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Becoming an Employed Graduate in London

On Friday 12th July 2013, I graduated with a first class BA (Honors) degree in Film, Television and Radio Studies from Staffordshire University. But let’s back up a bit. The story of me becoming employed starts before then!

During Cre8 Radio’s broadcast in May/June, a lecturer from Sunderland University was visiting student radio stations around the country and came to Staffs Uni to see what we got up to. Fred Marden is also a contact of a good friend of mine, Christopher Smith. Fred had got in contact with Christopher about a position at a company called All In Media. Christopher didn’t really fancy it but suggested I might be.

aimlogoSo Fred passed on the details of the job, along with the CEO of the company, Chris Gould. I sent my CV to Chris and the conversations led to me meeting up with him and CTO Jason Malaure in London. We spoke about what the company gets up to, its future and where I might be able to fit in with that. The meeting was on Thursday 26th June and on the Monday, I undertook a small task Chris set me. I apparently passed with flying colours as I was offered the job the same day

I took a couple of days to consider the offer and way up what it meant for me, before accepting it. I thought about where I might live, how I’d get to the office and also what life would be like near London. Fortunately someone I met at Essex International Jamboree posted a tweet saying they were looking for a fourth housemate, just 5 minutes away from London Euston.

By Thursday 4th July, every was sorted. I had a new job, a new place to live and a first class degree to celebrate!

WP_20130712_006On the following Friday (12th) I celebrated my graduation at Trentham Gardens with the class of 2013 from Staffordshire University. My mum, dad, sister, grandparents and auntie were all there and we had a great day.

We traveled back to Spalding the following day, before moving me into my new house in the Borough of Camden on the Sunday morning.

On Monday morning (15th), I headed off to my first day at Quality Assurance Engineer for All In Media. It was a pretty busy couple of days!

So I’ve just finished the first week at the company and it has been fantastic. I’ve got involved in the development of a load of apps, and I’ve been working heavily on a couple of apps in particular. I look forward to what lays ahead for me at the company and I can’t wait to get more involved as time goes on.

What makes the job offer from AIM even sweeter, is that a couple of days beforehand I got an offer from another company in London. They contacted me first, after they saw a project I worked briefly on. Being head hunted is rather exciting! I visited them for a day; got to know the team, how they worked and where the company was heading. At the end of the day they presented me with a t-shirt and also an offer. They were really lovely people and I could see great potential in the company, but it just wasn’t for me. I failed one of their tasks that they set me, yet they still invited me to their offices. They obviously saw something in me. But the role wasn’t really what I wanted and I don’t think I’d enjoy it. Writing my email to them to turn down their offer was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do as of late. But I learnt a lot about the recruitment process with them.

So here I am. I’m in London, with a full time job at a great company which is going places and taking on great projects.

View from the bridge over the Thames, which I have to cross to get to the office.
View from the bridge over the Thames, which I have to cross to get to the office.

I know others who graduate this summer won’t be as fortunate as I’ve been, but the positions are out there. Some people have asked why I haven’t gone into a radio station for a job. The answer being because I love being part of a company that assists stations in doing what they do.

My advice to anyone coming out with a degree, is to open your scope a bit more. See what positions are laying around your ideal job. Who knows, maybe that job that isn’t directly linked to what happens on air may get you closer into the station than you think.

Watch this space! I’m sure I’ll post news about what apps I’m working on soon; both on here and on Twitter via @OliverNeedham.

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Preparing for Poacher FM at Poacher International Scout & Guide Camp

PoacherFM-twitter-flatThis summer I’ve taken on a project which is very exciting but will also test my organisational skills.

In June 2011, a childhood friend Christopher Smith (Head of Media & Marketing) asked me if I’d like to be the station manager for an RSL to run at the Poacher International Scout & Guide Camp in 2013. At first I thought “That’s years away! I don’t know what I’ll be doing then!”, but I said yes anyway and here we are!

To prepare for the task of managing a radio station aimed at the Scouts, Guides and leaders at such an event, I went along to the Essex International Jamboree in August 2012. I had a great time with the Scout Radio team and also learnt a lot about what can be expected from an RSL covering a Scout or Guide camp. I also looked at how they were doing things and how I could possibly do them different to suit our campsite and audience size.

Poacher 2013 - Roundel RedSo firstly, what is ‘Poacher’? It’s a camp for Scouts and Guides from all over the world in the setting of the Lincolnshire Showground, near Lincoln, England, UK. It happens every four years, and I attended the event when I was younger (2004?). However they decided to postpone it a year, as it should’ve happened last year. I think it was because of the London Olympics and that EIJ was also happening that they decided to delay it.

Because Ramadan means there are so many more RSLs throughout the UK, Ofcom decided to setup a small application window for RSLs that wish to broadcast during July and August 2013 (read more). We went through the process, and thought that historically there are usually only RSLs from the Showground during the summer months in Lincoln, so we wouldn’t have an issue. We were proven correct as there was only application for an RSL in the Grange-de-Lings area; ours.

Earlier this month we received confirmation of our broadcast, which will take place on 87.9FM, with the full wattage available to us.

So how will we be broadcasting from the Lincolnshire Showground?

Fortunately we have the use of the EPIC Centre, which is a permanent structure, and this will offer us power, internet and a secure place to broadcast from.

Equipment wise, we are hiring in most of the equipment from Radiquip. For playout we are renting Myriad and AutoTrack from P Squared, as both Christopher and I have lots of experience with Myriad and find it a nice experience for presenters (most of the time). We also feel it will enable us to make sure we aren’t  hearing the same 20 songs on repeat thanks to presenters choosing all their own music!

We’re also very excited to be using products with HD Voice for our outside broadcasts. In essence it will be good quality audio, along with reliable signal. It also means that we’re being very ambitious with some of our show plans.

On top of that, of course we’ve been making sure we get the right broadcasting licences from Ofcom along with PRS and MCPS.

The most recent activity has been surrounding our actual on air content. Presenters have been asked for their opinions on the schedule and I’ve been speaking to some of them about what will happen during their shows. I’ve also been working on our on air imaging, where Christopher has been recording voice overs with some students from Sunderland.

In addition to broadcasting live, we’re also planning to do PoD; Poacher on Demand. It will be a podcast type format, which is posted via our AudioBoo channel. These ‘PoDs’ will contain highlights from throughout the broadcast, as well as anything extra that we don’t find time to play on air.

Another feature of our AudioBoo account will be the option for camp participants and parents of those participants to share voice messages with us. They simply record them into our channel and then we’ll moderate them before being played on air. We hope to embed this into the Poacher smartphone app. We also envisage people recording request messages via the platform, which we can then play straight on air.

So overall things are coming along nicely. There’s still a few of the finer details to work through, but with an 11 strong team, I’m very much looking forward to the week!

Poacher FM will be broadcasting from Saturday 27th July to Saturday 3rd August 2013, on 87.9FM and also online via the Poacher website.

#NowPlaying: It’s You by Duck Sauce

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WordPress for Radio Stations – More plugins, themes and ideas

In July 2012, I did a post about using WordPress to build a radio station website.

This post builds upon what was discussed in there, bringing in some new plugins and themes as well as news about future WordPress releases that will affect radio stations.

Themes

As usual, there are literally thousands of themes out there.

My main source of themes is ThemeForest. The new design for Cre8 Radio‘s website is a theme I bought from there and customised.

The only downside to any theme collection website is that sometimes you don’t get a feel for the features until you’ve actually bought it. If there  is the option to log in and play around with the ‘Theme Options’ panel, do so. You will get a better feel for how easy/hard it is to customise, as well as see if it truly have what you’re looking for.

On Twitter, why not search for “WordPress themes” or something similar. You may have to be picky with what links you click, but there are some gems out there. It’s just finding what you’re after.

The other option is to build your own. This can be a difficult process if you don’t already know how to use PHP or the WordPress loop system. My first attempt at designing a WordPress theme from scratch was the KingsStock Music Festival website, which uses Twitter Bootstrap as a framework for coding structure.

Plugins

There were was a great plugin suggestion on my previous post which I will give a mention here.

Radio Station – WordPress.org/plugins

This is based on Drupul’s ‘Station‘ plugin. It has some pretty neat features and means you can do things with playlists, the role of ‘DJ’ for users and widgets which generate the current ‘DJ’ on air.

I tried it out on an RSL station’s website and found that it was difficult to work with at times. That might have been because I wanted to really customise how it looked and how the widgets were laid out.

I can see the promise in the plugin, however things like the presenter profiles didn’t work for me out the box and I couldn’t find a way to fix it.

If there was an update or explanation for this error, then I may have continued to use it, but it’s certainly one to watch.

Audio/Video Plugins

There are some big changes coming to WordPress 3.6 which mean we can dispense with many of the audio or video plugins.

I previously mentioned that WordPress Audio Player plugin, which uses a shortcode to generate an audio player of your choice.

However, I’ve been playing around with MediaElement.js for my live streaming players (see Cre8 Radio and One Media Radio).

Previously there was a plugin which brought that library within the WordPress system, however it will soon be within the core of WP!

Audio/Video support in WordPress Core

With MediaElement.js within the core of WordPress, it means we no longer need to have plugins to generate those players for (many) podcasts or short clips that give context to a post.

Instead we can simply type audio src="audio-source.mp3" (in square brackets) and the player with MP3 will appear. It even supports WAV and OGG files. You can specify just one or all of the file types and the WP core will handle how the file is delivered to the user.

It even works in IE7! And can deliver native player options to devices such as iOS or Android.

It remains to be seen how exactly we’ll be able to manipulate the library or even if there is any visual customisation, but it is certainly a step to help us use less plugins!

You can read more about MediaElement.js in WordPress Core over on the Make WordPress Core blog.

Post Formats in WP 3.6

Along with audio/video support, WordPress 3.6 will add post formats.

The theme I use on this site has post formats built in, but now WP have added that to the core.

For radio stations, it will help you distinguish audio content, from YouTube videos and galleries of photos from community events you’ve popped along to.

New themes will be able to harness this information and display content differently and interesting ways. Imagine how easy galleries could become!

I was really excited to read the post I mentioned above about Post Formats in WP 3.6, however they have now been pulled from the core and will instead live as a plugin.

Post formats are powerful for radio stations as it will help you distinguish audio content, from YouTube videos and galleries of photos from community events you’ve popped along to.

I’m not entirely sure how this will now work, but it should enable us to make interesting content easy to find and display. Again, this is a topic that might be worth a watch.

Conclusion

Hopefully this post has given you some more food for thought.

What could the future of WordPress mean for radio stations? Will it make our lives easier or make us work harder for the medium we love? That remains to be seen.

But as always if you have any more plugin, theme or ideas to suggest, then feel free to comment below or pop me an email at oliver@oliverneedham.co.uk

 

Article image: Erik Pettersson / Flickr

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