Talk:James Boyle (broadcasting)

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Flagging as NPOV - this article is rather too glowing to be neutral. Opportunitycost 22:35, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. The claim that 'after the changes bedded in, they were shown to have been a resounding success: both listeners and listening time leapt past their pre-overhaul levels' is highly dubious. There is a citation for BBC News Online which reported in January 2000: "The changes initially caused ratings to plummet to well below the crucial eight million mark. But there was a sharp upturn last year when it was revealed that more than nine million listeners tuned in every week".

This is quite simply unsustainable. Radio 4's reach leapt from 7.940m (Dec 1998) to 9.475m (March 1999) when RAJAR altered its data reporting methodology http://www.rajar.co.uk/content.php?page=about_history : most radio stations recorded higher figures - many substantially so - as a result of this change (e.g. BBC Radio 1 leapt from 9.760m to 10.846m) and no direct comparison can be made between figures before and after the change in methodology. Ioan_Dyfrig 00:36, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

The text of Jenny Abramsky's 2002 James Cameron Memorial Lecture can be read here: http://media.guardian.co.uk/radio/story/0,12636,848252,00.html

Abramsky was BBC Director of Radio and Music, Boyle's boss. Her assessment, two years after Boyle's departure: "So, in 1998, when the new Controller of Radio 4 James Boyle, imposed wholesale change to the network it was not surprising he encountered hostility on a scale rarely seen in the BBC.

Radio is your friend. It is the soundtrack to your life. When it changes, it affects your life.

Everything was changed at once. It was too much for the producers and too much for the audience. Many switched off.

The comedy was poor, some of the new magazine programmes were just not good enough. Some of the producers failed to understand their audiences. There were too many substandard quizzes and even Today did not seem to know how to fill its extra hour effectively." She then went on to say that "as many of the problems have been addressed [...] Radio 4 is in tune with its listeners again."

Not the ringing endorsement this Boyle biography would suggest. Ioan_Dyfrig 21:54, 3 September 2007 (UTC)