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It’s endgame for 2012. How has it been for you? In this the final days of December 2012 we’ve been taking a look and listen to some of the things we got up to in this year. Our life here at Athena Media is marked by content - radio, television and online audio and video and despite its ups and downs 2012 has been a stunning year for story-telling. This time last year we were in the midst of finishing our modern history and politics series ‘Death of an Empire‘ for RTE Radio 1. This five part series ran across the early part of the year and told the story of the fall of the Soviet Union, over twenty years ago, and brought the story from Stalin to modern-day Russia and Putin. The series weaves archives, interviews, locational recordings done by presenter Seamus Martin and some wonderful music to create an audio journey through time. The series went on to win Gold at the international radio festival the New York Radio Awards, beating off competition from some of the best resourced history radio units in the world, including the BBC. Death of an Empire later went on to win silver at the PPI Radio Awards in Ireland and our radio trophy cabinet also had to make room for an Irish national award for our series Made in Ireland with Ella McSweeney, which went out on RTE Radio 1 over Christmas and New Year last year. Made in Ireland’s episode on craft butchers won Agricultural Journalist of the Year for Ella and the series has been running across the year in Australia in its Top of the Pods series.

We were extremely lucky that one of our ex Athena Media staffers, Paula Cunniffe came back to us in Spring 2012 following her sojourn in the US doing a journalism Masters in Florida. Paula became the reporter and assistant producer on The Media Show - the 8 part series on media matters presented by Brenda Power - which went out on RTE Radio 1 from April and covered the Primetime Investigates crisis for RTE and the subsequent BAI report. (We’re hoping The Media Show comes back in the Spring so watch this space for a news alert …..)
Paula went on to be the Assistant Producer on our ground-breaking TV documentary Beyond Limits which followed the lives of seven elite athletes heading to the Paralympic Games in London. The documentary dominated our lives from May to August and was the outstanding highlight for all of us in that we got to work with the incredible Mark Pollock and a cast of amazing athletes including Mark Rohan, Jason Smyth, Michael McKillop, Darragh McDonald, Catherine Walsh, Helen Kearney - who all went on to win medals under the Irish flag. The documentary was broadcast on Setanta and made with the support of the BAI Sound & Vision Scheme and we’ve just been told, this week, that we’ve been fortunate enough to win a second grant award from the fund to do a follow-up documentary called Beyond Limits - The Next Generation where we work with the winning athletes mentoring the next generation of new talent coming forth inspired by the achievements of London 2012. We can’t wait to start this and get into production with Mark Pollock who is himself making headlines by his plans to take on his first adventure expedition to Siberia. Mark - who is blind since his twenties - was a champion adventurer and author before a tragic accident two years ago left him paralysed. He is now training using bionic technology - bionic legs - and has taken up hand-cycling as an exercise since meeting double gold Irish paralympian Mark Rohan.

Paula left us to work with the Taoiseach’s Department from September and she’s been working on the EU Presidency which begins in Jan 2013 and supporting the website and online life of the project but she came back for a weekend to help us make a launch promo for other new Tv series Get Off the Couch! with Teena Gates. This is a series (again supported by the BAI and broadcaster Setanta) which aims to get people active and participating in outdoor sports like walking, hiking, cycling and swimming.

Get Off the Couch! from Athena Media on Vimeo.

A significant portion of our broadcast work is supported by the BAI Sound & Vision Fund and we’re extremely grateful that it has allowed us to help some important stories this year including the Winning Women series on Irish women Olympians for Newstalk which ran across the Summer and culminated in a one hour documentary featuring Sonia O’Sullivan. We’re just finishing a second series with Newstalk called Grassroots featuring short form documentaries on positive action from communities across the country. Grassroots producers are Rob Hope and Lisa Essuman and the final one hour documentary goes out on New Year’s Day on Newstalk at 8am.

But that’s not all our radio work this year. Audio engineer graduate Brendan Rehill joined us in mid year to work on Winning Women and has stayed with us full-time since then working on all our radio projects including our major arts/music production for RTE lyric fm on Wide Open Operas’s first production of Wagner’s Tristan & Isolde. We produced a short form series for daytime called Re-Imagining Opera and a full one hour documentary called Taking on Tristan which went out in late November just before the full broadcast of the opera itself. Our recordist and narrator on that opera project is Michael Gallen, a young composer who is working with us on a freelance basis. Michael heads up the band Ana Gog and we’re lucky to have several musicians around the company at present including Rob Hope himself who is the lead singer and song-writer with Senakah. We’ve used Rob’s music in Beyond Limits and Michael’s music featured in the Get Off the Couch! promo and in our documentary on Fighting Words which went out in late 2011 on RTE Lyric fm.

Michael is also helping me on our new big history radio project called Citizens: Lockout 1913 which tells the story of the Dublin Lockout one hundred years after the events which shaped modern Dublin and Dubliners. The series has been in production since August 2012 but wont go out until September 2013 on RTE Radio 1 so there’s a lot of work to be done yet and Michael will also be working on the music soundtrack of the project.

Other radio projects already started and running into 2013 include a new science series called Science is Everywhere for Newstalk - and Louise Denvir, freelancer, is helping us on that series while Lisa Essuman (who as everyone knows holds the company together) is working on Herosongs with musicologist Therese McIntyre in Galway. Herosongs is a wonderful music series which in many ways grew out of our big music history series High Fidelity as Therese was a listener and series fan who got in touch with the idea of telling the stories behind folk songs which have in themselves become history stories. Herosongs is again for RTE Radio 1 - and once again thanks to the BAI for supporting it.

So some amazing stories which have come our way - told by inspiring people - and we’re lucky to have had a great crew across the year including Lisa, Paula, Rob, Michael, Brendan and freelancers Stephen, Louise and our cameraman and editor Barry MacNeill. We’ve had several great interns across the year - Joseph Pelan was with us for the first six months under an Erasmus Scheme and helped enormously while we’ve been gifted to have recent graduate Leon O’Neill working with us supporting Social Media Training and our productions. We’ve expanded our output under Athena Media Training with the support of Sinead Kennedy and under the ever careful leadership of Lisa Essuman. We’ve been back in full swing running our half day social media workshops this Autumn and Winter and in Jan 2013 we move to The Gresham Hotel as our new venue for the workshops and we’re starting on Jan 21 with a new offering - the half day workshop on Linkedin. We’ve currently got four half days in the offering; twitter,facebook, linkedin and social media strategy & online content and we’re back working with the Dublin City Enterprise Board from the Spring with Twitter for Business. We spent the first part of the year working with the Irish Times training its entire newsroom and journalist staff on Twitter for Journalism and we’re keen to continue our research and work on the future of journalism, news and digital media. Some interesting things on the cards on that front and again we hope to have some details here soon.

So a busy year - a tough year in terms of ever reducing budgets and a declining advertisement market for many of our broadcast clients. A busy but challenging one and 2013 promises even more challenges for the media landscape as digital and online continues to disrupt every assumption the media business model sits on. For us 2013 already has so many deadlines and projects but our big ambition remains to tell true stories well and hope you enjoy them.

Happy Christmas and a very warm New Year wish to everyone - Let’s hope 13 is a turning point for the better (we know a few black cats who can cross the path just in case…..:)

Anyone expecting our show this evening, April 21st, to be full of Gavan O’Reilly and Independent Newspapers will be disappointed. But I’ll explain. By late Thursday when the story broke we decided it would be everywhere; on radio and TV current affairs and lots of print coverage. So rather than sounding the same we stuck with the programme we’d recorded and edited and decided to focus fully on the issue of cross media and media ownership next week when we can get behind the story and do something fresh and original which will add value to the public conversation. We’re not a live show. We record all day Wednesday with our reporter Paula Cunniffe working on future packages and items across the week. So we edit thursday and generally aim to get the programme to RTE early Friday morning so Radio 1 can hear it before transmission to make sure it is compliant. We are a bit like a weekend current affairs magazine; topical but if something happens Friday or Saturday the challenge will be to decide if it is big enough to warrant us to re-record. And in reality we are not a news programme. Our mission is to get behind media stories so for us the fit is to unpack the very complex issues of ownership, plurality of ownership, concentration, cross-media and policy and with that we’ve got some surprising elements in next week’s show.

This week our show takes a theme of the shift online in media from the online news successes at the Pulitzer Prize awards this week to the success of Mark Little’s Storyful operation, and the question whether the print version of newspapers is dead?. Storyful is a Dublin based global, digital news agency, which is re-writing our definitions of news and journalism while sticking to the principles of journalism 101 that everything is verified and checked. Newspapers have been hard hit by this shift online. We talk to young people who see news as something they get from social media and not newspapers. They rarely buy them and if they read its Metro. We hear from Noirin Hegarty online editor at the Irish Independent, John Burns of the Sunday Times and David Cochrane of Politics.ie. We also look at what happened when we, the audiences, readers and viewers, shift online and how the media money, which is the funding base of much of content, has followed. Gerard O’Neill, chairman of Amarach, the research agency, joins us. By the end of this year it is predicted that 20% of the 900 million euro Irish advertisement revenue will be spent online but the challenge here is that nearly half of that goes into search, into Google and social media sites like Facebook. When people advertise products on your Facebook pageyou are being sold as a produce to advertisers via Facebook. So traditional media, broadcasting and print, is losing revenue through the recession, through a drop in sales for newspapers and more significantly by the movement of media revenue out of content and into search. O’Neill talks about the absentee landlords of Google and Facebook who are stripping revenue from content creators in Ireland.
With over 2 million of us using Facebook more and more money is being spent marketing us there rather than radio, TV and newspapers but the end result is that money is not then going into media companies here producing our radio, television and print media. How traditional media fights back and finds its economic and business connection with audiences in a digital age will be a recurrent theme of our series as its one of the key issues in the national and international media landscape.

Its really interesting that so far the only company that has said a blanket NO to us in our detailed and very polite requests for interviews and access is Google, who as you know are based here in Dublin at Barrow St and are a big employer in the city. Google’s reply, when I said we were talking to media companies, was pointedly ‘but you do know we’re not a media company’. Which most of us will find a little surprising. They mean they don’t make content but in many ways they are the glue in the heart of the digital media business and media landscape. They are how media content is being found, shared and how media audiences/users are being marketed for advertisement. Their revenue comes from media advertisement money and is directly linked to the transformation of the media world. Its a shame that a company that is so central to our media life, and to the sharing of knowledge, is so private about its own work. But they are not alone. I once shared a conference platform in Hillversum, the Netherlands with Apple on podcasting and the classic moment was when a member of the audience, all radio professionals, asked ‘can you talk to us about the future, where things are going?’ to while Apple guy number 1 replied ‘we can’t talk about the future, period’. We all understand there are issues of confidentiality but a sense of openness would be helpful from some of the companies who dominate and shape our media and communications world

So our lead in this week is RTE’s decision to close the London Office, which is one of those stories which is bubbling away since it was announced and will probably get bigger as the closure happens post August. Given our much we interact with the UK we are exploring why RTE took the decision to end London rather than explore cuts and savings in other part of output or even share it across regional and foreign news output? What do you think? Do you value RTE being present in London or do you think it can be covered from Dublin and Belfast which is what the newsroom is saying? We talk to Cillian de Paor, who is acting head of news and current affairs and get the reaction of people like Pat Loughrey, former BBC Director of Nations and Regions. We also ask TV3 CEO David McRedmond for his view and in both cases you may be surprised by what they say.
One of the things we’re doing in the series is adding additional content post the transmission in the form of longer even full-length interviews. We did this twice with episode 1, with a long cut of both the Bob Collins and Hugh Linehan interviews and we plan to do the same within our very limited resources with episode 2 starting with that Cillian de Paor interview. Its all at www.rte.ie/radio1/themediashow
We’ll post links to podcasts and news soon. But keep in touch via mediashow@rte.ie. We may not be based in Montrose but that RTE email gets directly to us. If it is post do send it here to Athena Media, Adelaide Chambers, Peter St Dublin 8 rather than RTE - that’s faster!.

It has been a busy two weeks since we started full time work on the new RTE Radio 1 series The Media Show, with presenter Brenda Power. There’s such a pile of topics, stories and developments every day in the world of global and Irish media that the challenge for us is to be both topical and original; to try and make sure that everyone feels this is a programme for them and that it is relevant, innovative and extremely open-minded. I quess we also want it to be a good and intelligent listen!
We’ve set up a radio essay in the programme called Mediawatch where we are inviting people to pitch 300 word audio opinion pieces which we record and which allow us to bring new voices and
ideas into the discussion around media. In episode one radio fanatic and general good guy Brian Greene has done a beautiful radio essay, with sound effects, on the joys of radio and its relevancy 100 years after its use in Titanic’s tragedy. It is a lovely two minutes thirty audio essay and sets the tone for the kind of ideas and voices we want to encourage. Next week we have a great piece by Cork woman Deirdre O Shaughnessy on the lack of regional voices, writers and accents, in her view, on national media. We’ve another piece coming in which is by an Irish citizen, born in India, who tackles the way Irish media talks and treats the concept of identity, race and belonging. For a country with our level of racial and ethnic diversity where is that all evident in the daily life of the media? Other topics include the very current question of how the media covers religion. Is groupthink a problem for more places than RTE ? (Given that that seems to be one of the core findings of the Anna Carragher BAI report on the PrimeTime Investigates programme on FR Reynolds).
I definitely want to hear from more people with pitches for the MediaWatch slot. It’s not an audio rant but an audio essay; a chance to use radio to tell a story about the media, both Irish and international and your very own personal take on it.
In talking to Brian Greene, who is an enthuastic leader in all things digital, he asked whether I would be blogging about producing the show. So that got me thinking about my own approach to transparency and I figure I need to try and share, as much as possible, how we are thinking about the show and how I am making decisions about its content as producer of the team in Athena Media and with Brenda herself.
This week we had intended the show would have a focus on digital journalism and explore the future of newspapers with people in the midst of trying to answer the question ‘ will the print version of papers die?’. By Tuesday with the leak of the BAI briefing document on the Carragher/Reynolds report in the Irish Times I was considering what impact that made on our first episode. By Tuesday night in watching the PrimeTime programme which covered extensively the leak and the leaked findings of the report (which are it has to be said extremely damaging for RTE) it was clear to me that we had to talk about ‘what happens when the media itself becomes the story? How good are we are covering ourselves?” and that changed the direction of the interviews we were doing on Wednesday and Thursday. Part of the difficulty when the media becomes the story (whether RTE re Reynolds, the Irish Times re Kate Fitzgerald case or Independent Newspapers re Denis O’Brien) is that it is difficult to stand outside and look at it neutrally. And it required specific consideration in the conversation about media ethics, regulation and guidelines. Guidelines, in all media, should, I think, cover specific protocols in what happens when your media organisation is the main news story. We have seen how challenging this is via the Levenson Inquiry in the UK (something we hope to cover fully in The Media Show later).
So episode one brings you a range of different topics from smartphones and media apps to a strong interview with the BAI chairman, Bob Collins, on the leak but more signficantly on the Right to Reply Scheme which is a public ‘Right to Reply’ Scheme launched by the BAI a year ago but which has not been used at all by the public. We raise the issue whether this is because the public don’t know anything about the scheme and whether the BAI and the broadcasters (as it impacts on all broadcasters not just RTE) have done enough to let the public know about the scheme and how they can or could use it. The ‘Right to Reply’ is when you believe your reputation has been damaged by something broadcast - which is untrue - and allows you with no cost to seek a reply and correction. It could be part of how broadcasters like RTE work to heal its relationship with the public and could avoid long complaints processes and legal action if someone can quickly and speedily get a correction and apology aired. What do you think? Listen in tonight to the show at 7.30 on RTE Radio 1. The podcast will be online on www.rte.ie/radio1/themediashow afterwards and we’re going to start posting the long cuts of interviews, starting with the Collins interview, on Monday. So while the on air version of the show is just a half an hour we have the ability to give you the full interviews so you can hear additional material without the limits of slot. Our email is mediashow@rte.ie or contact us here directly at Athena Media via brenda@athenamedia.ie. My key mantra about this show and series is that it is for the public not the media and if in doubt on what we do that is what I put back as a question ‘what is the best approach for the public; what do listeners, readers and viewers think?’ .

Let me know.
And the first episode is just a beginning. We’re just shaping the series and have lots of things in the pipeline including a great series on inside media-houses from the Irish Times, Storyful to TV3. We’re looking for access to just about every influential media force you can think of and if we’re missing one of them let me know.
I am going to try and write a blog note regularly about the production of the show and will share your feedback too. Thanks for reading and hope you can listen.
Our twitter address is @athenamediaie and the hashtag we’re using for the series is #rtemediashow so please do use that so I can find all your comments!
Podcast online on RTE http://www.rte.ie/radio1/themediashow/
and our own site by Monday - and we’ll be posting full interviews from the series so starting with Bob Collins…lots more in that interview on Right to Reply and how it works.

www.athenamedia.ie

It’s strange to get the chance to make a series about your own profession and business - but it is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time. From April 14th we have a run with a new radio series, simply called The Media Show on RTE Radio 1 7.30pm, and along with presenter Brenda Power we’ll be getting behind the scene of the media business and helping listeners to navigate their way through broadcasting, print and online. It is a very big canvas from TV entertainment to news & current affairs, from regulators like the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland to the Press Ombudsman, from global companies like Google to Irish broadcasters like RTE and TV3. In many ways Brenda and myself are well fitted to talk media as between ourselves we’ve worked at some stage in just about every form of it; from print to broadcasting to online. But the focus of this series is not media people but the public and our aim is to make a series for citizens about how the media works and how it impacts on their lives. We want to get new voices on air as well as get inside the places and people who make crucial media decisions. We’re planning a series of radio essays giving voices to different slates on media - and the gaps perhaps in media coverage. We’ll be spending time in the editorial rooms of places like the Irish Times and talking to editors, directors and those who decide what we see, hear and read. We’ll go from the traditional homes of content like the Irish Independent to some of the new online challengers like Storyful and Journal.ie. We’ll also be global and look at the trends which are changing the landscape and hearing from New York and London and getting behind the Levenson inquiry as well as finding out how social media is changing journalism and news. There’s fun too; how is reality TV and the daily soaps made? And we’ll be getting into the media mindset of children, young people and older groups talking about their media habits and what they love and hate about what they see, hear and read. It’s an incredible opportunity and one we’re all getting stuck into and thankfully everyone we’re asking to help us is saying ‘yes’ with lots of people saying ‘it’s a great idea, and about time’. We hope the initial run of eight shows will be extended but as always its a test of what we can do and deliver within a tight budget and our ambitions are high.
Hope you can listen and follow the series if not on air then via the podcasts or player. We’re keen to hear from you too so do send us your ideas and thoughts via email or twitter @athenamediaie and we’re using the #rtemediashow.
More details on each show will be posted closer to transmission and we’ll make sure you get lots more additional content via the RTE website and via our own online life.

It’s December 8th so time enough to get into the Christmas spirit. We’ve wrapped the Adelaide Chambers offices in tinsel and the potted plants are sharing space with a nice little plastic tree, baubles and lights (thank you two euro shop!). It’s been a busy year. More radio than TV this year and we’ve a host of radio shows coming up over the Christmas and New Year. We’ve even got multiple shows on the same day. Phew.
We’re still editing our latest radio baby ‘Death of An Empire’ which goes out on RTE Radio 1 on Jan 7th. its a 5 part series presented by Seamus Martin (formerly of the Irish Times) and we’re tracing the story of the Soviet Union, twenty years after the dissolution of that Union, and finding out how its legacy has shaped modern Russia. The series starts with ‘Becoming Soviet’ and traces the state built by Joseph Stalin which once covers one sixth of the planet and had a range of 11 time zones.
But before “Death of an Empire’ goes on air our big radio baby (now a toddler) from this year, the 26 part music history series ‘High Fidelity - a century of recorded song with Jack L and Julie Feeney’ which went out on RTE lyric fm from May to November, gets a second life on RTE Radio 1. The series will begin after Christmas with a run across the week starting Dec 27th and has a full repeat on Sunday nights at 11pm from New Years Day. So that keeps us on the air right to the end of May!
We’ve re-edited the series to match the RTE Radio 1 slot and we’ve also created a podcast channel which you can access via iTunes or www.podcastingireland.ie. Which means we’ve effectively edited it three times! Thanks Lochlainn and Naomi.
But just after High Fidelity starts on RTE Radio 1 our current series ‘Made in Ireland’ which goes out Mondays on RTE Radio 1’s Today with Pat Kenny show - it gets its own re-fashioning and goes out as a re-mixed stand-alone series on RTE Choice, RTE Radio’s digital radio services. This 13 part series finishes its run on December 26th and episode 11 goes out on Monday -with lace-makers in Ireland talking to Ella McSweeney about their craft. Its a series which has prompted a great response from listeners particularly this week’s episode on poitin and the story of poitin makers in Ireland. Made in Ireland is supported by the BAI Sound & Vision Scheme (and thank you very much for that licence-fee payers!). Made in Ireland goes out on RTE choice form Jan 4th, every wednesday at 3.15 and then repeated on Saturdays at noon. So that’s High Fidelity, Made in Ireland and Death of an Empire all making weekend appearances from January.
But if all of that is not enough listeners in Carlow-Kilkenny region will also get a second chance to hear our ‘Opera for Carlow’ programme as KCLR is broadcasting the opera on Christmas day between 5-6pm (we’re chuffed with that and again thanks to BAI Sound & Vision for letting that production happen). We were delighted to share the broadcast with KCLR, the local radio station in the region, as the original broadcast was with RTE Lyric fm and went out in mid November.
So lots of output, lots of our 2011 work coming on air at Christmas and New Year.
Now just the small business of trying to find new projects to excite us all in 2012 and begin the whole process again of making great programmes and telling engaging stories.
Have a wonderful Christmas and a better New Year.

It feels cold and autumnal today. But I quess September is just one week away so perhaps we need to adjust and let go of the idea of Summer. Largely it was just an idea.
September 1 is one of my favourite dates in the year. Its the day we set up Athena Media back in 2003. So its our 8th birthday. Which seems mad. We don’t feel that old. My nephew Adam turns 8 in a few months and he said 8 is different - 8 is grown up. So I quess we must be grown up as a company. We’re still small and perfectly formed. But its good to know that on this September 1 we’ll be filming with one of our favourite people - Mark Pollock, the adventurer and motivational speaker, who is in rehab after a major spinal injury one year ago. Mark inspires us because he refuses to be limited by his physical life. Its tough, frustrating and hard but he sees more than most of us who still have working eyes. And I am sure that he will out-reach most of us despite his broken back and wheelchair. Life is about what we do with the cards we are dealt not about the ones we don’t get. Its how we face the day which counts.

Athena Media is now happily living in Adelaide Chambers and exploring the delights of Camden St cafes. We’re in the midst of several big radio projects including wrapping up our documentary on Fighting Words which is called ‘Word of Mouth’ about the creative writing centre in Dublin started by Roddy Doyle. It goes out on RTE Lyric fm later this year and 2011 has been a good year for our connection with RTE Lyric fm as our 26 part music series High Fidelity is reaching its endgame. We’ve recorded and edited 20 episodes and next Monday night showcases episode 16 a Jack L special on movie composers. Its been wonderful fun working with Jack and Julie Feeney and a great focus for our work. We’re also in the midst of a big series on the fall of the Soviet Union called Death of an Empire which is being presented by Seamus Martin, the ex Irish Times correspondent in Moscow. Seamus and producer Laura Haydon have been recording in Moscow this month and we’ll continue with more recordings in Dublin and beyond in the coming months. The series goes out over Christmas/New Year on RTE radio 1 so we’ll keep you posted about transmission times and dates when we get them.
Our other big radio baby is called ‘Made in Ireland’ with Ella McSweeney and that is a 13 part series for RTE Radio 1 which starts in October and goes into the Today with PK Show. We’ll also be re-editing the content for RTE Choice, the digital radio channel so you’re bound to be able to hear some of it.
Other radio projects in the pipeline include a series for BBC Radio 4 which we’re currently in development on and which will be very exciting if it happens. We’ll let you know.
Our training workshops continue with the new twitter half day workshop ‘twitter business’ and we’re also running our social media workshop - call Lisa and Niall for bookings and details on 01 4883350.
But back to September 1 - our shoot with Mark is for a new Capital D feature for RTE TV which goes out in mid September and focuses on Mark’s rehabilitation training as he works to re-build his independent life again post the accident. Our videographer Barry MacNeill will once again be behind the camera and edit desk .Barry was behind our recent ‘Drimnagh is Good’ feature and he is also editing our Belmayne documentary and just did a beautiful short introduction to the piece. You can check out our work on vimeo www.vimeo.com/athenamedia.
So we’ll be celebrating on our eight birthday with a great story - which is how we like to do things anyway. Inspiring stories told well. What more could a birthday bring?

Its not yet the end of March, the daffodils and the spring colds are out in force, and few of us have read the entire Moriarty Report. Both nationally and internationally it seems a lifetime has been packed into the last three months.In a sense, the media winner has been news & current affairs, as people try to keep up with a radically changing world. The fluidity of information has grew user/audiences for online aggregators like Storyful. But the dominant swing has been to traditional news providers like the BBC and in Ireland RTE where audiences for news programmes have grown.
In Athena Media we spent the month of February working with The Irish Times on its digital media content during the Irish election. It was fascinating to be back in the heart of a national print newsroom; a place where I started my own journalism career in the mid 1980s. We worked with the online and politics teams to create daily audio podcasts and to try and mentor print journalists on thinking audio and video when covering their story. Print is at the coalface of the impact of online on both audiences and revenue and the global newspaper sector is still struggling to shift both its content and business model online. The growth of Kindle readers and iPads is creating a platform for online content with a revenue model and bundled content with added value is finding a market. (Its equally finding lots of solutions to rip the content for free!).
Here at Athena Media we’ve been balancing as always between the traditional broadcasters and the digital sphere. In early February our TV documentary series Pat Falvey: My Private Everest went out on Setanta Ireland and the three part series will be repeated soon. The story of Kerry based adventurer, Falvey, generated a lot of publicity around the broadcast coinciding with his second attempt to trek to the North Pole. Sadly bad weather dogged the scheduled and once again Falvey had to abort the North Pole.
With Lyric fm we’ve continued our project ‘An Opera for Carlow’ - the community based music project where conductor Fergus Sheil and composer Brian Irvine are working with the Carlow people to write and stage a new opera at the Visual Centre’s theatre, the GB Shaw, in early May. Every month we release a new episode on the story behind the collaboration via the In Tempo programme on Lyric. You can hear all nine episodes on Audioboo and we’ll produce a full hour documentary around the final performance which will go out later in the Summer.
‘An Opera for Carlow’ is being funded and supported by the BAI Sound & Vision Scheme and we;ve already started on a second project, again with Lyric fm, and supported by Soun & Vision. This time’s its the story of Roddy Doyle’s creative writing centre for children and young people, Fighting Words. The one hour documentary called Word of Mouth will broadcast in last Autumn and we will be recording in New York in late May with Fighting Words at readings there under the Imagine Ireland umbrella.
What’s fascinating about the Fighting Words project is the way creative writing brings the teenagers we are working with alive. It reminds us of ‘Tower Songs’ the music documentary we did in Ballymun with teenagers and children who created a song cycle on the regeneration of the area. Over the years these projects have shown us that its the arts which transform and open minds; particularly for young people who often struggle to find their way and identity.
Music and the power of song is the driving force behind our latest radio project called High Fidelity; the history of recorded song presented by Jack L and Julie Feeney. Its a madly ambitious project tracing the history of sound recording and its impact on the world of music, song and singers. We’re incredibly lucky to work with two such outstanding singers and the series starts in mid May - again on Lyric fm but under the auspices of the Independent Radio Production round. We’ve started a facebook page for the series called High Fidelity so join us there if you are using facebook. Part of what is fascinating here is the power of songs to connect us with our memories, our families and how the ability to record and mass distribute songs allows the development of both celebrity stardom and a global sharing of music and song.
We’re keen to connect with people in Ireland who have private collections of early song recordings on gramophone discs, 78s etc and get their stories. So spread the word!
Finally one of our social media discoveries in the last week is the new Irish crowd-sourcing funding site Funditwhich allows people to help the funding of creative arts projects including digital media, documentaries, film and music for as little as five euro. Its a fantastic development which makes our involvement with the arts more personal and dynamic and may allow new things to happen, not just within arts institutions but also give creative teams who find the rejection letters from places like the Film Board and Arts Council depressing. Try it out - risk a fiver - and support a project. We did. And we hope to use it as a method to try and get our observational documentary film Belmayne: Gorgeous Living completed. We’ll let you know and hopefully you can help us finish this amazing project.
Athena Media Training continues to offer its Social Media & Online Content workshops and the next one is April 7th, here at the Digital Depot, Thomas St. Incredibly the facebook users in Ireland now reach 1.9 million while twitter played a significant role in the February national elections. Some of the online content tools we’re using include dropbox, audioboo, broadcastr, vimeo and qik. Our last blog was a top ten tips for social media and its a great starting place for anyone trying to put together a digital media, social media and online content strategy for their business or project.

posted by Anita

Athena Media’s Helen Shaw is one of the authors of a new study on digital radio and the future of radio in Europe. The book, which is published by Intellect is produced by the DRACE network, a collaborative pan European research team working together since 2004. The book deals with radio’s digital transition and included a chapter on podcasting and online radio written by Helen. The book is available online from Intellect.

Buy the book on the Intellect website here

I am clearly not destined to actually be at the PPI radio awards when we win something. Some years back, 2001 I think, I was then Head of RTE Radio and Head of RTE Radio 1, but when the station won the best station of the year award I was in my sick bed and had to get it all by text message on my phone. Any time since when I have gone it has either been in another capacity or like last year when ‘The Last Wake’ was short-listed - we didn’t win! But I am not complaining. Last Friday when our music documentary ‘Tower Songs’ was up for the music special of the year award I was once again in my sick bed with the flu, enjoying a quiet lemsip induced sleep, when the text came in that we had won. Sweet at any time and even sweeter for this project as it was such fun to make and record.
The strange thing was as I read the text messages from Lochlainn Harte, who edited the programme, and was at the awards for us, I suddenly remember what day it was and figured maybe it was all meant to be. When Lochlainn and I were editing Tower Songs just before its transmission for RTE Lyric FM my mother Rose who had been ill died and in the end the programme went out on Valentine’s Day -the day after her funeral. I asked Lyric Fm’s commissioning editor Olga Buckley if she would let me dedicate the documentary to Rose since Rose lived and died within a stone’s throw of Ballymun where Tower Songs was based and because of all things in life she loves a song more than anything.
So when the show went out it was dedicated to her memory. On Friday night when the text messages came in I realised it was October 2nd still and Rose’s birthday. It seemed apt - a birthday gong to remember her by and a chance to celebrate again.
My thanks to Niamh Kinane our researcher on Tower Songs and to everyone in Athena Media, Linda, Chris, Susan and Paula who helped with the production. To Dusty Rhodes who being so supportive during the final edits when he gave us time and attention and let Lochlainn finish it when I had to go to be at Rose’s wake.
So we’ll celebrate in an old fashioned style soon with some liquids other than lemsip and profound thanks to Ron Cooney and all the children of St Joesphs in Ballymun who made the project possible and showed the transformational power of music.

Sing on.

It seems everyone is talking social media these days but often meaning quite different things. Like Henry James’ image in Portrait of a Lady it depends on what window you are observing the courtyard from, as that defines what you see and understand. In essence social media is communities of people connecting via new technologies and communicating using content whether text, audio or video. It’s about sharing everything from news to views, music to video clips. It is the extension of our offline lives, whether in work, at home or in the pub, the way we create and gather networks of friends and colleagues. It is the Internet - and high speed broadband - which has enabled that natural human instinct to connect, communicate and share to mushroom, accelerate and expand. Many of us now have online networks through social networking sites like Linked In, Facebook or MySpace which have gradually become part of our daily lives and integrated into the one thing that tends to go everywhere with us - our mobile phone. Today social networking is the 4th most popular activity on the net globally and its rapidly moving up the ranks and in some areas it is already number 2 just behind email. Facebook has a global community of over 250 million and yet its still very new, very recent and run by a CEO in his mid twenties. Facebook has now overtaken MySpace as the world’s most loved and used social network and the fickleness of our digital habits is clear; if something more useful comes along we shift happily and quickly. Its hard to think but just a year ago Twitter was still only a bubbling undercurrent. Today its one of the most significant forces in shift-changing social media and the concept of the micro-blog, the 140 character message, has taken root. Whether Twitter itself is here for the long run is a debate (remember how dominant MySpace was just a short time ago) but the age of ego-media has spawned millions of tweets and re-tweets. Recent research shows that up to 40% of tweets globally are ‘rubbish’, global chit-chat about standing at the bus stop or getting caught in traffic. Equally about 10% of all Twitter accounts generate the message traffic while the rest are ‘following’ in that quaint, rather passive language of Twitter. Effectively the ‘follow’ in Twitter is simply an RSS feed similar to what brings you this blog, or our podcasts or even your news alerts. It allows you to follow strangers, like Queen Rania or Brittany Spears, unlike Facebook where you are required to become a ‘friend’ or a ‘fan’ but increasing the lines are blurring somewhat between the two worlds as middleware tools like Seesmic allow you to integrate your social media life and your updates to Twitter and Facebook.
While trends may come and go the underlying nature of social media is about connections, trusted and valued connections which communicate and share; from the family photos to a hidden treasure of an article, essay, poem, song or story which comes to you via a link. While there are lots of one sided conversations going on in Twitter (technology enabled monologues!) the real story happening right across the Internet is of a rapid expansion of communications, conversations and information sharing. The filter for many of us in that fast fire of content is our trusted networks, our ‘friends’, and the continued growth and presence of trusted portals whether in news, entertainment or education. In a sense that may be Twitter’s weakness. Its reach is wide, its a global megaphone but the communities it creates are weaker, more fragile. In a sense Twitter is an extension of blogging which sits within social networks so perhaps the future is equally that Twitter is a mico-blogging channel steaming in and through social networks but not replacing them.

What is the fuss about social media? Effectively its a reflection of the shift to new media habits and the dynamic shift in user behaviour. For those attempting to communicate, to market, to sell, to persuade, to build advocacy or awareness you ignore it at your peril. On the other hand don’t assume it all about sending endless tweets all day flogging your stall. The marketplace has altered. Social media requires investing not just time but a little of yourself in order to make it work. Sadly there are few really outstanding business bloggers in Ireland and as a country we’re still behind our European partners in fully embracing the digital transition. It has been about broadband. But now it is also about ideas and how we use this altered landscape to create vibrant communications for both social and business needs.

Let me know what you think. (by the way we are on Twitter @athenamediaie and try not to inflict our bus queues and traffic jams on you!)

(We’re also running a Social Media for Business workshop on Sept 5th and Sept 18th if you want to find out more… check the news story on our website)