media update’s Aisling McCarthy spoke to the CEO, Lance Rothschild, about the Awards and the importance of supporting quality media.

Tell us a bit about the idea behind the Liberty Radio Awards?

Essentially, the Awards are a credible, well-judged and transparent programme. The underlying rationale is to promote excellence in radio. The bottom-line is that it’s very easy to just arrive at a radio station and just do a day-to-day job, but if you’re not competing with anyone, you’re only competing with yourself, ultimately. The Liberty Radio Awards encourage radio personnel to continually set higher standards of journalism.

I personally come from a radio station management background, so it’s always been important to me to keep people motivated, and keep them shooting for constant improvement. The commitment to excellence that, hopefully, results from the Awards will ensure that radio offers the listener a compelling reason to listen. In other words, the kind of thing of “Wow, I really enjoyed that – I’ll go back for more tomorrow”.

Older radio people talk about what we like to refer to as ‘carpark radio’, where you arrive at your destination and don’t want to leave the car because of what’s on the radio. So we want to encourage more carpark-type radio.

Why do you think it is important to recognise excellence in radio, specifically?

I think it’s important to recognise excellence in everything, and, there was nothing of this sort in the radio industry in South Africa. Radio is still growing substantially in South Africa; it’s still the most popular medium in terms of its reach, or its access to the populace of South Africa. More people across the country are impacted by radio than by any other medium on a daily basis, so it certainly retains its importance.

We do better radio in order to keep people involved in this medium, and to make people love this medium more. The better work we do, the more compelling it is for people to listen to radio and, ultimately, it keeps radio’s profile as the foremost media choice.

What made you decide to partner with Liberty this year?

There was quite a good meeting of the minds between us and Liberty. Liberty saw the Awards as an opportunity to reach the broader South African community through the broad reach of radio.

They saw it as a platform that raises the standards for radio listeners to enjoy more knowledge and understanding on a range of issues that build into our society. That was generally our shared vision. Obviously, they saw the value in it – the Awards have been built over the years into a valuable sponsorship property.

Why is it important for South African businesses to support unbiased, high-quality media?

It really is important that we have reputable, credible, strong media – and it’s in any democracy – who particularly question the use and the abuse of public finances. This ensures that the listening public, the media consuming public, are well informed; not only about our failures, but also about our successes. We need to celebrate our successes, but we most certainly also need to examine our failures and learn from them.

How can businesses support the media and journalism?

That is a multi-faceted question, because it depends on the businesses level of openness and transparency.

The media reaches the customers of those businesses, and those businesses need to reach those customers. They don’t really have a way of reaching them directly, necessarily. The media has always been an ‘intercessionary’ platform between the businesses and their potential clients. So it’s important that businesses realise this, and the media’s primary source of existence is not subscriptions – it is advertising revenue. Businesses and government spend money with media in the hopes of getting their message across to that media’s audience.

It needs to be a partnership relationship between the business and the medium. But, by the same token, it needs to be a partnership of mutual respect. The businesses shouldn’t be telling the media what content to publish, and the media can’t tell the business how to conduct themselves. They can, however, and should be allowed the freedom to expose both positive as well as negative aspects.

Do you think that the Awards are a way of businesses getting involved?

Without a sponsor, we wouldn’t be able to run the Awards; it’s quite an expensive exercise to run in terms of people and technology. So the Awards aim to raise the standard of all radio journalism. It makes people conscious of doing great work and doing better radio.

By raising the standards of all radio, it actually benefits all businesses – anyone who wants to use the medium of radio. If the station is setting higher goals for itself and being more compelling to its listeners, then my support of that radio station, as an advertiser, is going to reap me better results.

Do you think that business partnerships with media can be seen as a kind of bias? How do we avoid this misconception?

For the Liberty Radio Awards, Liberty wants to interact with radio stations. But they don’t influence the adjudication or the award system at all. That is done independently – it’s audited and verified. We’ve set that up so that there can be no hint of impropriety.

They haven’t come to us and said “you’ve got to say Liberty 40 times to qualify” – they’re not asking for any of that. They’re getting publicity because of the independence and the verification. They’re getting an extremely substantial value on air, print and social media.

For more information, visit www.libertyradioawards.co.za.

Interested in finding out more about the role of radio in South Africa? Read our article, John Robbie reveals the future for radio in South Africa.