3 Things - 10 February

Welcome to this week’s 3 Things, a look at media and tech trends in the UK and beyond.

1. Radio’s enduring resilience

The quarterly UK radio listening figures from RAJAR, the industry body, tend to get some pick-up. Particularly from certain media who like to see whether the Today programme’s up or down and what impact Radio 2 schedule changes are having.

But looking at the latest data, released last week and covering October to December, I’m interested in a broader story, and a positive one at that: the sheer resilience of radio.

Consider the following, which are from RAJAR’s time series data, looking at 2024 vs 20 years earlier. During the final quarter of last year, radio reached 87% of UK adults. For the same quarter in 2004, it reached 90% of UK adults. You might reasonably point out that 90% is higher than 87%. But that’s a small drop when you think about what’s been thrown at radio in the past two decades: demographic changes but, more significantly, a technological revolution in audio with the rise of music streaming platforms and podcasts.

In fact, radio has turned tech to its advantage. According to RAJAR, 63% of smart-speaker owners use it to listen to radio. And 28% of people listen to radio on their smartphone.

So what’s gone right? For a start, radio is baked deeply into many Brits. Millions will instinctively switch on the radio as soon as they walk into their kitchen or want it with them in the car or on their headphones when walking the dog. Radio’s personal in a way TV and video on-demand aren’t. It also saves you stewing over what to choose from Spotify’s 100 million-plus songs.

And there’s the fact that UK radio is among the best in the world. Whether it’s the BBC’s biggest presenters or the likes of Jordan North on Capital or Shelagh Fogarty or Lewis Goodall at LBC, these are broadcasters at the top of their game.

2. Media, democracy and the truth

Last week I mentioned Channel 4’s research into Gen Z’s troubling views on democracy and how they consume news. After that, Channel 4 boss Alex Mahon appeared on the BBC’s The Media Show, explaining more about the research and specifically news and truth.

“The definition of what truth is is quite hard for them [Gen Z] to grapple with,” she said. “And it’s having impacts on society,” she added. Mahon then talked about how on social media, “radical or noisy or confrontational” things move “up the algorithm faster”.

Social media companies like the benefits of acting like publishers (colossal ad revenue) but have less appetite for policing what’s on their platforms. So Mahon, referring primarily to ‘trusted sources’ like public service broadcasters the BBC and Channel 4, suggested their content be given "algorithmic prominence” to make it “easy for [Gen Z] to find”.

Other guests - Sky News Group executive chair David Rhodes and Geordie Greig, formerly Daily Mail editor and now heading up The Independent - pushed back on Mahon’s idea. Greig talked up The Independent’s impressive growth on his watch as evidence that people can make their own choices.

But I think he misses Mahon’s point. Most Independent readers will be sophisticated news consumers: that is, they know what sources are trustworthy and which content has gone through a rigorous editorial process.

Unfortunately a lot of people aren’t so discerning and don’t have the skills to weigh up what can be trusted and what can’t. So hopefully Mahon keeps pulling at this thread. Is the status quo - social media platforms awash misinformation and disinformation - really worth protecting?

3. Not Starmer’s finest hour

There I was last week contrasting Donald Trump’s regular attacks on US media with Keir Starmer’s support for a free press here. Then The Sunday Times reported (based on details in a new book, Get In, by journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire) that the prime minister last year recruited Simon Case, at the time Britain’s top civil servant, to call the BBC to try to kill a story about Sue Gray, Starmer’s chief of staff, earning more than him.

Case, according to Pogrund and Maguire, contacted both BBC political editor Chris Mason and director general Tim Davie to ask them to drop the story. Among other things, Case claimed that Gray’s salary being made public might deter people from going into the civil service.

Starmer should really know better. He can’t go on record praising a free media, then enlist a politically neutral civil servant to attempt to bury an awkward but well-sourced story because it’s embarrassing to him. Credit to Davie and Mason for ignoring the pressure and publishing anyway.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.