The national question

Newstalk is prepared for an uphill struggle when it goes national on Friday, chief executive Elaine Geraghty, tells Bernice Harrison

Three days earlier than originally planned, and only five months after winning the licence, Newstalk goes national on Friday. While it has been a Dublin talk radio station for the past four years, serving up a mix of magazine programmes as well as news and current affairs, Newstalk is not an entirely unknown quantity outside the capital - thanks in part to larger-than-life key presenters, Eamon Dunphy (who has now moved to RTÉ) and TV rugby pundit George Hook. They gave the Newstalk brand national exposure, but the test will be whether listeners around the country looking for quality talk radio can be convinced to turn off the likes of Pat, Marian, Joe and Ryan and look for Newstalk on the dial - it's on FM between 106-108 - and tune in to a new set of voices.

"We recognise it's going to be uphill; we don't have any super-inflated ideas," says the station's chief executive Elaine Geraghty. Despite having spent more than 20 years working in the media, the Dublin woman has no public profile. She doesn't normally do interviews.

"I was asked around the time I got this job a year ago, and when we won the licence in May, and of course there's the female chief executive angle, but I'm not interested in promoting myself."

At 44, the career path she's taken couldn't have been planned. After the Leaving Cert in Holy Faith Clontarf, her first real job was as a receptionist in the Sunday Tribune. "University was not an option for me."

She stayed six years, moving into sales and marketing. In 1989, Denis O'Brien won the licence to set up 98FM and she left the newspaper business to move in to the operations side of radio. She's been an O'Brien employee ever since. At 98FM, she says she learned about brand building and what listeners want. While she went in on the marketing end, she found herself presenting the station's breakfast show for six years. When that programme ended she stayed at 98FM a little longer, working part-time while completing an MBA in DIT, specialising in marketing. A move into O'Brien's Communicorp group followed after it acquired radio stations in eastern Europe, and then she was offered the top job at Newstalk. She lives with her husband in Malahide, Co Dublin.

There was never any doubt that, when the the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI) announced it was going to award a commercial talk radio licence with a national reach, Newstalk would be first in with a submission. Geraghty's job was to pitch for and win the licence (no one else pitched for it). Then, as soon as it was awarded in May, there was speculation as to whom Geraghty would be poaching for her new line-up of presenters.

The assumption was that her first hunting trip would be to Montrose to lure some of RTÉ's big names, because a national station needs nationally recognised heavy hitters. Today FM had been there before when it started up, bagging Ian Dempsey and Ray D'Arcy, who are now that station's big audience grabbers. That speculation intensified when Eamon Dunphy announced he was leaving Newstalk. It was, Geraghty admits, an unexpected blow. She expected him to be there for another year.

"We looked at everybody, and I mean everybody, of course we did," says Geraghty. She confirms she did meet Joe Duffy. "But that was back in January or February and we had a meeting and we went our separate ways," she explains, carefully avoiding stating whether an offer was made or rejected.

When the new schedule was announced earlier this month it held no great surprises, either in terms of presenters or programme formats. There were no stars unexpectedly thrown in the mix. Commentators looking at the Newstalk formula have always remarked that it is personality driven - as if other stations aren't. But that theory ignores the way RTÉ has built up and promoted its top personalities on a national level, being in the unique position of being able to do so by giving them TV programmes. It was also able to put their faces in the RTÉ Guide.

Newstalk's version of personality-driven broadcasting is that it takes on strong presenters and lets them off the leash. "We won't always be balanced," she says. The station doesn't have to worry about a public service remit. The new presenters do, however, all have some national profile. Journalist and barrister Brenda Power has a late-morning phone-in show and the calls won't, Geraghty says, "be just people moaning".

Former RTÉ reporter Eamon Keane is taking on the lunchtime news-driven slot and Irish Times journalist Róisín Ingle will present a two-hour Saturday morning show. There will be a small number of documentaries ("they're very expensive"), a history programme, and a current affairs programme as Gaeilge. As for existing big names Sean Moncrieff, Orla Barry and George Hook, "they'll have some tweaking for a national audience but they don't need major surgery".

Twelve stringer reporters from around the country have been contracted to feed in stories across all programmes, and other editorial appointments to the famously lean station have included RTÉ old hand Ronan O'Donoghue, who was a producer on the Gay Byrne radio show. For the station to reach its first-year targets, all shows - from Sean Moncrieff's afternoon slot to the Off the Ball daily sports slot - will have to increase their listenerships four-fold.

When it comes to news coverage, Newstalk stole a march on the national stations twice this year. During the Dublin riots in February, while RTÉ continued its leisurely Saturday schedule, missing the gravity of events on O'Connell Street, Newstalk scrapped its schedule and broadcast live from the streets throughout the day. And when Mary Harney resigned as leader of the Progressive Democrats, Newstalk got there first, interrupting its programming to broadcast the press conference live.

"That is one of our strengths: people don't have to go through three layers of managers to make a decision, if there's a big news story we can respond to it immediately." It's a boast that might prove more difficult when the action is further away and the station is relying on part-time reporters.

There's an adage in radio that if you win breakfast, you win the day. Sports editor Ger Gilroy is taking over from Dunphy, co-presenting The Breakfast Show with former TV3 newsreader Claire Byrne. There's been a major glitch though. Geraghty confirms that Byrne's contractual arrangements with TV3 mean she won't be available until the end of November.

"She's worth waiting for," says Geraghty, making the best of what must be a fraught situation. Meanwhile, Gilroy will continue alone.

RTÉ isn't the only competition. There's local radio - "Local do local best, we won't be competing with them," she says.

In the evening, the drivetime slot is up against not just Mary Wilson on RTÉ Radio 1 but the increasingly popular The Last Word with Matt Cooper on Today FM. He has 180,000 listeners and a strong listenership outside Dublin, particularly in Newstalk's target audience of 25- to 44-year-olds. The new audience will also, she says, come from people in that age group who are tired of listening to music stations and want some news and current affairs but who aren't served by the older-focused RTÉ Radio 1.

The stakes are high. Newstalk has already lost more than €14 million, and the national licence, if it works, gives the station its only chance to turn itself around. In its submission to the BCI, it projected a 4 per cent share of the Republic's radio market in its first year, delivering revenues of €8.4 million. After five years, its projected sales would have climbed to €12 million, to deliver, in year five, operating profits of €720,000. Accumulated losses at this stage would amount to €14.8 million and ramping up to go national will cost more than €6 million.

"Our shareholders are patient people but they can't be expected to be patient indefinitely," says Geraghty, acutely aware of the commercial bottom line. "Every single person on the station is the same," she says. "If you're not fighting for your audience every single day, then you're not doing your job."

Bernice Harrison's Radio Review appears every Saturday in The Irish Times WeekendReview