Radio news and pointless localisation

A lot of radio news hasn't changed since the days of black and white

Listening to the newly structured news bulletins on Bauer's Greatest Hits Radio recently took me back more than 25 years to my days at Fox FM. The bulletins are now split, with national news first from (I assume) a central hub followed by local news. In the local bulletin, the golfer Justin Rose was described as from Hook and then the next day as someone 'who grew up in Fleet'. Firstly, which is it? They are two different places; close to each other but different.

But more importantly, this was the type of needless localisation that radio bulletins and local newspapers used to do, just to find something that gave them a chance to feature a national story with a unique angle. Rose was leading the Masters and that was a headline enough, without needing to say where he was originally from. It doesn't make the story more relevant for people in Hampshire. Where do we stop with this? Do London bulletins refer to the prime minister as 'Southwark born Keir Starmer' every time he's in the news?

At Fox FM in the 1990s we had to always say 'Oxfordshire's Tim Henman' whenever he was in the news. There was very little point to this, other than being able to say Oxfordshire one more time in the bulletin. Henman's success had no more meaning to the listeners of Fox than other fans of British tennis. I remember a newspaper in Reading leading with the fact that Pan Am flight 103 flew over the town before it blew up over Lockerbie. A desperate attempt to localise a national / international story for its readers.

In the case of the Justin Rose story, it didn't help that the local part of the bulletin merely said on the Sunday that 'Rose will look to bounce back' after falling behind the leaders. Who the leaders were was never mentioned. Had I been listening in Northern Ireland I may have been told 'Hollywood's Rory McIlroy' was leading the tournament. The idea of these local add on bulletins is not a new one and something I have tried before. To be fair to Bauer they do not sound awful but what happens when the big national story is also the big local story?

What all this points to though is my constant gripe that radio news bulletins are so tired. Rarely do I hear anything creative. It is still the traditional inverse pyramid approach and lazy cliched writing. For 60 years or more we have heard the same thing. As podcast news briefings have shown there are more immersive ways to tell stories, radio just refuses to innovate. Lack of resource is the main problem of course. It's why Bauer has changed the bulletin structure; to save money. The local bulletins are now just a throw-away add on, produced and read by people probably doing 3 or 4 bulletins an hour. That means they grasp at any way to get local names and references into their bulletins. But sometimes there is just no point, as the Rose example shows.