hello and welcome to my easy to understand guide to newsbeat on a radio with a focus on audiences this video is going to be particularly relevant for you if you are studying aqa a-level media studies as newsbeat is currently a set text on that specification newsbeat has a primarily young target audience so mostly people from kind of 15 up to around 30 to 35. so let's have a think about how they target that particular age group the hosts of the show are primarily people in their 20s with a few in their 30s and having those primarily young people actually hosting newsbeat really helps to engage a young audience it gives them somebody that they can relate to the hosts of the show the presenters try and present things in reasonably simple easy to understand ways so lots of chunked information quite simple headlines and explanations and that includes those particularly complex stories that come out about things like politics climate change finance so they really try and explain it in a way that young people can actually access that information they focus on the news show on aspects of things like celebrities you know that element of elite people in terms of news values so lots of stories about celebrities um and other famous people and that helps to make it more appealing too they cover a variety of content not just kind of mainstream news they also look at entertainment news sports news for example they even cover gaming and the issues that are going on within the gaming industry they do focus a lot on issues that affect young people so for example they always do a story every results day about what's going on in terms of gcc and a-level results because they know that a lot of young people are going to be interested in hearing about that young people often quite like to be active audiences and they like to get involved and so newsbeat actually has to offer some interactive content so for example on the bbc website they actually invite young audiences to submit their own ideas for stories and content um they invite people on social media to comment and like and share and take part in things like polls and advice and q a sessions so trying to engage audiences through the use of interactive content obviously the hope is that these audiences are going to take the preferred reading but some audiences are going to take the negotiated and oppositional reading because you can't please everybody there are some audiences who comment on social media that they don't like the show that they think the news is dumbed down because there is this assumption that young people won't understand more complex news and some audiences really don't like that some audiences are less liberal and don't like the fact that some of the content seems to be targeted at more kind of left-wing liberal young people um and so some people don't really like the political ideologies of some of the stories newsbeat bulletins are very short two to three minutes really max and that is because we as unfortunately the assumption is that young people just don't have the attention span for anything longer sorry so keeping the bulletins very short to try and engage young audiences newsbeat is broadcast on bbc radio across three different stations so the first station is on is bbc radio one radio one has a target audience of around 15 to 25 15 to 30 year olds so it's a great way of targeting young people the second station is broadcast on is bbc radio one extra which again targets young people but with a focus on trying to particularly engage uh young people from ethnic minority backgrounds uh in particular from black backgrounds and the third station is broadcast on is the bbc asian network radio station and again that's got a young target audience of under 35 year olds with a focus on people from asian backgrounds so the target audience is primarily young people but from quite a diverse ethnic background because they're funded by license fees rather than advertisers they don't have to bring in massive audiences to make advertisers happy it means they can afford to take risks because their money is coming in from license fees regardless of how many listeners they have they can make programs that perhaps are more niche have smaller more specific audiences than perhaps more mainstream commercial radio could there are longer bulletins at 12 45 and at 5 45 and those time slots seem to suggest that they think that young people are more likely to be listening with more time on their hands then and that could be to do with the timings of things like lunch breaks whether that's at school or from jobs and also the time that people might be getting home from work or sitting down to do homework there are less bulletins at the weekend and that is because they the understanding is that a lot of young people will be out uh socializing and they're not going to be listening to the radio at that time if you miss a broadcast you can catch up with it on bbc sounds so this idea that you can catch up at any time reflects the increasing popularity of audiences wanting content on demand and not really wanting to fit into a particular schedule the bbc are trying to think about targeting a wider more global audience they already have the bbc world service which is a kind of channel that is used to target a more global audience and sell british bbc content to other countries and at the moment they're thinking of starting a kind of global version of newsbeat on bbc world service so that's something later this year that might help to target a more global audience bbc radio obviously have their own news offices and in theory i guess they could use those journalists and that content and those offices and resources to create the content for newsbeat but actually newsbeat had their own individual office staffed by younger people and i suppose that's because they realize that their content really does have to be different in terms of the way it's written and who it's written by because of who it's written for um so you know the bbc obviously have the facilities and resources to be able to do that the bbc hope i guess that listening to newsbeat on you know bbc radio one extra and on the asian network etcetera or listening to the newsbeat bulletins online is going to be a way to try and direct those young audiences into the rest of the bbc radio channels as they get older kind of graduating them on to the mainstream news programs and to the other content on the radio stations you know if you want to keep that audience and don't forget a lot of audiences now that particularly younger audiences aren't listening to the radio anymore so trying to get them involved with short simple easy to understand news bulletins in the hope that as those audiences get older they will stick with the bbc brand so that was my easy to understand guide to bbc's newsbeat program and audiences don't forget to check out my channel for other videos about newsbeat and the rest of the a-level media studies set texts if you have any comments or questions or you would like a specific video please leave a little comment below and i will see what i can do