Radio as an Instrument of Protest: The History of Bush Radio

This article provides a historical account of Bush Radio, the oldest community radio station in Africa, based in Cape Town, South Africa. The creation of Bush Radio's precursor, the Cassette Education Trust (CASET) was a pivotal moment for the emergence of community radio on the continent. This people's history of Bush Radio tells the full story through the voices of the founders and staff, together with other sources of historical data. The article argues that although the apartheid state constructed essentialist racial and ethnic categories, CASET and later Bush Radio constantly positioned themselves in a space of liminality to interrogate and redefine these categories. Privileging an instrumentalist approach, this article shows the connections between ideology, politics, and economics as they converge to form the industrial structure, the political environment, and the cultural product of broadcasting.     

Radio Listening and News Prominence in Zambia

Although much of the world basks in the glory of the Internet and availability of competitive media outlets, Africa's media landscape remains bleak. Radio, newspapers, and television continue to be government controlled: Radio's power to reach the masses suggests that many governments may never fully privatize the electronic media. Zambia has experienced growth of private media. Private radio stations in Lusaka have attracted nearly half of the listening audience away from government radio. Listeners rate radio as their most important source for news and the medium is highly regarded for accuracy and fairness. Yet these few private stations lack national coverage and political and economic clout to challenge government broadcasting.     

Copyright,Community Radio,and Change: How the U.S. Community Radio Sector is Negotiating Changing Copyright Rules and the Rollout of Digital Distribution

Radio has been regulated in the United States by the Federal Communications Commission, and previously the Federal Radio Commission, since the 1920s. Now, community radio operators and producers find themselves operating within a range of regulatory frameworks, depending on the platforms (over-the-air or online) on which they place their content. This article reviews how the impact of copyright regulation on community radio is changing as that sector expands into internet distribution. The article draws on a number of case studies of U.S.-based community radio stations, and forms part of a larger study of the changing structure of that sector. A significant lesson from this case study is a better understanding of the manner in which community stations are not only negotiating the platforms on which they distribute their content, based in large part on regulatory constraints on different platforms, but also are often fringe actors in policy debates dominated by larger economic groupings, such as corporate broadcasters and recording industry lobby groups.     

"Short-Term Bursts of Inspiration": The Development of British Women's Alternative Radio

This paper begins with a review of literature and an historical account of the development of alternative women's community radio in the UK. It describes how UK women's radio stations were developed from feminist radio activity in the 70s and 80s. The two short case studies are based on qualitative research in women's community radio stations that have developed in the 90s: Fem FM in Bristol in the southwest and Radio Venus in Bradford in the north of England. Finally it develops a model of alternative women's radio for those who wish to forge a gendered space in a radio environment dominated by male broadcasters.     

KBOO Community Radio: Organizing Portland's Disorderly Possibilities

Across the radio spectrum, there are relatively few stations in the United States that concentrate on community building and sustainability. One of the country's early community radio stations, KBOO-FM in Portland, Oregon, has been on the air since 1968 and has significantly expanded its signal reach and audience during that time. Preceding National Public Radio, KBOO is the outcome of a Portland grassroots activist movement that initially sought to restore classical music on the local airwaves and eventually concurred on a more radical mission to serve the underserved and to cater to communities at the margins in the metropolitan listening area and beyond. KBOO transmits a potpourri of musical and artistic styles, foreign language programs, and critical news, public affairs, and commentaries—all with a largely volunteer-based governance structure. It also devotes its attention to promoting community-based initiatives. This article focuses on four major community functions served by KBOO community radio: public transmission, radio training, political education and mobilization, and community building and outreach. We conclude with observations about the uses and potential of community radio in developing a rich democratic civil society.     

Community Radio Stations as Community Technology Centers: An Evaluation of the Development Impact of Technological Hybridization on Stakeholder Communities in South Africa

This study investigated the impact of using community radio stations to extend information and communication technology (ICT) benefits to poor communities in South Africa. Six community radio stations in six rural South African communities were studied, using face-to-face interviews, community conversations, and observation method. The study found these radio stations have ICT presence, but because of a lack of resources they are only able to allow their stakeholder communities' indirect access to these technologies. It concludes that for these stations to realize their full development potential of extending ICTs to poor rural communities in South Africa, collaborative innovative strategies will have to be instituted.     

Historical Constitution of Public Radio Stations in Brazil

Educational, state, cultural, and university radio stations have already developed over more than 70 years of history in Brazilian radio broadcasting. Currently, there are hundreds of stations transmitting across the country, from the North to the South. Some of them—that in the 1990s included 100 broadcasting stations and among these, the oldest and nationally referenced—up to this decade operated and were referenced as a component of the educational radio system. Mainly from this period on, most of these stations began to call themselves public. And, especially due to their programming, they have been attempting to define themselves within the profile of public radio stations. The purpose of this article is to uncover the historical construction of this group of radio broadcasting stations, by means of a timeframe, from the advent of the non-commercial segment in the 1930s until today. It reconstructs referential models and presents main threads and features of the programming of these stations throughout these seven decades. In this way, it will also evince how Brazil is constructing its model of public radio.     

Radio as a Sociability Space

This article aims to analyze community radio stations from their very physical spaces, where social relations and opinions are elaborated, but also outside the actual studio during the various events that they may sponsor. Combining anthropology and history, it sheds a new light on the role played by US community radios in shaping the semantic of the New Left from the 1950s onwards.     

融媒体背景下广播电台转型发展探索

融媒体时代到来,广播电台处于转型发展的关键时刻,如何找准转型方向和构建融媒体平台一直是传统媒体转型过程中遇到的难题.本文主要从内容、传播、产品和平台构建等方面阐述广播电台转型发展途径.提出了构建"电台+两微+APP+网络直播"的融媒体平台,拓宽多元化的融媒体传播渠道.打造以上游内容生产,中游用户社群聚集,下游广告、活动...     

Reviewing Net-only College Radio: A Case Study of Brooklyn College Radio

This article explores the history and development of college Net-radio and analyzes the factors underlying Net-only college radio's growing popularity. It reports on an ethnographic study conducted in 2005 about one of North America's first Net-only college radio stations, City University of New York's (CUNY) Brooklyn College Radio.     

Radio in Paris: Can community stations survive?

The history of French noncommercial, community radio is traced in this article, and its current status in relationship to state‐owned and commercial radio is described. The author concludes that community stations have been put at a disadvantage through regulatory policy, especially in the relatively low power that has been assigned them, but that they play an important role by offering an alternative to the rationalized and bureau‐cratized services of Radio France and the commercial stations.     

Development of Radio in Kazakhstan

This article discusses how radio in Kazakhstan changed after the Soviet Union collapsed and market-oriented independent countries emerged. Since independence in 1991, the media, including radio, developed partly as a private enterprise and partly as a government entity with government radio operations controlled by the State Television and Radio Broadcasting Corporation. State radio stations in Kazakhstan are subsidized and operations do not depend on popularity or successful competition for audiences. Commercial stations have found support in advertising and continue to be successful. Although Kazakhstan has been independent for about 20 years and Kazakh stations are successful, the radio market in Kazakhstan is dominated by Russian radio. This article highlights the significant challenge for Kazakh radio as it continues to develop a uniquely Kazakh character that can promote Kazakh language and culture, and successfully attract a Kazakh audience.     

The Conglomeration of Public Radio: A Tale of Three Cities

A relatively unstudied development in the recent history of U.S. community and public radio is the emergence of metropolitan-based public radio networks. These are being constructed by buying out college and community facilities and frequencies by larger stations, resulting in student and community radio outlets being shifted to online streams and giving universities a one-time cash infusion, though this seems to vitiate the purpose of their educational licenses.     

Community Radio Stations in Brazil

This work intends to provoke and enlarge the debate about the subject of community radio stations in Brazil. Although it is a subject quite often commented on in the present time, it is still rarely studied with its deserved importance in scientific communication. This study brings forth new information about how the legalized community radio stations in Brazil have been operating since their creation in 1998. The data presented in this study were catalogued during the development of a doctoral thesis, the focus of which was the functioning of community radio stations in Brazil.     

Radio as a Successful Local Storyteller in Los Angeles: A Case Study of KKBT and KPCC

This case study examines the local storytelling practices of two radio stations in Los Angeles: one a commercial hip-hop station, the other a public radio station managed by Minnesota Public Radio with a news-talk format. Interviews with station staff and direct observation of station practices provide data that reveal specific practices showing how stations can apply communication infrastructure theory in attempts to forge the connections between the media, community residents, and the local organizations that bind neighborhoods. Obstacles to sustaining these practices are noted, including commercial pressures and journalistic principles that may hinder advocacy.     

Queer Radio History: Pacifica Radio

Pacifica Radio was the first listener-sponsored non-commercial radio network in the United States to air queer voices beginning with Allen Ginsberg reading his iconic poem, Howl on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California in 1956. From that broadcast, Pacifica stations KPFK-FM (LA), WBAI-FM (NYC), KPFT-FM (Houston), and WPFW-FM (Washington, D.C.) have consistently given space to the LGBTQI community and perspective over 60 years, creating a vibrant recorded history relatively unknown and vastly under-researched.

What survives of the broadcasts are largely found in the Pacifica Radio Archives (and other repositories) and documented in the printed station program folio guides (1949–2005) and consumer catalogues.

This article explores the importance of Pacifica’s queer sound and print archive and looks to identify what survives and what has been lost. It also highlights the many ways the queer story was expressed; bearing witness to the Gay Liberation movement through reportage, literature, poetry, radio drama, music, interviews, live event coverage, documentaries, docudramas, listener call-ins, and group discussions. The author presents this article to bring awareness to these rare instances and help motivate their preservation and access for extended scholarly use.     

Radio's Role During Hurricane Katrina: A Case Study of WWL Radio and the United Radio Broadcasters of New Orleans

This narrative case study examines the news and information role played by WWL Radio and the United Radio Broadcasters of New Orleans during the real life drama of Hurricane Katrina. The performance of United demonstrates that media consolidation, deregulation and the threat of emerging technologies do not justify abandoning the idea that broadcasters still have a moral and ethical responsibility to serve the public interests of audiences; that traditional radio should stop looking over its shoulder at threats posed by other media, and instead should make use of the medium's greatest strength—taking care of the communities it serves on the local level. This study provides further proof that traditional radio is still vital, especially in times of disaster and catastrophe; that radio's attention to the local community, and its ability to collaborate among other broadcast outlets in that community, may be two of many distinct factors that keep the public tuned in to the medium.     

Remarks on Radio Localism

Radio stations regularly conduct music research to determine what music they should play. Programming belief is that if they play music that people like better, more people will listen and listen longer, and the station's ratings will improve. This project utilizes Radio &; Records' Callout America® callout research of the top 30 songs on its Contemporary Hit Radio/Pop chart and their published CHR/Pop radio station playlists to compile an average favorability score for the music the station played. These scores were then compared to Arbitron ratings. Analysis found a statistically significant direct correlation between music research scores and Arbitron ratings.     

The Radio and the Portuguese 1974 Revolution. The Military,the Radio Personnel and a Successful Cooperation

The importance of the media in the Portuguese 1974 Revolution is recognized by the military, politicians, and journalists. In this context, the major role of the radio broadcast in the course of events is undisputable. In the dawn of April 25, a popular Portuguese song was the start signal for the military coup and other counter signals followed, sounds that became symbols of the Revolution. Radio was the medium chosen by the Armed Forces Movement (MFA or Movimento das Forças Armadas in the original) to communicate with the parties involved in the coup and it was also used to inform the population of the goals and progress of the military operations. The following manoeuvres eventually transformed Radio Clube Português, one of the radio stations, in the commanding post of all the operations and the Portuguese people became aware of the MFA goals and victories by the bulletins that were broadcasted by the military on the radio. In a country with high illiteracy, radio played a crucial role in terms of information, which confirms its unquestionable centrality in the course of the April Revolution (also known as the Carnations Revolution). This study aims to explain how this process was achieved and it is based on the recollection of documents, archives, and other information. The recovery of testimonies and reconstruction of events allow us to explore the way military interacted with radio personnel and how radio logics prevailed and helped the military to successfully achieve their goals.     

Community Radio Via Public Service Broadcasting: The Kothmale Model

Kothmale Community Radio (KCR) is one of five community radio stations operated by the government-funded public service broadcaster Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC). Community radio was originally introduced to Sri Lanka under an UNESCO-DANIDA ^{1 1}Danida is the overseas development funding arm of the government of Denmark. funded project called Mahaveli Community Radio (MCR).