first posted by Dan Adams on the 'Save NZ Radio' group page on Facebook 24 February 2010. On this blog, by kind permission of Dan Adams
As the founding producer of Upbeat I'm glad that Chris has found it to be a place for 'world music'. Long may that continue.I thought I'd share here correspondence with John Boscawen about Radio New Zealand, and in particular RNZ Concert.
A friend has cautioned me not to mock Boscawen's spelling, and so I promise I won't. That, Helen, would certainly be elitist of me.
But
I have to editorialise here by asking why was John Boscawen so eager to
appear in a nationwide
interview about the future of Radio New Zealand
when by his own admission to me he is a keen
learner? Wouldn't you
expect an MP to be better informed about his own shadow portfolio? In
the
middle of the interview he urged interviewer Geoff Robinson to back
him up that Radio NZ was a
great place to work with no shortage of
cash. It showed a total void of understanding about the
fundamentals of
journalistic impartiality. Where can you go with that? It's like trying
to have a
debate with a kitchen table and chairs. It's possible to do, but vexatious on the spirit and ultimately
futile.
That's my rant du jour.Dan
dear Mr Boscawen
In
your recent Morning Report interview with Geoff Robinson and Green MP
Sue Kedgely you
remarked on the quality of the recording studios that
you were seated in, seemingly to support
some line of reasoning that if the studios are plush then there is no shortage of funding at Radio
New
Zealand. In response I wanted to share with you an anecdote of my seven
years employed at
Radio New Zealand Concert, which may possibly disabuse you of such notions.
In 2001 I was hired as producer of
a live-to-air two hour weekday lunchtime radio show on Radio
New
Zealand Concert. At first I was employed on a 0.5 salary, as it was
thought that one fulltime
presenter and a 20 hour a week producer would
be enough of a team to get 10 hours of live
magazine radio to air each
week. After a month or two of working more hours than I care to recall,
I
was appointed fulltime. In my seven years as a radio producer I
consistently earned less than a high
school teacher, and only once I received a pay rise beyond incremental inflationary adjustments.
For
our show's first months, when we were on-air I 'produced' the show by
listening to a small
battery powered FM radio at my office desk on the 4th floor of Radio New Zealand House, 155 The
Terrace. The presenter sat alone in a little dark box about three metres square on the 3rd floor. When
anything went amuck and required urgent 'producing', I had
to run down the correct flight of stairs
and burst through the studio
door at an opportune moment. If I ran down the wrong flight of stairs
(the ones with no swipe card access to the building's interior) I would have to run all the way down
to ground floor and take the lift up to Level 3.
It took several months - a year perhaps - for a window
to be cut into the tiny Radio New Zealand
Concert studio so that I
could communicate with the presenter. An able in-house technician wired
up a talkback circuit, and for the next six years I contentedly
monitored the live show through a pair
of $30 computer speakers.
I recently visited Radio New Zealand, and was pleased to note that - while that same dark box with
a window is still the Radio New Zealand
Concert live-to-air studio - the current producer has
upgraded to speakers that looked something like $50-60.
Mr Boscawen, I don't tell you this story to denigrate my former colleagues at Radio New Zealand,
or the work they do. I am proud of what we achieved between
2001 and 2007. We made radio out of
grit, out of determination and out
of the belief that public service broadcasting was of great benefit
to
ourselves and our fellow New Zealanders. I tell you this story in the
hope that you will better
understand that the treasure, the taonga, of
Radio New Zealand in all its broadcasting and online
streams, is the
people who work there, the ideas that are voiced there, the thinking
that goes on in
our country on account of what comes out of those studios. Radio New Zealand is a voice for all our
communities, be they
large and commercially robust, or unique and fragile. Besides, if you
tried to
sell Radio New Zealand Concert, what would its saleable assets
actually be? If you made the
network start charging commercially for
radio coverage, which of our country's Classical music
institutions and emerging composers and performers would be able to pay anyway?
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