New RTÉ Radio 1 boss tasked with halting the slide in big-name listenership

WHEN Ana Leddy takes up her new role as head of RTÉ Radio 1 on March 6, she will be all too conscious that the latest Joint National Listenership Research figures show that her job will not be the most enviable in Irish radio.

The Sheffield-born woman will also be acutely aware that she will be expected to halt a downward slide in audiences for the vast majority of the station’s daytime programmes.

This week’s JNLR figures which measure performance during 2005 revealed that many of the big names in Radio 1, including Pat Kenny and Joe Duffy, as well as its news and current affairs programmes (with the notable exception of Morning Ireland), suffered further slippages in listenership. They also provided little comfort for Leddy’s 2FM counterpart John Clarke, as the station’s flagship programme hosted by Gerry Ryan saw its audience decline by more than 13% to 331,000.