Radio Journal:International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media - Volume 12, Issue 1-2, 2014

Since Horton and Wohl’s recognition of the para-social relationship, there has been an interest in understanding the relationship between presenters and audiences beyond commodification models. But while the relationship has long been named, little is understood about the process from ‘inside’ the presenter experience: what audiences mean to presenters, how the relationship is constructed and becomes real in the absence of face-to-face contact when, for the most part, the presenter can only know the audience as an abstraction or a projection. This article will explore the way Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) talk radio presenters construct their audience as a dialogue partner, and the way that the on-air self is managed, in line with the corporate expectations of their employer, to achieve the appropriate symbolic indicators of friendship, sympathy, companionship, disclosure and intimacy. The findings are based on interviews with leading ABC radio presenters.

The main objective of this article is to provide an understanding of the Portuguese free radio movement while at the same time presenting it as a part of the Southern European movement. Theoretically, we use the concept of media system provided by Hallin and Mancini – in particular, the polarized pluralist model used to describe the Mediterranean countries. The Portuguese movement shared with its Greek counterpart some of the characteristics associated with the sharing and enjoyment of music. Comparison with the French free radio movement allows us to frame the reaction of the Portuguese party political system to the illegal broadcasting phenomenon. The methodological strategy is based on the triangulation of information sources. A total of fifteen in-depth interviews were conducted with free radio activists, parliamentarians and journalists, and press reports and parliamentary debates between 1983 and 1988 were subjected to content analysis. With the study of the recent past we want to contribute towards the public debate about mass media in subjects like regulation and the state, pluralism and public service, media economic groups, freedom of information and expression, and citizenship rights.

In response to the depthlessness and fragmentation of postmodern experience, Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson offers the anticipatory and utopian concept of cognitive mapping. Cognitive mapping holds out the promise for radical social transformation, in times when such possibilities can seem remote. One of the limitations of Jameson’s articulation of cognitive mapping is that he does not offer a viable practice of cognitive mapping. The making of the radio documentary, La Frontera: A journey into the borderlands of Mexico and the United States, is an experiment in cognitive mapping in sound, grounded in an emergent practice: the art of listening. To draw out and explain the thinking and practices that constitute the making of La Frontera, I examine the pre-production, production and post-production phases in turn. To conclude I draw out the implications of this experiment for the field of radio studies.

Despite its high levels of consumption, there is little research about the grammar, communicative genres and codes through which radio is produced. This article strives to fulfill this gap in the literature and provides some preliminary ideas and exploratory characteristics about the language of radio. After conducting a rhetorical analysis of the talk radio programme Hora 20, broadcast by a highly consumed Colombian radio station, this article suggests a few levels that allow us to start thinking about the grammar of radio. Specifically, this article suggests three main levels through which the secondary orality of radio manifests in Hora 20: empathetic, grammatical and dialogic levels. It examines how the use of elements, such as interjections, rhythm, tone, flow, spontaneity, genre, enumeration, redundancy, as well as parallel, pedagogical, collaborative and confrontational dialogues, define the language of talk radio. Finally, this piece claims that all three levels and corresponding sub-levels of secondary orality create a particular rhetorical situation of addressivity in which speakers connect with their addressees in particular ways.

This article begins with the hypothesis that social media are the prosecution of radio by other means; its aim will be to focus on the changes that radio has undergone since it started to mix with social media, in particular Facebook (FB). How deeply have such changes affected the relationship between radio producers and listeners? The article will analyse the cases of three Italian radio programmes that have developed an intense interaction with their listeners through FB. It will report on quantitative observation of the social media activity of these programmes over an entire week and show the different social media strategies implemented by the selected programmes, as well as their different dramaturgical relations with the listeners.

The aim of this article is to report, summarize and spread the results of a largescale European research project funded by EBU Radio in 2011 to map best practices in social media and European public radio, focusing on the way successful public service radio formats have incorporated social media in their production flow. The programmes have been selected for one of the following reasons: programmes that are audience leaders in their country, use innovative radio language or are youthoriented productions. The survey has been carried out by a team of ten European researchers from seven countries on a sample of 28 public radio programmes analysed for two months between January and February 2011. The research team attempted to answer the empirical question: ‘How social media are used by public service?’. Are there some common threads and shared practices among successful programmes in different countries? The team adopted an empirical approach based on social media content analysis and interviews with radio producers. This article will present the main results of this empirical research project. It will conclude with practical guidelines for public radio production and social media innovation.

Beginning in the early 1990s, radio training projects aimed at teaching young people (aged 15 – early 20s) the basics of audio production began emerging throughout the United States. By decade’s end, these ‘youth radio’ training programmes mushroomed to about 40 different places across the country due to the availability of grants from individuals, foundations and state agencies with a variety of agendas. Despite more than a decade of experience, youth radio training programmes have received some journalistic attention, but little to no scholarly analysis. This article responds to this lack of scholarship of this robust area of media practice by examining the experiences of participants at four well-established, yet structurally diverse youth radio training programmes. Making sense of these experiences can be accomplished from multiple theoretical perspectives including media literacy, feminist criticism, cultural studies, etc. For the purposes of this research, however, theoretical contributions from alternative and community media and development communication will be used. The remainder of this article will review the alternative, community, and development communication literature in terms of the conceptual framework and the research questions that guided this study. It will then identify the research settings and methods of data collection and analysis. The bulk of the article, however, will present the findings from the research before turning to a summary discussion and conclusions section.

The Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company (UR)1 25 years ago was in the process of ceasing production of radio programmes for children. There were two main reasons expressed: first, their broadcasting role model, the BBC, had recently given up their educational radio programming for children; and second, the use of radio programmes (or tapes) in schools in Sweden had decreased in favour of television or video use. Surveys of teachers’ attitudes towards radio usage in education revealed that teachers expected a lack of listening abilities in children, unless audio was accompanied by pictures. A case study of children’s listening experiences, however, illustrates the abilities among 8–9-year-old children to create mental images through radio programme listening. Children were pleased about their experiences and advocated an increased usage of radio programmes in school. The benefits of radio or audio and its absence of any pre-produced pictures are rarely acknowledged. Radio is often neglected among the various media mentioned in media theory literature of university Journalism and Media production programmes. Special affordances of radio/audio narratives, with or without sound effects, are seldom expressed. In this article I will elaborate these affordances in relation to children’s listening experiences and to interviews with teachers.

Online audio drama creates the potential not just for new forms and patterns of listening (on-demand and audience-controlled) or for revised methods of plot structuring (with series stacking allowing for the use of extended narrative arcs) but of a complete recreation of the listening experience as part of an act of transmedia storytelling – one in which the narrative spins out of the wireless and overlays the ‘lived’ experience of the listener. This article will discuss the opportunities that have been opened up for writers and producers of radio drama through the development of online and downloadable audio. It will discuss the use of both social media tools and diverse media platforms in a construction of story in which the membrane between the real and fictive has become permeable. It will focus on the author’s ongoing work on The Flickerman, a piece of applied creative research that began as an attempt to explore the possibilities offered to writers by working outside conventional radio networks, and has developed into a piece of as-live, collaborative, open-source storytelling.

This article presents a case study of a compulsory first-year undergraduate communication degree subject (Language and Discourse) that combines critical discourse analysis, genre and multimodality studies with the teaching of radio production. Using audio/radio as its primary focus, the subject is delivered to over 700 students per semester and aims to produce communications professionals whose everyday practice is informed by an understanding of how theory and practice work together. Described here are the rationale, pedagogical approach and early outcomes of this subject through qualitative research methods including interviews with key course designers, tutors and students. In this subject students produce genre-diverse radio/audio pieces that reflect an understanding of complex theoretical concepts, such as Foucault’s work on discourse analysis. The article concludes that radio has a distinctive part to play in the teaching of language and media studies to large cohorts of students using the skills and resources brought to the subject by a generation of digital natives.

Practice-based research methods have opened up opportunities for radio journalism academics to have their radio practice recognized as academic research. Using the example of an Australian practice-based Ph.D. project, this article presents an innovative model for higher degree research in radio, reflecting on the project’s research question, methodology and structure incorporating both text and audio. This article argues for radio production as a form of qualitative methodology for collecting data and as a way to present research findings to a broader audience outside academia. Informed by Candy’s (2006) framework for practice-based and practiceled research, the Ph.D. study applied two research approaches: research through practice and research on practice. To demonstrate research through practice, the researcher produced a 54-minute radio documentary, Deadly Dust, commissioned by Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Radio National network. The ‘doing’ – the making of the documentary – was then contextualized and analysed through a reflexive process informed by fieldwork interviews with internationally renowned radio producers. The research on practice component of the Ph.D. dissertation accompanying the radio documentary provided new theoretical insights into the creative process of long-form radio. By demonstrating how practice can be defined in research terms, this article provides justification for the inclusion of long-form journalism, in this case a radio documentary, as a legitimate academic research output.