Our job as Broadcast Managers is different from other jobs because it makes us close to the people. We have the mandate of being the Watch dog of the people; to always ask what and why and again what and why.

Pages: 178 pages
Price: On request
Published by: AIBD

The book can be downloaded as a PDF file.

This handbook is intended for broadcasting managers in the developing world and emerging democracies of Asia. It is sponsored by the Asia-Pacific Institute for Broadcast Development (AIBD) and the Thomson Foundation (UK). The author’s involvement with management consultancy and managerial training for both organisations suggests that, with the exception of a handful of countries, newly appointed managers in the region’s broadcasting companies are often recruited without any previous experience of managing people, resources or programmes.

Management training is limited to the fortunate few since only a minority of organisations have a budget line for training at all, while international funding agencies have their slim resources extended beyond any possibility of fulfilling this particular need.
This handbook attempts to provide senior managers who are unskilled
in various key sectors of the industry with the main areas in which to concentrate attention. A senior manager is required to be “a Jack of all trades and a master of none”. But at least he/she should always be in a position to question the activities of every department in the company on critical issues of the highest priority to the broadcaster’s aims and objectives.

The author is aware that many readers have English as a second or
third language and every attempt has been made to avoid academic or
technical jargon. No provision is made for in-depth knowledge of any
single branch of the industry but the manual offers a broad perspective based on the concerns expressed by dozens of senior and middle managers in seminars all over Asia in recent years.

Senior managers require very different levels of expertise in their
executive team. The chapters on news management, finance and human
resources have benefited from additional perspectives of experts in those increasingly technical areas. I am grateful to Philip A. Davies and Jeff Dawes, both of whom were managers of BBC departments of Finance and Human Resources respectively, as well as Russell Lyne, the experienced journalist and Head of Regional Development in the Thomson Foundation. I also thank Graham Mytton, a former head of
BBC World Service Audience Research, for his Appendix on this subject and Michael Betton, Manager of Lincs FM, a British commercial radio group, for his thoughts on raising advertising revenue. Finally my thanks to Javad Mottaghi for encouraging me to write this handbook; to Janet Boston, my successor as Director of the Thomson Foundation for allowing me the use of the Foundation’s facilities; to Manil Cooray, Programme Manager of AIBD who has seen the book through to publication; and to Poranee James, my personal assistant at the Foundation for 15 years, for typing it all for this technical dinosaur.