Effects of Local-Market Radio Ownership Concentration on Radio Localism,the Public Interest,and Listener Opinions and Use of Local Radio

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and ensuing radio ownership consolidation are often blamed for harming radio localism and the public interest. The present research sought to determine effects of local-market radio ownership concentration on listener opinions and use of radio—potentially indicative of stations' localism and public service—by surveying listeners in markets categorized by ownership concentration. Findings suggest concentration does not strongly influence perceptions; however, overall results indicate potentially negative consequences from local and national consolidation on amounts of local music, news, and public-service programming; live-local programming; and station responsiveness.     

The Development of Rural Wired Radio Systems in Upstate South Carolina

In the 1930s, the residents of upstate South Carolina constructed a homemade media system—wired radio—which lasted in some areas for almost 10 years. Wires were strung across miles of countryside to connect thousands of nonelectrified rural houses to a central receiver located at the end of the power line so that residents could partake in the radio revolution being experienced in other parts of the nation. This essay describes the development and construction of these wired radio systems and looks at local programming and resident reactions to the medium. Information for this essay comes from interviews with and the writings of system operators and subscribers. Initial research indicates that such homemade media system; were unique to that area of the country and that they served different purposes and needs than the wired radio systems that developed in the large cities during the 1930s. Also, previous scholarly work on this topic has maintained that such systems in the United States died out after experimentation in the 1920s, contrary to the findings covered in this paper.     

Buying Time to Start Spanish-Language Radio in San Antonio: Manuel Davila and the Beginning of Tejano Programming

This article reveals how Spanish-language radio started in San Antonio, Texas—as blocks of time bought by Hispanics interested in providing music to San Antonio's Spanish-speaking residents. In particular, this study recognizes the contributions of San Antonio radio pioneer Manuel Davila and his role in starting Spanish-language radio and the Tejano format, drawing from a combination of on-site observation at Davila's station, personal interviews, and the collection of historical data. The article also lays a foundation for critically analyzing the political economy and hegemonic process of maintenance of economic and cultural power possible in the early days of radio broadcasting to compare it to the current corporately dominated marketplace.     

Radio production courses: A survey of current practice

With the domination of broadcasting by television in the 1950s and since, academics of both teaching and research persuasions have tended to ignore the older and larger (in number of stations) medium of radio. Courses in radio announcing and production, usually the oldest in most schools’ curricula, were summarily suspended or simply faded away for lack of student and faculty interest. Meanwhile, of course, radio continued to grow, and with the resurgence of FM and interest in high‐fidelity sound in the mid‐sixties, students in both film and broadcasting courses began to request more audio training and practice. In the following article, the author surveys current practices in radio production based on returns to a nationwide request for data. Throughout, comparison is made with the APBE composite course outline for such a course, published in 1970. Dr. Martin is associate professor in the department of radio‐TV at California State College—Long Beach.     

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.     

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.     

Defining a Medium: The Educational Aspirations for Early Radio

This essay examines the attempts by many writers to steer the burgeoning U.S. radio industry towards educational uses and programming in the 1920s. At the same time that commercial radio began to take shape, several competing and seemingly incompatible visions of the airwaves emerged—one of which privileged the use of radio for educational purposes. Using discourse from trade journals, general interest magazines, and newspapers, this article explores the calls for educational programming amid the rapidly expanding and consolidating commercial radio industry.     

Stimulating the Imagination in a Radio Story: The Role of Presentation Structure and the Degree of Involvement of the Listener

It has always been stated that the radio is the invisible medium that has the greatest effect in stimulating the imagination of listeners. Therefore, this article intends to compare two kinds of presentation structure—dramatisation versus narration—in a fictional radio story to determine the extent to which the imagination is aroused and the point to which the listener becomes involved. The outcomes of the study point to the fact that the dramatised structure is the form of presentation that is best able to fulfil these aims.     

Democracy in the Air: Radio as a Complement to Face-To-Face Discussion in the New Deal

This article focuses on the use of radio broadcasts as resources for those organizing and convening face-to-face discussion groups in rural communities across the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Led by the United States Department of Agriculture, small group discussions took place with leadership coming from Cooperative Extension agents from land-grant universities. As public affairs shows were being carried on the major commercial radio channels, the USDA discussion project utilized radio broadcasts to introduce people to the methods of conducting group discussions. The article focuses on the national efforts of the USDA as well as localized attempts to utilize radio broadcasts in the service of democratic discussion, focusing on one of the most robust examples of a land-grant university—the University of Wisconsin-Madison—utilizing technology for democratic discussion in rural communities across the state. It notes shortcomings and challenges, as well as identifying the critical role that radio played in helping citizens and communities begin to think about complex public problems through the use of new technologies.     

Introduction to the Symposium on Canadian Radio Research

There has been a dramatic shift in the philosophy of broadcast regulation. After decades of managing the local radio market structure with policies of ownership regulation, Congress and the FCC have mandated policies of ownership deregulation. This study examines the effect of deregulation policies on the small market radio industry. Recent research has explored issues of radio market structure and performance in larger markets; however, few studies have examined the impact of policy in smaller markets. This study analyzed 52 metropolitan statistical areas with populations less than 125,000. The study used regression analysis to identify the effect of deregulation on the number and type of radio owners in the small markets. Overall, the results revealed that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 had a dramatic impact on the number of local radio owners in the small markets.     

Visualizing a Non-Visual Medium through Social Media: The Semiotics of Radio Station Posts on Instagram

For decades, radio was primarily a hidden or unseen medium to listeners. In recent years, digital technologies have transformed radio to a medium that can both be seen and heard. In particular, visuals on social media have given audiences a real-time glimpse of broadcast operations and talent, while enhancing interaction with stations. This study examined how commercial stations across the United States portrayed themselves through posts on Instagram. Using a qualitative methodology and social semiotic theory, results of the study revealed two dominant themes of station posts—station promotion and community—that signified the essence of radio stations.     

Call-In Talk Radio: Compensation or Enrichment

This study focused on call-in talk radio because it provides a unique opportunity to test competing hypotheses drawn from two different perspectives about the appeal of media programming. A good deal of research on call-in talk radio grows from a deficiency perspective, which holds that people seek out media content to fill gaps in their lives. More recent research, however, suggests that, like the selection of other media content, the appeal of talk radio lies in enrichment, or its ability to provide content for specialized interests. A random telephone survey tested competing hypotheses that compared listeners to call-in talk radio with nonlisteners. For the most part, the results supported an enrichment explanation. Compared to nonlisteners, listeners to call-in talk radio listened to the programs for information, perceived themselves as more mobile, and valued arguments. Compared to nonlisteners, callers to the programs were also more civically engaged. Moreover, listening to various subformats of talk radio programs was also likely to signal enrichment.     

A prescription for AM radio programming!

During the past several years the academic community has written an obituary for radio, particularly AM radio. The broadcast curricula usually lack “real world”; orientation. Programming, sales, and management classes often reflect materials designed more appropriately for large metro radio stations. Little research has been published on AM or FM radio. The lack of academic journals devoted exclusively to radio broadcasting (exception is the new Journal of Radio Studies) testifies to the importance the academic community places on radio broadcast research and theoretical concepts. The author suggests a rapprochement of broadcasting curricula, including programming—a critical element in any future success of radio, and AM in particular.     

I've Heard That Before: Habituation of the Orienting Response Follows Repeated Presentation of Auditory Structural Features in Radio

Research has used the cardiac orienting response (OR) to show that structural changes in the auditory environment cause people to briefly but automatically pay attention to messages such as radio broadcasts, podcasts, and web streaming. The voice change—an example of an auditory structural feature—elicits orienting across multiple repetitions. This article reports two experiments designed to investigate whether automatic attention allocation to repeated instances of other auditory structural features—namely production effects, jingles, and silence—is a robust phenomenon or if repetition leads to habituation. In Study 1 we show that listeners of a simulated radio broadcast exhibit ORs following the onset of auditory structural features that differ in semantic content. The prediction that listeners would not habituate to feature repetition was not supported. Instead, both jingles and synthesized production effects result in more iconic ORs to the second repetition compared with the first. However, orienting significantly diminished following the third repetition of both. Study 2 replicates this result using multiple repetitions of structural features containing identical semantic content.     

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.     

Radio and African rural communities: Structural strategies for social mobilization

This paper reevaluates and questions some of the assumptions that have been made about the efficacy of radio broadcasting in rural Africa—the target of most domestic and international social change programs. Among other possibilities, the paper suggests that the inexpensive availability, portability, and nonliterate accessibility of rural audiences to radio are necessary conditions but are insufficient to maximize the medium's potential utility for social mobilization. Using an existent tripartite concentric cultural diameter as the basis for argument, the paper reemphasizes the claim that the rural African community is distinct from the suburban and the urban. Recommendations are offered, on that basis, for a restructured radio network that would reflect the uniqueness of rural communities and the changing phase of Africa's marginalized population.     

The Future of Radio Revisited: Expert Perspectives and Future Scenarios for Radio Media in 2025

In 2005–2006 the research group DRACE (Digital Radio Cultures in Europe) performed a study on how 43 people in key positions related to the radio industry in 4 European countries and Canada viewed the future of radio and which delivery technologies they considered would be most successful. In addition, it analyzed the motives and reasons certain technologies were seen as more promising than others. Finally, it presented 4 different future scenarios for radio media. The study was published in the Journal of Radio and Audio Media, May 2008.

In 2005 the future of radio was considered much less obvious and clear than it appeared 10 years previously. Instead of a transition from analog to digital audio broad- casting (DAB), there was a selection of alternative technological options for digital audio delivery. When looking back from 2015 and considering the results of expert interviews, the project group about Public Service Media in the HERA project: Transnational Radio Encounters found interesting perspectives in replicating this study—now looking forward to 2025. By using the same questionnaire and interviewing the same experts (or new persons in the same positions) they could compare the predictions with the present situation, looking for technological, regulatory, policy based, and user-oriented contexts. Furthermore, they could ask the experts to look 10 years forward to 2025. Besides from the interviews, desk studies were performed in order to explore the national similarities and differences as background for the analysis of the scenarios for the 2015 and 2025 studies.

This comparative study involves Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, and the UK.     

Narrative Transportation in Radio Advertising: A Study of the Effects of Dispositional Traits on Mental Transportation

This study examined the impact of 3 individual traits—namely need for cognition, vivid mental imagery ability, and transportability—on one's psychological transportation and ensuing belief change subsequent to listening to a narrative radio advertisement. The study demonstrated that both vivid mental imagery ability and transportability tend to significantly influence one's degree of transportedness. Moreover, the study showed that a higher degree of transportedness leads to a more potent persuasive impact on one's affective and conative responses to narrative radio advertising.     

Understanding the Social Media Audiences of Radio Stations

This article investigates the online comments of news items posted on the Facebook pages of two popular Arabic-language radio channels: Radio Monte Carlo—France24 and Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW). This study examines over 184,000 comments with a special focus on the most liked posts in order to understand how audiences of regular radio interact on social media. The results indicate that audiences seem to be more engaged with posts that encourage participating in broad issues, interacting with clever quotes, and entering contests and less so with reading breaking news. With regards to news events and serious issues, this study also examined how social media users of these two Facebook “radio” sites responded to postings that differed from their own opinions, and seemingly actively engaged with contrasting or oppositional views or sentiments.