Virgin treads a fine line to tune in with listeners

Dan Sabbagh on the balancing act that confronts the radio company's new chief

Performing a tricky high-wire act: Fru Hazlitt wants to introduce more stunts to help to increase audience and revenues at Virgin Radio

FRU HAZLITT, the new chief executive of Virgin Radio, has to get it right. Critics of the station have been silenced for now by the poaching of Christian O'Connell, as breakfast DJ, and by the recruitment of Hazlitt from Yahoo!. But if she can't deliver, the knives will be out once more. Virgin's problem is that it is losing listeners on its national AM service, as people tire of the poor quality of the signal compared with FM or digital. Its London FM service is holding up, and it has invested heavily in growing digital services, but profits were down 41 per cent to £4.3 million last year. Against that dismal backdrop, Lord Alii, the founder of Planet 24, made an unsolicited offer of £100 million for Virgin Radio to its owner, SMG. The Glasgow-based media group resisted — it paid £200 million for the station — and Alii failed because SMG shareholders were reluctant to back what they saw as a low-priced offer. So, to justify her survival and perhaps that of SMG, an unfashionable mini-media conglomerate, Hazlitt has to move the dial, which in her view constitutes "improving audiences and revenues" — although, she adds, "nobody [at SMG] has given me an answer as what that exactly means". Since arriving in August, the