With news this month that Jules Lund is returning to the airwaves, a 4-6pm show reportedly focused on business, entrepreneurship and innovation on new DAB station Disrupt Radio, Lund was a guest on Luke Darcy’s podcast Empowering Leaders, talking about changes in his on air thinking and output.
Lund said,
“I was getting paid a lot of money for shock value and I’m actually in that moment destabilising. It’s just highly offensive and inappropriate. For me, I was affirmed.
The biggest journey for me is unlearning everything up until that point.”
For all that young radio students are told to “be yourself” on air, we’re also told to push boundaries, up the anti and challenge the rules for the shock value that Lund mentioned. As ratings, profiles and online interaction increases, we too are affirmed while moving increasingly away from ourselves.
Lund used the example of sitting between his old school dad and 13-year-old daughter at the footy and realising that he had to take responsibility to change his language, interactions and habits of behaviour to what he would be happy to have his daughter to hear or witness.
On a totally different note, this weekend one of my favourite writers, who put together opinion pieces for a media masthead, shared the link to her latest offering on Facebook and Instagram.
I went to read the article, to find it was behind a paywall. This annoyed me as while I invest in subscriptions to a couple of newspapers, I can’t and won’t pay for all of them and why share something on socials if bulk of us can’t access it?
Someone obviously commented to her about the paywall and today she’d figured out how to publish the articles for us all to read.
I wondered if the masthead had to grant permission first.
The balance between being accessible as a person, providing free access and granting too much access to something that isn’t really you is a fine line in today’s social media driven environment.
I watched The Social Network for the first time this weekend. Highly recommended. There’s an ongoing debate between Facebook creators Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Garfield’s Eduardo Saverin whether adding advertising to the platform would stop it from being “fun”.
19 out of every 20 things I see on Facebook now are either promotional or advertising, rather than connecting me with a friend, or fun. Fun suggests to me being free of expectations and restrictions, something all social platforms lack with most of the fun TikTok videos now carefully curated and edited before publishing.
Social media platforms too, and media mastheads, are also rigorously and ruthlessly culled of content deemed inappropriate. Most rightly so, but some like NPR’s stoush with Twitter and Stan Grant’s recent resignation from Q&A over repeated racism, deserve more reflection.
Radio, and podcasting might be one of the last places where you can push the envelope freely and for free.
Lund again reflecting on his own experiences,
“(I was) being sleazy, offensive, a bit sexist, a bit racist, a bit, right up until that line where they can’t put a finger on it. That was seen as what gripped, even if people hated listening to you, saying that it was seen as compelling, which is the point of radio.”
Compelling is when I must know what happens next, or what the outcome of something is. This can be a news story unfolding, a cold case being re-examined in a podcast or knowing the conclusion of Queen Charlotte and King George’s relationship in Bridgerton, the last taking me by surprise as to my investment.
It isn’t knowing what words will controversially come out of someone’s mouth, what so and so’s next post on Instagram will be or who won the $1 million prize on X radio station. I might want to know the outcome to the latter if I had entered, but compelling it is not.
Disrupt, via the Oxford Dictionary, means,
- (of a company or form of technology) cause radical change in (an industry or market) by means of innovation,
- interrupt (an event, activity, or process) by causing a disturbance or problem,
- drastically alter or destroy the structure of.
As mentioned, Jules Lund is shortly to begin on Disrupt Radio, alongside Lisbeth Gore and former ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie. I wish them all the best in their plans of compelling and disruptive radio.
