For the second year in a row the Women Mean Business Awards and Conference has invited Athena Media MD Helen Shaw to facilitate the day long event. The awards, sponsored by 02, take place in the Shelbourne Hotel on Monday Sept 29th and are organised by the Women Mean Business media business, led by entrepreneur Rosemary Delaney. To find out more check out www.womenmeanbusiness.com
Click here to find out more information on Athena Media’s latest radio documentary, Women and Words which broadcasts this Saturday, 23rd of August at 3pm on RTE Lyric FM.
Athena Media has been awarded a new BBC World Service radio commission for a documentary series marking the 40th anniversary of the Moon Landing. The series Small Step Long Shadow will coincide with the anniversary next year of the historic moon walk and will explore how the lunar landing has changed our global sense of ourselves and our world.
Women and words, our six part radio documentary series, starts on 23rd August with Booker Prize winner Anne Enright. The series, which has been supported in its funding by the BCI’s scheme SOUND AND VISION will showcase outstanding Irish women writers like Enright, Jennifer Johnston, Eavan Boland and Maeve Binchy. The series was recorded across Mary-July and has been in post production in studio this month in preparation for its transmission slot starting on 23rd/8/08. We’re creating a myspace page to profile the series and we’ll share the end result with you shortly. The presenter of Women and Words is Kay Sheehy and the researcher is Linda Stanley.
Click here to listen to the promo for Women and Words.
we’re growing steadily these days and the horrors of growth is trying to find the right people to match our projects in TV, radio and online content. We’re currently recruiting for a production office manager (ideally communications graduate with some production experience and excellent office skills) and a content creator (good multi media skills and audio-visual college training and experience). Send CVs and details to jobs@athenamedia.ie. We currently have TV, radio and online projects on commission and we’re keen to hear from people who share our holistic approach to content and are confident, self-starters who enjoy problem-solving and who know that great, creative projects come from strong processes and order.
This September the EBU’s Digital Radio conference wil take place in Sardinia to coincide with the Prix Italia. The focus will be the turning attention of the radio industry to all things web based and the debate over the balance between terresterial broadcasting versus the Internet as the future for digital radio. I’ll be there as part of the DRACE - digital radio cultures in Europe network and wil be talking about podcasting and exploring some research on how podcasting is working and how audiences are using it. My colleague from DIT Dr Brian O Neill will also be at the conference and we’re hoping to engage with public broadcasters on some of the key issues challenging digital radio in Europe. The DRACE network is working on a book publication for 2009 and we’re presenting work at the forthcoming ECREA conference in Barcelona in November. Its interesting how much has changed since we started work in mid 2004 as a pan-European research network - podcasting had hardly entered the realm of our conversation and the growth of downloads and rss feed content (ie podcasts) is one of the big changes the radio industry has seen in the past two years. In Ireland more people are listening to podcasts than the DAB trials and the growth of content in audio and video podcasts has been remarkable throughout 2008. Podcasting has largely been good news for traditional radio in that its allowed those stations to extend their content life and reach young audiences in a new way. Its allowed them to provide an on demand service to listeners whether its Morning Ireland or the Right Hook. In many ways what the audience is directly and immediately responding to is the ability to select what they want when they want it - rather than saying they want more and more linear streamed channels of low grade quality. The big question of what will fund the move to podcasting - and online content - when its separated from traditional spot advertisement? Those are some of the interesting and fun questions we’ve been asking in our podcasting research.