Thebe Mabanga
in your ear
Radio has a long way to go before it can lead the South African media in news coverage and analysis. Although newspapers rely somewhat on radio to give publicity to stories covered on a specific day, radio still depends on print media to amplify a story it might have broken.
When Max Du Preez appeared on Safm’s The Editors and said that he thinks President Thabo Mbeki is a womaniser, it took a daily, The Citizen, to make the story a dinner-table topic. The paper was accused of being opportunistic, but that is an entirely different matter.
There are three issues for a broadcaster to attempt to address. The first is when to present a bulletin. The convention at present is to present a bulletin on the hour and headlines on the half hour. There is no rule that says you cannot present your bulletin at a quarter of an hour and the headlines at a quarter past.
If a broadcaster were to do this it would run the risk of losing listeners to stations that play music or interesting talk. But the listeners the broadcaster would gain by playing music on the hour when other stations have news would offset that.
The problem here is that it needs one brave programmer to experiment and if it works you will find that, in say three to five years, all stations will have news at a quarter to and headlines at a quarter past.
The second issue is how to present a bulletin in a way that captures a listener’s attention. I once heard Vuyo Mbuli read a lunchtime bulletin on SAfm for seven minutes.
A colleague remarked that it is because SAfm is an information-driven station so their bulletins have to be in depth. This is wrong. A bulletin should be about four minutes long, including sport and weather.
Unless of course the Hansie Cronje scandal just broke or Nkosi Johnson has died, in which case you can stretch the bulletin to five minutes, but only if you have new information on the story.
Finally, a programmer has to decide what to do immediately after the bulletin to keep the listener interested.
Incoherent rambling after the bulletin creates a few extra minutes during which a listener can surf to a different station where they can find a hit song, a comedy clip or an announcement that an exclusive interview with their favourite boy band is coming up later, all of which can influence a decision of what to listen to for the rest of their day.
Mbuli’s indiscretion is a minor blemish on SAfm’s impressive news presentation record. When they keep their bulletin to four minutes which they usually do they are sober and engaging. The nerve centre of news commentary and analysis on English radio today is to be found in Safm’s John Perlman.
Perlman has an impressive grasp of issues and mild alacrity in his approach. His clean, no-frills style, with no background music and direct but non-confrontational interviewing technique makes him an essential part of an information-packed breakfast.
A glaring flaw in news presentation is the continued marginalisation of African language stations. The most classic example of this was the recent Ellis Park disaster.
The SABC sent both TV and radio crews to cover the match. As the tragedy unfolded, we had to wait until the delayed coverage was beamed to us to learn about the tragedy. In the exhaustive print coverage that followed, I have not heard anyone who said they heard via the radio that there was a catastrophe.
Radio news is a strange and interesting phenomenon in programming. The benefit of getting news from a source like radio is that, besides being read to you, it is short and punchy and the ideal way to consume current affairs on the run or while driving. The pace of compiling can be chokingly frenetic in a bid to satisfy the requirement that information must be accurate, complete, economical, reliable, relevant, simple, verifiable and timely.