Dutch commercial station BNR Nieuwsradio has unveiled a new membership scheme to raise money from its listeners. This follows an announcement on Thursday by FD Mediagroep, the parent company of BNR, of 49 redundancies. The radio station will also be affected, with cuts in its afternoon programming. BNR Nieuwsradio has a weekly reach of just 550,000 listeners, but its listeners are very loyal and its market share is stable.
Editor-in-Chief Paul van Gessel commented that “It would help tremendously if minister Plasterk [the minister responsible for the media] shows as much nerve as French president Sarkozy, and makes public broadcasting advertising-free. Then more advertisement money would come to us.”
It’s not yet clear what BNR will offer to those willing to become members. “Perhaps a big fan day”, according to Mr van Gessel. “But for the time being we can offer 365 days of good radio; isn’t that beautiful enough?”
(Source: ANP)
Andy Sennitt comments: It will be interesting to see what response the station gets from its listeners, who tend to be better-educated and more affluent than average. Despite the economic downturn, there still seems to be plenty of money about, as religious station GrootNieuwsRadio found out when it successfully appealed for donations to stay on the air.
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on Feb 14th, 2009 at 15:51
Paul van Gessel has a good point that banning commercials from the pub-service would be very helpful for the commercial stations, but also the public will be better off with commercial free outlets.
Apart from the unfair competion on the advertising market, BNR and others also struggle with the better and gauranteed coverage of its rival Radio 1 (public) and the regulation that pubcaster have a must carry on many platforms like the cable which is also free for them.
Finally the auction procedures of the frequencies are killing BNR and others. (In fact the station has very little value since the licence expires Sept 1 2011)