The JNLRs tell us young people love radio. Seriously?

Last week, as usual, Irish media dutifully reported on the latest quarterly results from the Joint National Listenership Research, better known as the JNLRs, which measure the popularity of every radio programme and every radio station in the State on a regular basis.

You will be familiar with the drill: Headshots of well-known presenters. Boldface numbers indicating the thousands of listeners each one has gained or lost since the last survey.

Every three months these numbers are published and every three months they are solemnly treated as a matter of some consequence.

Last Thursday, for example, we were informed that the most dramatic winner was Oliver Callan’s RTÉ Radio 1 show, with 355,000 listeners, an increase of 6,000 since the last survey. By my calculation, that’s a rise of 1.72 per cent. No margin of error is provided.

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The JNLRs are carried out by Ipsos MRBI, one of the world’s most reputable polling firms. The results are based, we are told, on a representative sample of 16,000 Irish people over the age of 15. That is many multiples of the sample sizes used in the party political polls that are carried out by this newspaper and others. The methodology is long established and apparently robust.

And the listenership numbers reported by the JNLRs are generally positive. One might even call them boosterish.

Take the country’s most popular radio show, Morning Ireland. Last week‘s JNLRs put its average listenership at 471,000. Back in 2015, with the breathless enthusiasm that characterises its press releases on the subject, RTÉ expressed its delight that Morning Ireland had recorded 433,000 listeners. Go back a further five years to 2010, when the twin death rays of smartphones and social media were just starting to be trained on Irish media, and Morning Ireland’s number was 449,000.

Most other high-profile shows (yes, they’re all still around, albeit sometimes with different names attached) have seen similar stability or even slight growth over the past 15 years. Compared to what’s happened to the rest of linear media over the same period, this is a remarkable feat. Newspaper print circulation has more than halved in the same timespan, while live television is down at least a third.

Those declines were driven by inexorable technological and demographic shifts. Older audiences are loyal but dying. Younger ones prefer other options: YouTube, Spotify, podcasts, Instagram, TikTok et al.

So that younger cohort should be a real pressure point as it is for TV, where it’s dropping like a stone. However, last week‘s JNLRs tell a happier story: 68 per cent of 15-34-year-olds listen to radio each weekday. Daily weekday listening levels for what the JNLR press release describes as the “hard-to-reach 15-24-year-old cohort” is also “very impressive” (their words) with 64 per cent listening each weekday. Overall, 15-34 year-olds apparently listen to radio for 188 minutes every day.

I don’t know which teens and twentysomethings the researchers are talking to, but they’re not the ones I know. They wouldn’t know what to do with a radio if you handed them one. The idea they’d listen to it three hours a day is laughable.

Business podcaster Conall O Móráin has been questioning the accuracy of these numbers without getting a satisfactory answer beyond “large sample” and “robust methodology”. His frustration is reflected in the title of the piece he posted on LinkedIn in response to last Thursday’s survey: “I’m giving up commenting on the JNLRs”.

The post compares the JNLR’s numbers with those of the highly reputable Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) survey, the national longitudinal study of children and young people, which is run by the Central Statistics Office.

According to the GUI, 15-23-year-olds on average sleep for eight hours daily, are in education for eight more hours and view screens for six hours.

“Add in basics like eating, washing, sport and socialising and that’s it,” O Móráin says. “It’s all over for the 24-hour day. Fifteen to 23 year olds just don’t have time listen to radio – and certainly not for 188 minutes a day.”

For years, O Móráin and a few others have been treating the JNLRs with scepticism. And for years, the radio and advertising industries who fund the survey have defended it. That is beginning to look untenable.

Perhaps because the JNLRs are seen as a fluffy item with celebrity appeal and a handy narrative of who’s up and who’s down, the JNLRs have largely escaped serious scrutiny.

After all, media companies have always engaged in puffery, massaging their circulation, web analytics and subscription numbers to show themselves in the best possible light.

But the JNLRs are different, or should be. For one thing they claim to offer objective industry-wide data. For another, two of their sources of finance are the publicly funded RTÉ and the State media regulator Coimisiún na Meán.

Both make much of their commitment to tackling misinformation wherever it occurs. So they might stir themselves to explore the glaring contradictions between the depiction of young adult lifestyles in the JNLRs and the reality which most of us can see with our own eyes and which is confirmed by the GUI research.

If the survey results for 15-34-year-olds don’t make sense – and that’s what it looks like to me – then what price the rest of the JNLRs?

If there is a problem with the methodology, such as (I’m being charitable here) a confusion between name recognition and actual time spent listening to a show, then how can we trust all those ups and downs for Morning Ireland and the rest?

More to the point, why should we care? Even if these tiny shifts from survey to survey can be trusted and are of some use to broadcasters and advertisers, they’re meaningless for the rest of us.

It’s hard not to see the whole thing as a dated marketing wheeze masquerading as a news item, with a side order of statistics that don’t add up.