What's so special about radio?

This wouldn’t happen in any other medium: an elderly Auschwitz survivor called LBC radio to tell the presenter, Nick Ferrari, about her experiences in the camp as a child. She then told Ferrari she hadn’t even been able to talk about Auschwitz to some members of her own family.

Ferrari told the story on a Media Society panel about radio. Along with presenters Paul Gambaccini (above) and Sue MacGregor, the panel was chaired by the radio critic Gillian Reynolds. They enthused about the unique intimacy of radio, its flexibility as a medium, and its ability to present both human emotion and intellectual argument more vividly than television, print or online media.

Two BBC executives on the panel, Mary Hockaday and Jonathan Wall, encouraged people wanting to get into radio to stick to their ambitions and make use of the new online opportunities in audio, such as podcasting, to learn their skills and build an audience.

Hockaday also advised applicants to listen to a lot of radio. For Gambaccini, the key to getting on in presenting is “self-knowledge” – the ability to understand where you’ll fit in.