Emily Bell - adapt and survive

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The radio industry is coping better than television in the digital age, says Emily Bell

Who would win a TV Burp-style fight between television and radio? Last week's Rajars suggest that radio is beginning to prosper in a fragmented and rapidly digitising market, while television is suffering doldrum-lag.

Poor Simon Shaps and Paul Jackson, over at ITV, launched a raft of original programming - including the stripped, stranded and whipped Bonkers and Benidorm- to reasonable figures but critical disdain or, worse, indifference. One Spinal Tap-esque tabloid review described Benidormas 'shit'. Or maybe I just imagined that.

Meanwhile, as ITV tries to salvage its ratings with strap-ons, infidelity, teenage pregnancy and discussions of penis size, it seems that on radio all you need is a cheerful disposition, a playlist more Dairylea than urban grime and a couple of cast-off presenters to see your figures soar.

In a market where every medium competes for time, radio listening was up - helped by the fact you can now listen to radio on anything from your mobile phone to a dog's hind leg, if you care to get close enough. There is a lesson here for television for, while nobody would doubt that content is king, the crown prince is definitely consumer experience.

Part of radio's modest success - and the advertising market is still some way from being the mid-1990s cashfest we so fondly remember - has been its ability to recover in the gloaming of obscurity. Take, for instance, the relatively unglamorous Heart FM, which, by dint of hard work and true engagement with the medium, has slipped past Virgin and Capital to be London's most listened-to radio station.

Heart FM's success has been taking presenters who are not in the Jonathan Ross league, such as Jamie Theakston and Harriet Scott, and using them to facilitate good radio, rather than buying in big names and sticking them onto a service denuded of resource. In the marvellous world of DAB and the internet, word of mouth will enable them to grow way beyond their licensed domain.

Conversely, some experts suggest Capital lost its grip because it didn't neutralise the Tarrant factor early enough and that, after the merger with GWR, Ralph Bernard never quite loved the adopted child as much as he did his own.

The radio industry, though hardly revolutionary in some respects, has begun to understand that technology is an enabler rather than an unwelcome barrier or an outright threat. TV is more hampered by the cumbersome nature of its output - the BBC iPlayer only just getting Trust approval at the point where its relevance dwindles to almost nil - so its relationship with web distribution is bound to be more troubled in the short term. TV has yet to properly undergo its own period of consolidation. Radio's experience should teach the mainstream media that adaptation rather than denial is an altogether better strategy.
Emily Bell is editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited