Newstalk targets 350,000 daily listeners by end of year

Newstalk wants an influx of younger listeners and "Pat Kenny loyalists" to make it "the number one talk radio station in the next five years", says station editor Garrett Harte. "That's the ambition."

It is quite the ambition. RTÉ Radio 1 has 849,000 daily listeners compared to Newstalk's 315,000. The Communicorp-owned station's audience is increasing, however, with 21,000 listeners piling on during the final quarter of 2013. "Our target is 350,000 by the end of the year," says Harte.

Because the Joint National Listenership Research survey takes place over the course of a 12-month period, with the figures averaged out for that period, a radio show has to be on air for a year before a true figure for its popularity emerges.

This means it is not yet known how many people are listening to The Pat Kenny Show, which began in September 2013. The last JNLR figure for the slot, which covered eight months of Tom Dunne's show and four of Kenny's, arrived at 96,000, up from Dunne's final survey figure of 55,000.

The next set of JNLR figures, which will be published next Thursday, will cover the period from April 2013 to the end of March this year, and will show another upswing in Kenny’s figure. “We would like to think we would get close to 120,000 [in this survey], but we will definitely get over 100,000,” says Harte.

In the long term, Kenny is eventually expected to bring in more than 150,000 listeners and become the biggest show on the station. That honour is currently held by The Right Hook, which takes 130,000 in the competitive drivetime slot.

But by rights, given the size of the available audience in the morning, Newstalk Breakfast , which has 126,000 listeners, should also overtake George Hook. "Win breakfast and win the day, that's the old radio adage," says Harte.

The target for the show, presented by former Government minister Ivan Yates and Chris Donoghue, is 150,000 listeners. "Much as we have people coming in for Pat, we want to have the building blocks in place for him."

Revised JNLR targets have been “communicated to all teams” on all Newstalk shows, though because of the vague nature of the JNLR data, it is difficult for producers to know which segments and topics have been successful at pulling in listeners.

Producers have also been charged with drumming up interest in local press and community groups in the counties of Roscommon, Longford, Cavan and Monaghan, which are among those where Newstalk is weakest.

“If we were a Dublin station, we would be sitting here drinking whiskey and smoking cigars,” says Harte. “But the further west you go, historically it’s been tough territory for us.”

With well-performing "non-news" shows such as Moncrieff on his schedule, he is keen to "dispel the notion of Newstalk as 'Sky News on radio'", which he thinks is down to the name of the station.

“The name is foreboding, and the listener in Donegal or Sligo is thinking ‘I don’t really want to listen to Sky News on radio’.”

But there is no rebranding on the cards. “The name’s the name. We’re not going to change it now.”