As you may know, it’s the fiftieth anniversary of the Today programme on Radio 4 this week, and there have been one or two pieces about it. A large piece in The Observer and something written by presenter John Humphrys himself in The Mail on Sunday.
All very interesting, but the Mail piece has a nice little table showing how the Today programme “beats all its rivals in radio AND TV news.”
The chart shows that the Today programme has an audience of 6 million, followed by the BBC Ten O’Clock news with 5.5 million and the BBC Six O’Clock News with 4 million alongside Tonight, With Trevor McDonald also with 4 million.
But is this a fair comparison?
Well, no.
You see, while current RAJAR figures (the industry ratings body) show that three hour Today has an audience of 6.2 million 15+ adults, that’s actually a weekly “reach” figure. In other words, that’s the number of different people who listen to the programme for at least five minutes across the course of a week. Not everybody listens to the programme every day. And they certainly don’t listen to every minute of that three hours. According to the most recent figures it gets:
4.7m on Monday
4.7m on Tuesday
4.6m on Wednesday
4.6m on Thursday
4.5m on Friday
(The slight decline across the week is probably not true, and is slightly symptomatic of the research methodology, with less scrupulous completion of listening diaries later in the week).
But that’s not the end either. Generally quoted TV audience figures are not “reach” figures, but are actually the average number of viewers over the duration of the full duration of the programme. For example, last Friday’s BBC Ten O’Clock News had an audience figure of 4.1m viewers, but in fact in the 22:00-22:15 period it was 4.0m and in the 22:15-22:30 period it was 4.6m. Since ratings are averaged out on a minute by minute basis, this actually leads to an overall 4.1m figure (In this instance I suspect that the increased number later in the news are people tuning in to watch Jonathan Ross after the news as it got a larger audience than the news).
But we know that it “reached” – at least for a short period – 4.6m viewers, and we can safely assume some of those who watched the first fifteen minutes of the programme did not watch the second fifteen minutes of the programme. So the overall reach of the programme will be higher than 4.6m (I don’t have a full TV ratings system to supply the precise number).
Obviously that 4.1m figure for the Ten O’Clock News is divergent from the 5.5m figure quoted by the Mail, but Fridays are likely to be lower rated than other days of the week with more people out, and it’s not clear where the Mail figures were sourced from or over what period. But by way of comparison, the audiences for last week were:
4.7m on Monday
4.4m on Tuesday
4.7m on Wednesday
5.4m on Thursday
4.1m on Friday
Note that these are “overnights” and don’t include anybody who might have recorded the news for later viewing (as unlikely as that might seem, there are sure to be some), and the full “reach” is likely to be a bit higher.
Suddenly, on a day by day basis, the Today programme’s audience is much closer to the BBC Ten O’Clock News’s figures, with the TV programme regularly being seen by more people than those who hear some of the Today Programme.
I’m not sure that even Humphrys quite understands the differences:
“Its audience is healthier than it has ever been, at well over six million regular listeners. Most television producers would sell their grannies into slavery for ratings like this.”
I should also point out that TV and radio use entirely different methodologies for collating their figures – with radio using a sample of around 130,000 people a year keeping paper diaries for a week at a time, while television uses a panel of around 5,500 homes that have boxes attached to their TV sets monitoring what they watch. Now is not the time to get into this further – perhaps I’ll save that for another blog entry – but you should be very wary of comparing figures gathered using different methodologies.
So the moral of this story? Don’t compare apples with pears. Radio and TV audience figures are calculated using very different methodologies, and the resulting numbers – even basic audience figures – are not directly comparable.