Different Standards: Engineers’ Expectations and Listener Adoption of Digital and FM Radio Broadcasting

As digital radio broadcasting enters its third decade of operation, few would argue that it has met all expectations expressed at the time of its launch in the mid-1990s. Observers are now more circumspect, with views divided on the pace of transition to an all-digital future. In exploring this mismatch between expectation and actuality, this article considers the introduction of FM radio in the 1950s. It too was expected to replace its forebear (AM) but, like digital radio, its adoption by listeners was slower than anticipated. An examination of published literature, in particular engineering and technical documents, reveals a number of similarities in the development of digital radio and FM. Assumptions about listeners’ needs and preferences appear to have been based on little actual audience research and, with continual reference in the literature to the supposed deficiencies of the predecessor technology, suggest an emphasis in decision making on the technical qualities of radio broadcasting over an appreciation of actual audience preferences.     

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967: Radio’s Real Second Chance

This introductory essay serves to frame this special public radio symposium that commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, on November 7, 2017. Drawing from his earlier writings on public broadcasting history, the author tells the story of how educational radio got its start and continued to struggle for survival until the fledgling enterprise could be reborn as public radio, a result of what may be the most significant piece of communications legislation of the second half of the 20th century. The author argues that despite the enterprise’s marginalized roots and repeated political attacks that span a half century, public radio, in one form or another, will survive well into the future.     

The Influence of Device Access and Gender on Children’s Reading Frequency

We explore the role that devices currently play in children’s book reading, finding that while children have relatively high access to devices with eReading capability, these devices are underutilised for reading purposes. While ownership of devices was negatively associated with reading frequency for both genders, its negative impact was more significant for girls than boys. We also found that when boys and girls identified themselves as daily readers, and where they had access to devices, they did not use them frequently for book reading, suggesting that paper book reading is still preferable for frequent book readers of both genders.     

The Greater London Council’s Initiatives: A Precursor of British Asian Radio Broadcasting

By the mid-1970s, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Independent Local Radio (ILR) sector started catering to the local Asian migrant listener community in England, by producing Asian radio programming output in English and in Asian languages such as Hindi and Urdu. In the 1980s, the Greater London Council (GLC) came up with its own initiatives to cater to London’s Asian migrant community. This article describes GLC’s initiatives through its Community Radio Unit, which encouraged independent British Asian radio broadcasting in England.     

Adopting and Implementing an Open Access Policy: The Library’s Role

With the support of the library, the faculty, and the administration, Allegheny College recently adopted the strongest type of Open Access policy, a mandate for all faculty scholarship to be placed in the college’s institutional repository. The library’s Head of Technical Services tells how the policy came to be approved and how it is being implemented by the library.     

The Canadian State of Mind: Coverage of Men and Women Athletes in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Prime Time Broadcast of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games

The following study represents the first attempt in to empirically analyze the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s (CBC) prime time Olympic broadcast to determine if there were significant trends based on the sex of the athlete. All 72 hours of the CBC’s 2014 prime time Winter Olympic broadcast were analyzed. When excluding mixed-pair competitions, men received 60.4 percent of the airtime. Men received 61.2 percent of the mentions and comprised 65 percent of the top 20 most-mentioned athletes list. Sportscaster dialogues surrounding the attributions of success and failure of athletes, as well as depictions of physicality and personality, contained some divergences based on the sex of an athlete. Men were more likely to be depicted as succeeding because of athletic ability and intelligence while women were more likely to have their successes attributed to experience. Additionally, men were more likely to have their failures attributed to lack of intelligence. In the areas of personality/physicality, women athletes were more likely to receive comments about their size/parts of the body while men were more likely to receive comments in the areas of outgoing/extroversion and emotions.     

Far from Fifty-Fifty: Legal Measures and the Relative Lack of Women in Powerful Decision-Making Positions in Germany’s Broadcasting Sector

A gender-equal organization of institutions requires adequately qualified women to be equally present on every hierarchical/functional level. In light of this, the authors evaluate how women participate in leading managerial and supervisory positions of administrative relevance, i.e., beyond editorial departments, in public and private broadcasting corporations and organizations in Germany. The study comprises an examination and comparison of existing legal requirements/regulations for gender equality on the supervisory councils of Germany’s broadcasting corporations/organizations and contributes to the analysis on the contemporary politics of gender in Germany’s broadcasting sector. It is the first study of its kind.     

Undervaluing Mutual: The FCC’s Missed Opportunity to Restructure Radio Broadcasting in the New Deal Era

This article reexamines the Federal Communications Commission’s investigation into monopoly practices by the “chain” or network radio broadcasters in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The FCC targeted NBC and CBS and eventually succeeded in forcing NBC to sell its Blue radio network. But the Commission ultimately failed to prevent network domination of affiliates. I argue that the Commission missed an opportunity to recognize that the Mutual Broadcasting System offered an alternative, cooperative model for organization of the industry that could have better served the FCC’s goals of harnessing the power of chain broadcasting and promoting localism in broadcasting.     

Students’ Perceptions of Teacher Clarity: The Role of Cognitive Traits Across Contexts

This study explored how teacher clarity may be construed differently by students with differing traits depending upon the content of the instruction. Specifically, it examined relationships between students’ need for cognition and cognitive style and their perceptions of teacher clarity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and non-STEM classes. Results showed that participants’ need for cognition and analytic cognitive style positively predicted perceptions of teacher clarity in STEM classes but did not do so in non-STEM classes.     

That Sounds Familiar: The Relationship Between Listeners’ Recognition of Celebrity Voices,Perceptions of Vocal Pleasantness,and Engagement with Media

The human voice is a major component of popular media, yet its role in people’s media experiences has received minimal research attention. To address this gap, we investigated how recognition of celebrity voices interacted with perceptions of and engagement with audio-only media. After listening to famous actors reading stories, participants indicated whether they recognized each voice, rated its pleasantness, and completed parasocial interaction and narrative transportation measures. Results indicate that recognized voices were perceived as more pleasant. Additionally, vocal pleasantness was associated with increased parasocial interaction and transportation. Findings partially support the prediction that vocal recognition enhances parasocial interaction.     

Tradition Never Goes Out of Style: The Role of Tradition in Women’s Naming Practices

The goal of this project is to explore why, given United States women’s historical struggle to gain legal and social acceptance of nontraditional naming forms, the overwhelming majority of women continue to follow tradition and adopt their husbands’ names upon marriage. To begin to explain this phenomenon, this study focused on Catholic women, who changed their names between 1940 and 1998. This article illustrates the role tradition plays in participants’ worldview and how tradition influences their behavior and attitudes toward naming practices. The naming behaviors and attitudes of the women in this study are then analyzed within a larger sociocultural and political context.     

Limitation and Maintenance of Library＇ s Right of Access to Copyright Works

认为赋予图书馆著作权作品获取权是基于对公众知情权、文化教育和表达自由等权利的保障,因此,图书馆的获取权有坚实的法理基础。数字环境中,图书馆的获取权受到技术保护措施的限制。只有法律设置规避技术措施的例外条款,同时采取因应之策,才有利于著作权法合理设计图书馆的权利,有效保障图书馆的获取权。     

Producing Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose: How Libertarian Ideology Became Broadcasting Balance

In the first weeks of 1980, Public Broadcasting Service affiliates across the United States aired Free to Choose, a television series featuring the economist Milton Friedman. This article focuses on the production team, which brought Friedman’s small-government, market-focused perspective via privatizing the production of public television. Specifically, executive producer Robert Chitester’s success in bringing the series to air stemmed from two factors: first, he expressed social imaginaries that helped coordinate funding relationships with underwriters; and second, he drew on his institutional knowledge of public television production to navigate zones of regulatory ambiguity without running afoul of broadcast rules and regulations.     

The Good Working Mother: Managerial Women’s Sensemaking and Feelings About Work–Family Issues

We use a sensemaking lens to explore how women managers experience and articulate work–life concerns upon their return to paid work following maternity leaves. We focus on 11 women who held different types of managerial positions, including vice presidents, circulation managers, and human resources experts. We found that our participants re‐framed the good mother image into a good working mother role that fit their lifestyles and interests. To accomplish this reframing, participants engaged in three thematic processes supportive of the good working mother image: (a) good working mothers arrange quality child care; (b) good working mothers are (un)equal partners; and (c) good working mothers feel pleasure in their working mother role. These themes and image were both ironic and fragile constructions of working motherhood. Because these themes and images enable participants to make sense of and establish the worth of working motherhood to family members, friends, acquaintances, organizational members, and community members, they provide a reason why middle‐ or upper‐class working and stay‐at‐home mothers may be in conflict about work and family choices.