Research Magazine’s Brian Tarran reports that Arbitron’s portable people meter-based radio ratings systems in New York and Philadelphia have been denied accreditation by media auditor the Media Rating Council according to the company’s SEC filings.

Rajar is currently testing these meters in the UK but has released little to no information on its progress.

MediaGuardian reports today on a new ad campaign promoting the benefits of digital radio that will run until Christmas.

Each of the more than 40 ads is introduced and concluded by Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels star Jason Flemyng and feature real members of the public talking about the virtues of digital radio.

The story includes links to four examples:

Pause and rewind if you want to hear back what you were just listening to

Scrolling text, auto tune and a wealth of programming

Five million DAB sets already sold and there’s one for every situation

How easy and user friendly DAB digital radio is

The ads were commissioned by the Digital Radio Development Bureau and produced by Radioville.

View the full story here (registration required).

Our afternoon drive DJ Ben Jones has started cycling now that the weather is good and yesterday we were talking about how much we enjoy riding in Richmond Park.

I mentioned my long Saturday rides into Kent and he mentioned it to the country:

Australian born radio DJ Alan “Fluff” Freeman has died aged 79. In the UK he worked for Radio 1, Radio 2, Capital Radio and Virgin Radio.

According to this MediaGuardian article, Guardian Media Group is relaunching Q96 (Paisley) as 96.3 Rock Radio in January and it will be “the country’s first classic rock radio station”. Well, it might be Scotland’s first but last time I checked they were still part of the UK and therefore served by GCap’s Planet Rock which launched almost seven years ago.

Q96’s current format looks broad enough to allow the change without requiring Ofcom’s approval. They need to maintain “a locally focussed music and information station for the Paisley area” and it should be easy to build a classic rock format that fits their current outline:

The music is mainly a spread of ex-top 40 hits from the 60s to the present day. Current and re-current tracks will never make up more than 45% of the music output.

The rest of the elements such as local news, weather, traffic and travel, what’s on details and regular listener participation should make it easy to keep daytime speech above the required 20%.