I’m completely biased in this because Rick O’Shea is a good friend but I’d listen to his show if he was a mate or not. Except his show isn’t a show anymore. It’s a playlist with a voice that doesn’t get enough coverage. As you may have read on some blogs and in the press, 2FM made a very silly decision to take an axe to Rick O’Shea’s afternoon show along with the shows of Nikki Hayes and Will Leahy. Rick’s show was a modern radio show, meaning it was interactive, it was guided by pop culture and whatever zeitgeist was happening, it read texts out, it got people to do funny things, it spread the 2FM wings out from radios and into the general populace and the ratings showed it was working quite well. The future of Radio is not the “broadcast out and that’s it” model, the future of radio is about reaching out and getting back and reaching out again. Radio needs to be guided by the voices of those that are listening. We don’t need a Carson Daly radio model.
And now the personality and the soul of it has died. The music lives on but nobody wants just music anymore, as someone said, our iPods will do that for us, we’re much better at being our personal DJs.
They won’t take his blog away though or his chat and banter with us the audience at the Blog Awards or the Web Awards so we can still have fun with Rick there. You can join the Facebook group If It’s Not Broken Don’t Fix It: Keep Rick O’Shea and Nikki Hayes Talking to show your support. Or has Una says, email complaints@rte.ie.
Photo owned by kevindooley (cc)
I don’t think a Facebook Campaign is enough though but at least it’s a way of showing our support. Join the group, write a blog post and maybe suggest ways of getting this more attention.
