Global Radio axes all regional/local breakfast shows

It does say later in the same paragraph about local touch points and content, so they might just have got the wording mixed up.
Not to say it won't happen sometime soon, but Bauer seem a lot more cautious. That City 1/2/3 concept was a terrible idea.

Quite possibly, although that whole paragraph has now been replaced with 'Hits Radio is an exciting new radio station'. Someone's obviously had a word.



My guess is that they're using Hits Radio Manchester as a guinea pig, and aiming to get that right before rolling the brand out further. There's a lot of tinkering and tweaking going on - another new jingle package this week, for example. What they don't want is to replicate the Rajar slump seen after the rebranding from Key 103 across their whole local radio network. I'd argue though that such a generic name as 'Hits Radio' is a real hindrance when it comes to the all-important recall needed for filling in a Rajar diary. At least Heart, Magic, Kiss, etc. stick in the mind more easily.

Personally I didn't mind the City 1/2/3 concept, but I thought the execution was poor, and I'm not sure BCN 3 had a well-defined enough remit. BCN 2, as a station for listeners to move onto when they're growing out of the core brand's demographic, rather than drifting off to Radio 2, I thought was a sound idea, but it never quite worked for whatever reason.

Isnt that what they do with Greatest Hits? It was tried in Liverpool first (Radio City 2?) and then became a national station with two FM outlets

Yes, Breakfast comes from Liverpool, so they can maintain the minimum of 'local' hours for the local FM licence. The other FM station in the West Midlands has an opt-out drivetime programme.

Which is odd because the station it replaced (Absolute) had no local content other than ads and travel... or I wonder if the local content is to make up for it's loss on Free Radio 80s?


There's a lot of odd license jiggery poker going on, gets very confusing

Radio City 2 was part of the Bauer City 2 network along with the likes of Radio Aire 2, Viking 2, Metro 2, etc.. Radio City 2 was unusual though in that, as London Lite says, it was on FM whilst the others were DAB/AM only, so was a bit more successful and probably considered something of a flagship. I’m not sure it was specifically the model for GHR though.

Radio City 2 was originally only on AM too, but they decided to swap the frequencies of Radio City 2 and City Talk a few months after the 2015 City 1/2/3 rebranding.

The original version of City Talk in the early '90s was closed to make way for what eventually became Radio City 2, so it was a bit like history repeating itself.

Of course there was also the issue of Rock FM 2 being on AM...

As part of the format change to the West Midlands regional licence, Bauer offered local news as part of the deal. Another rule remains that you can only offer a national service on a regional licence if it's on a certain percentage of DAB transmitters, this is usually achieved by being on Digital One, as Absolute and Planet Rock before were.

Indeed, and it didn't play any rock, either.

I think Bauer's 1/2/3 naming policy stemmed from Radio Clyde, who rebranded their split services Clyde 1 FM and Clyde 2 sometime in the early 90s. Other SRH stations followed suit, and I guess it was a logical extension for Bauer to bring them to the rest of the network.

Yes but I think that was because the local output was being carried on Free Radio 80s. The West Mids drivetime presenter was on Free 80s

They essentially swapped the Free 80s license to FM and that became GHR and the rock music license to MW with a simulcast of Absolute Classic Rock