Radio: get the look

RadioCentre recently released a series of professionally-shot images like this. Each one shows today’s people listening to today’s radio on today’s devices in today’s Britain.

They’re about normal everyday life accompanied by radio because that’s how radio works. But why was this necessary?

The trouble is, if a time-pressured journalist runs a quick search for “radio” on a stock image library, this is the gallery of sadness that confronts them:

Getty

Adobe Stock

Other image libraries are available, and equally depressing.

International radio futurologist James Cridland agrees. He has a polite but persistent campaign against the lazy and inappropriate use of old wireless pics in the media. In his weekly email dispatches he names and shames the culprits.

It matters because all those dials and Bakelite might suggest to some that radio is stuck in the past. Being a futurologist, James can look back from the future and see that’s not true.

Eargasm

Client director at the UK’s Radiocentre, Lucy Barrett has a further pet hate:

“We regularly despair at seeing stories about radio accompanied by antique radios or pictures of perfect Hollywood youths having “eargasms”.”

This kind of thing, Lucy?

In addition I’ll suggest that no picture of an empty radio studio is ever more engaging than one of people enjoying radio.

MediaTel’s reporting of record commercial radio revenues was accompanied by just such a studio shot:

Brilliant news about radio’s rising revenues but not the most relevant picture under the circumstances, given that it shows a studio at the BBC.

The best way to avoid all these pitfalls is to use the photographs from RadioCentre. If you write or present about radio please do your bit. Here’s the full set to download.

Radio is taking responsibility for its own portrayal. All we need now is for these images to float to the top of the stock library search indices.