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In the field and on the air

Alan Cane
Published: August 13 2002 10:32 | Last Updated: August 13 2002 10:32
FT Creative Business

There are, Henry Peirse calculates, 9,000 English language radio stations around the world, of which only about 70 have so far signed up with Global Radio News, the internet-based radio news agency he founded two years ago. So there is plenty of potential for the concept. Operational since February, it has been welcomed by journalists and broadcasters but has yet to make the critical commercial breakthrough.

Yesterday, however, the fledgling agency's confidence was boosted by the announcement of a deal to distribute material from CNN, the US news service, in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Under a similar agreement, GRN distributes material from Sky News radio outside the UK.

Its credibility should be further enhanced next month if a deal to distribute news from Bloomberg, the financial news agency, kicks in. And in a move that should underline that GRN is a serious player, the BBC is planning shortly to experiment with taking stories from the agency.

Housed in cramped offices on the edge of London's financial district, the agency is based on a simple premise: that the internet is the ideal medium to bring together freelance radio journalists seeking to sell their stories and radio stations anxious to fill their schedules. Peirse, a freelance radio reporter who cut his teeth in the former Yugoslavia, understands the frustrations and the waste of time and money involved in phoning around to place stories.

And he knows about urgency. A freelance who finds him or herself on the spot when a big story breaks has a limited window of opportunity to shift the goods before the stars arrive. "They've got 24 hours before the parachutes come in," says Peirse.

So he provides an electronic mailbox, with intelligence. Peirse and his team try to place stories with stations, looking for angles that they know will have local appeal. The service is not aimed at the big players with correspondents and news teams. Its target market is the smaller stations on limited budgets who are able to pay a small fee for a story that they would otherwise be unable to source or afford.

Grahame Lucas, head of news and current affairs for the English language service of Deutsche Welle, the German public service broadcaster, uses GRN from time to time: "It is an interesting idea with possibilities for further development. We have used it for short news items."

Journalists benefit from no longer having to spend time on the phone selling their stories or deal with the administrative chore of invoicing, all of which is handled by GRN. Although the agency charges only a small amount for a story - £4 for a typical item - the technology makes it possible to sell the same story to many stations, multiplying the journalist's earnings. Mike Theodoulou, a freelance working out of Nicosia, Cyprus, points to the possibilityof selling a story to thousands of stations: "It is a good idea - if it takes off."

Peirse and business partner, Fiona Winterburn, a radio producer, established GRN on funding of £140,000 raised from a group of business angels. The current burn rate is about £12,000 a month. The company is raising a further £150,000 to take it through to the break-even point, which Peirse says could be early next year.

It took 18 months to create the software that enables journalists in the field to file their stories to GRN's servers and allows radio stations to browse, select and download material to slot into their schedules. The site design was carried out by Webb Technologies. The code was written by Murray Woodman, an Australian who continues to maintain the software despite having returned to the Antipodes.

The key element is the GRN Reporters Audio Production (RAP) kit, software that reporters download to their computers and use to file to GRN. "Filing was not much of a problem," says Theodoulou. "It didn't take long to learn how to use the software".

Journalists plug in a microphone, record their story, transcribe it, compress the file and press a key to send it off to the GRN website. GRN staff edit the material and attempt to place it with the radio stations on its books.

The agency's main limitation is its tight budget. Peirse agrees that the speed with which the agency can prepare stories for sale is compromised by a shortage of staff. Andrew Bolton of the Cape Town based English language station Capetalk makes the point: "At present, GRN's output is more useful for features than news. I think it has a big future if it can get the material up on to its website within an hour or so."

Peirse is looking at ways of further automating operations to cut costs. But he accepts there is no substitute for fingers on keyboards, and the new funding round will enable him to tackle that problem.

alan.cane@ft.com