KCL Radio: Best Station 2014 - written submission

BEST STATION 2014 • FIRST YEAR WITH A FULLY LIVE SCHEDULE • 48 HOURS OF ORIGINAL LIVE SHOWS A WEEK • RECORD NUMBER OF LISTENERS • EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS • MORE DJs THAN EVER • LIVE CONCERTS, SPORTS, MUSIC • DIVERSE PROGRAMMING • RELEVANT CURRENT AFFAIRS • NEW MUSIC • NEW WEBSITE • IMPROVED STUDIO

Our Aims For the Year In the last academic year KCL Radio was a podcasting society which produced the occasional live broadcast (such as the Gold winning coverage of the 2011 London Varsity). This year, after 3 years of this, we finally got the station fully live with over 48 hours of live and original programming a week. A milestone for KCL Radio.

With – – – – – – –

this year our aims were to; Go fully live as a station on our website kclradio.co.uk Expand our coverage of King's events with live broadcasts.

Have a wide, inclusive slate of programming.

Build a strong base of listeners.

Create a recognisable brand across campus.

Broadcast agenda setting current affairs, debate and student politics shows.

Engage a broad range of students from all campuses, courses and societies.

We set a launch date and began work 3 months ahead. As we were launching as a live station, we needed a lot of shows, and producers and presenters behind them. From July we contact a range of students, advertising that we were looking for Djs/Producers. Over the summer we had a great response and began immediately training those who were available and running pilot editions of their shows. By the time we launched at the start of term we had a schedule to fill 10am to 4pm each day. Over the coming months we expanded the schedule even further. By the end of our first semester of broadcasting, we had shows covering House Music, Jazz, Hip-Hop, Disco, Popular music, Electronic music and lots more. We had a weekly current affairs show, a Global issues discussion programme, a feminist discussion programme and a trans/Queer discussion programme. Hopefully we most bases and provided student created programming for as wide a group of people as possible.

Highlights & Achievements Great New Shows in Live Schedule

Our first hurdle to clear was to build an entire live station from scratch. Apart from an editorial team of 7, we had no shows to bring back from last year and very few people.

The end result was 34 weekly live shows and over 60 people on air every week, excluding guests. Below are a few examples of some of the shows we're especially proud of.

Included in our schedule is science discussion, classical music, show tunes, disco music, lost hits, chart music, rock music, hip-hop and much more. We kept our hours of broadcasting from roughly 10am to 8pm/9pm because that was when students were most likely to listen. After programming finished for the day we switched to an overnight playlist of popular music and repeats.

Building this schedule was a real struggle. As our launch date loomed, a week into term, we were frantically searching, training, piloting and scheduling shows. I don't think I went to many classes in our first week. We wanted someone there for everyone's first show. We had put a lot of effort into ensuring people were going to listen. We didn't want to cock it up when they did!

Our 2013/14 schedule

Improved Studio Thanks to some the creative use of the little funding we had this year, we were able to greatly improve our studio making it more suitable for the fully live station we had become.

New studio furniture (which we built) gave us much more space for round the table discussions, and more space for presenters to sit notes and laptops. It also gave us more room for live performances as gave us a good space to film in.

We also installed a playout software with a cartwall which made our studio much more like a professional radio studio. This is important as many of our members want to pursue a career in radio.

Because of the success of this year, we and the other student media groups at King's have secured the funding/support to move to a new office and studio space.

KEY EVENTS VARSITY This year KCL Radio broadcast live from the Women's and Men's rugby matches. From 4:30pm to 9:30pm we had live commentary from the stadium and roving reporters with wireless mics/headsets talking to players, coaches and fans.

It was a great success with a record number of listeners for the station and lots of interaction on social media. Because the site of the matches was over an hour from the centre of London, many KCL students could not go. Therefore we got lots of students listening from bars on campus and from their accommodation. Our commentators had excellent knowledge, great humour and our reports got some insightful and hilarious interviews. A triumph of team effort despite some early technical problems during the Women's match with our line back to our Strand Campus studio.

KCL RADIO IN A DAY In a bid to boost listeners, show off our schedule and publicize our shows. The station was playing in key locations around campus all day and was available online as usual.

From 9am to 9pm we broadcast 24 of our shows live in 30 minute slots. We had a real mix – everything from Hip-Hop to feminist debate to Disco music to Global news. The idea was for all our shows to show off the best of what they do. We had many live performances, great music, excellent chat, games, interviews and guests.

The day boosted listeners, increased traffic on our website and cemented KCL Radio's position as a new, vibrant and inclusive part of student life. It allowed us to show that KCL Radio caters for all students. The day also allowed us to step up our PR operation and wheel out the kind of photo, social media, video promotion that big national stations do every day. Live performances, interviews and key moments were filmed for online.

We also kept our twitter and facebook followers up to date with a stream of photos.

STUDENT ELECTIONS KCL Radio, as a new student media on campus (we also have Roar the student newspaper and KingsTV), took the lead on elections and produced live debates between the candidates on campus and live on the radio.

We also ran a #caughtcampaigning hashtag on our twitter which was tremendously effective, getting student around campus to tweet us photos of pesky candidates annoying people who wanted to just sit and have lunch with policy chat.

We also broadcast live from the Waterfront Bar (where the results night was being held) with a panel of pundits, the results live, the first interviews with the winners, and comment and reaction from the crowd thanks to our roving reporters. This allowed student not based at the Strand campus to be brought all the action and atmosphere live. These elections are for 20,000 students yet only around 150 can fit in that bar. KCL Radio wanted to ensure that any student who wanted the inside track on what was happening in their name could tune in and get it all live, accurate, impartial and entertaining.

LORD CAREY INTERVIEW Our exclusive interview with Lord Carey was recorded in secret and then announced to much excitement/fury. Lord Carey has been a large figure of hate on KCL Campuses for around 2 years, ever since he spoke in a debate against same-sex marriage in the House of Lords and aligned those against him with Nazis. Lord Carey is an alumnus of KCL and his photo is on the front of our Strand campus as part of a collection of alumni photos. His has been defaced twice and has been the subject of many debates, student newspaper arguments, petitions and online rants.

KCL Radio took the initiative and secretly invited him for an interview. It was announced and a week later played out as part of a special programme with guests in the studio to debate and more tweets and emails than we have ever had before. Arguments broke out between our Dean and the President of our student union via emails read out on the show and many students got the chance to have their say and to hear Lord Carey's side of the debate. It took months to organise yet by chance the day before we were due to announce a new motion was put to student council to try and have his image removed from the front of the building.

The programme sparked debate, gave the debate a balanced place to the discussed and engaged hoards of students.

LIVE CONCERTS King's has many live concerts a year, many organised by the Music department. However usually the only people who know about them are music students. KCL Radio broadcast a series of live recordings of these concerts with interviews with those involved. These were a great success, gaining a strong number of listeners, and allowing those not based at the Strand campus and those who wouldn't normally go to these events to still enjoy them. These programmes were presented by our music editor, Beth Gibson but her entire production team (interviewers, technical ops, editors) were fist year students.

This allowed those without any experience of interview recording, programme editing, setting up of recording equipment could learn some new production skills.

DEBATES We also hosted one off debates on key issues in conjunction with the student newspaper Roar and KingsTV. Our most successful one was a debate we quickly organised after the Union's student general meeting voted to boycott Israeli goods and services. Many students were vehemently for and against this; we produced a special programme to help explain what was happening and to represent the opinions of students from both sides of the divide.

All of these events resulted in a big boost in our listenership, a strengthening of our on-campus presence and brought in more interest from students in listening or producing shows for us.

Audience Impact – A New Student Media Because KCL Radio now had the audience and the air time, we could begin fully engaging with debates concerning students. Regular programmes such as Luke Jones's discussion show (looking at national and student politics), Enough About Eve (our younger, more student relevant answer to Woman's Hour), Nights at the Circus (a show debating Queer/Trans/Feminist issues) and Global Friday (debating international news) really tapped into the debates going on around campus and allowed those with opinions to be heard in a more open forum. All of these shows included students as guests.

Special programmes like the KCLSU Election candidate debates, our Election Night programme, the Lord Carey exclusive interview programme, our coverage of student demonstrations and the closure of the University of London Union made KCL Radio a leading student media outlet. In conjunction with the student newspaper Roar and KingsTV, KCL Radio broadcast excellent coverage and analysis to keep students informed and heard.

During the elections, our hashtag #caughtcampaigning highlighted how annoying those canvassing for votes during the election really were. We started this hashtag asking students to send us photos they had sneakily took on their phones of candidates boring students who are trying to have their lunch with endless policy chat. This was a terrific success with loads of photos being sent to us during the campaign week. Although it was initially done for the fun of it, it actually engaged a lot more people in the election so far. This was especially good for King's which has the lowest SU election turnouts in the Russell Group. This year, after KCL Radio ran the candidates debates, had coverage across a range of our shows and broadcast live from the results the turnout lifted from 4,000 students voting in 2013 to 12,000 voting in 2014.

Reflecting and Engaging Students This year, broadcasting a fully live radio station allowed us to fully engage with all that was going on in King's and to reflect what students wanted to hear. Our current affairs coverage has been relevant, our music output has been a mix of chart music, specialist genres such as Hip-Hop and House, and new music, and our presenters have been drawn from all over King's and reflect KCL today. When establishing our first live schedule this year, accurately reflecting student life was one of our primary aims and our popularity and the great feedback we have received suggests we've done well with it.

Unlike many universities with Student Radio Stations, King's does not have any kind of radio or media production course. Therefore all the people involved with KCL Radio are producing the kind of shows they want to. Surprisingly it is a minority of the 60+ people producing shows who actually want a career in radio. Therefore our schedule is rich and diverse, as our presenters are speaking about what they want to and playing the music they want to. Very few have one eye on the station and another on where it could lead them in the industry.

This diversity also means that KCL Radio has brought together a wide variety of people. We didn't want our DJs to only meet who was before and after them in the schedule, so we organised many Station socials so that everyone could meet. It was because of these socials that some like-minded DJs met and began producing the Friday Music Collective, a 2 hour show every Friday evening featuring a different group of KCL Radio music DJs.

Part of the University – Engaging with Societies As a new student media, with the most weekly output of them all, KCL Radio had lots of airtime to help promote and celebrate what other student groups were doing. Music societies, fan groups, drama groups, baking (!) groups, sports groups and political groups were all key for KCL Radio as they were an endless seam of guests to mine. All of our political shows would always have at least someone each week from one of the political groups because it was a good way to tap into on campus debate. This allowed KCL Radio to quickly become part of the university community as we represented what they were doing and became a forum for all these groups and students to express their opinions, thoughts and skills. This was difficult at first, because no one knew who we were, but as we got more and more societies on air, more and more people listened and we became a recognisable brand across campus.

Station Promotion A mix of traditional promoting (with student paper adverts, posters and flyers) and social media, KCL Radio has done extremely well this first year of being a live station to ensure students know we exist and what programmes we broadcast.

Across both forms we invested a lot of time in trying to create professional graphics which draw in students to listen. No one is going to tune into a station if the flyer look like they were made on Word circa '97. We focused on using eye-catching images, such as with this Varsity advert (right), and snappy, memorable information.

When is it, what is it, how do I listen? Physical adverts in publications like our student newspaper were a great way to reach a large number of students with ease.

For our online promotion we decided the key was humour. No one would keep following a radio account which just tweeted 'Now Playing: You Don't Know You're Beautiful by One Direction'. That would annoy most people. So instead we had a policy that humour and interesting images were key. All our shows had access to our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts because they would know what to post about their own show better than one person appointed as Social Media person for the entire station. That meant we had a constant stream of photos and posts whenever we were broadcasting. We also had a system on on air promotion. Some of our shows produced trails for their weekly shows or special editions they wanted to promote. These trails were then stored on our playout system for other DJs to play out

This year we have gone from 5 people in quiet room to over 60 in a bustling studio with an exciting, vibrant and professionally sounding station. We are all tremendously proud of fulfilling and even going beyond all of our aims for this year. We have engaged more people and produced more brilliant programmes than we had ever hoped. In our audio entry I have tried to emphasize how much fun we have all had. As a new, big piece of student life we have had some great laughs with a wide variety of students.

We have drawn in presenters and listeners from a broad range of students and have led some of the biggest debates on campus, and we have brought some outstanding events, matches and performances to a wider number of people than previously possible. And radio is the ideal place for them. Newspaper articles, YouTube videos, Facebook memes, rants and posts are all very well but at KCL Radio we have enjoyed the simplicity of excellent radio. Of a good song you had not yet heard, an interesting thought you had not considered, an exciting event you could not attend. As Lord Reith said, on radio 'unaffected simplicity of utterance alone gets over'.

LUKE JONES – STATION MANAGER