Neil Bierbaum
An on-line radio news service is being provided by the South African Press Association under the banner of its new division Network Radio Services (NRS), which will also act as an advertising brokerage for community and commercial radio stations.
The news product, dubbed Network Radio News, is presently being supplied in text form via e-mail to 25 radio stations. The stations are required to pay R500 a month and allocate six advertising slots a day to NRS, which will then attempt to sell these slots and keep the revenue.
NRS will also act as an advertising brokerage and will take a 15 percent commission for any advertising sold on behalf of the station beyond its own allocated six slots. These slots will be sold to national advertisers, at rates determined by the individual stations. NRS will not be selling local advertising for regional commercial or community stations.
NRS intends making this service available via satellite by December. The satellite service will include live broadcasts, scripts and soundbytes. The station can then simply rebroadcast the live news reading which will emanate from the NRN studio which is based in the Sapa offices in downtown Johannesburg.
Alternatively, stations can adapt the scripts and combine them with local community news, using their own newsreader. Soundbytes will also be available, which the station can then insert into the news broadcast.
In order to justify the 24-hour satellite capacity, NRS will inevitably distribute other programmes which can be rebroadcast by the subscribing stations. This may include programmes produced by independent producers or by NRS in its own studio.
CEO James Lorimer believes that this service will have the edge over others as it is linked into the newsrooms of the country’s major newspapers and has a large national staff base. “There is no reason why community stations should have bad news,” says the former Capital Radio staffer.
Lorimer was originally employed by Independent Newspapers (then Argus) to investigate the viability of such a network. It was decided that the only way to make the project sufficiently profitable would be to make it a joint venture with Sapa.
Sapa is a Section 21 company which receives its funds from the major newspaper groups according to a set formula. The need for Sapa to justify the expense of this operation will mean that it has an interest in ensuring the survival of the community stations. For this reason, says Lorimer, NRS will also provide a consultation service which covers programming and equipment buying. “There is a huge skills and experience problem out there,” he says. The network will also benefit from the reverse flow coming from community news gatherers.
Initially, the news service will only be available in English although NRS is “investigating the viability of an Afrikaans service”. It will provide this if it “can cover the cost”. NRS is also looking at doing a number of Xhosa translations each day and will consider other languages “in response to demand”.
The advertising sales will be carried out by Creative Radio Africa, which to date has sold mainly for campus radio stations. Although there is no data available on these stations, NRS has commissioned the CSIR to produce maps, which will show each station’s coverage area, true to its transmitter.
Advertising and sales manager Tim Walker believes that while the individual stations are small, they can compete as a group, either nationally or regionally. However, one problem is the disparity in audiences and languages.