevant.

Still trying to hack my way thru your buzzworded ‘dimension of immediacy’ nano-interest niched forest Gosh, good stuff tho — in terms of the writing style. But basically a one-sentence sum-up: The more microscopically narrow your audience, the higher the poor-quality tolerance. Wide – Professional. Niche – Medium. Nano – Shaky Cam Heaven.

Viral drivers? Ohdearme…

Thanks Chris, your summing-up was spot on.

Viral drivers?

Your’re of course right to scoff.

The term viral has been used indiscriminately enough for a serious use of it to merit entirely justifiable derision.

But I was being quite definite about the ‘recommendation chain’ process which I was describing, and the term seemed apposite in this case.

I’ll use something better if you can come up with it.