After a hectic summer of preparation, Newstalk goes live on its new schedule on Monday, with changes including refreshed presenting teams on breakfast and drivetime and George Hook moving to midday.
Chief executive Tim Collins, who is overseeing a fresh push for listeners, said he expected "some sense of normality" would soon return to the Newstalk floor of Marconi House in Dublin, as its hard-pressed producers can dispense with making a string of pilot shows and get on with the real thing.
“We have been in the difficult position of running two radio stations over the last few weeks, one on-air and one off-air,” Collins said.
Newstalk, which is owned by Denis O'Brien's Communicorp group, has a 6.3 per cent share of the national radio market and some 380,000 daily listeners. While it wants to increase this tally, Collins has identified overtaking RTÉ Radio 1 in the 25-54-year-old age group as the primary target.
“Obviously, there are risks involved in making all these changes to the schedule at once,” he said. But the media agencies that buy ads and agree sponsorship deals on behalf of advertisers are keen on the idea that it is “doubling down” on a younger, urban audience. “It allows them to go to the brands and say this station has got the right profile.”
Media agency employees tend to be young themselves, which might be why they have expressed personal interest in tuning into the new duo helming drivetime, thirtysomethings Chris Donoghue and Sarah McInerney, "who gelled from day one", said Collins.
"I'm looking forward to getting on air," said Shane Coleman, Newstalk's former political editor, who will be presenting the new breakfast show alongside Colette Fitzpatrick and Paul Williams. They, too, have been rehearsing on mock programmes, complete with dummy interviews, "but obviously there is no substitute to being on air and seeing the red light".
The new breakfast show not only has to replace a proven double act in Ivan Yates and Donoghue, it must go up against Ireland's most listened-to radio programme, the RTÉ Radio 1 institution that is Morning Ireland.
"We want to be just as strong as Morning Ireland on informing listeners of the issues of the day and doing hard-hitting interviews with ministers," said Coleman, "but we're also going to have more personality, more humour, more edge."
Breakfast can be “a pretty gruelling” slot, but with only two of the three presenters on air each day, the alarm clock won’t always have to be set at 4.30am.
Alan Quinlan will anchor the sport, and the retired rugby player will bring "a little bit extra", Coleman promised, "rather than just the results".
As for the cold hard results of this schedule revamp, it will be some time before anyone – Newstalk and its rivals, advertising agencies and their clients – can properly tell. Collins said it would take "several cycles" of the quarterly Joint National Listenership Research (JNLR) ratings survey before it can get a clear idea of its popularity, "not one or two".
