And in case there are people who post here but not on the R3 boards
- Friends of Radio 3 carried out a survey among (mainly) supporters to find out what they felt about the individual changes introduced last year. This has now closed and we hope the results will be considered by the BBC Trust as they assess Radio 3's annual performance. That will be reported on, briefly, in the BBC Annual Report, published in July.
We hope it will be considered valuable evidence in assessing the reasons why, not only is R3's reach at rock bottom, but (in some ways more importantly) listening hours have gone through the floor. The BBC assesses value for money on the basis of 'cost per listener hour' so the fewer hours, the more they cost. This may affect R3's future budget allowance.
Overwhelmingly, our sample said they were listening less - and this corresponds with the drop in listening.
It's a bit after the event (I'm anxious to get our report to the Trust as soon as possible) but if anyone wanted to fill in the survey form, contact me via
http://www.for3.org/contact.html And for anyone who thinks FoR3 is made up entirely of classical music listeners, these figures emerged:
listened to some of the 4pm strands 44% (9% listened to all of them)
listened to jazz programmes 29%
almost 2/3
hadn't heard of Mixing It (or confused it with Making Tracks) but the remaining third split evenly over the axeing. 18% said they were against it, higher than the number who regularly listened to it.
listened to world/LJ 16%
Many/most would agree with Tommy that R3 still has a lot to offer and is better than any other station around (!
) but there do seem to be some very fundamental problems here that the BBC has to sort out. Not just tinkering.
