Radio Journal:International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2005

This study investigates the role of Turkish commercial local radio in the construction of a youth community in the city of Sanliurfa, which is located in the poor rural south-eastern region near the Syrian border. Through in-depth interviews with radio listeners and analysis of their interactions via radio, this article also examines young people's attempts to overcome traditional restrictions and social norms through talk radio. By doing so, this study aims to highlight the social role of radio, which is often underestimated in media studies, and to challenge western-centric scholarship on talk radio, which ignores talk radio's role in community formation. By drawing on Downing's concept of radical media, Atton's definition of alternative media, and Couldry's theorization of the symbolic hierarchy of media power, this study will discuss why some local commercial stations in Sanliurfa function as alternative media for the Turkish youth and how they cross the boundary between the media and ordinary worlds to create a space for themselves.

This article explores the ways in which Radio Zimbabwe (RZ) programme schedules reflect and affect Zimbabwean rural and urban daily life. Daily and weekly linkages between national radio programme schedules and national everyday life were analysed. I argue that RZ was popular because its schedules appropriately approximated the habits of Zimbabwean national everyday life. It is the broadcasters' duty to reach audiences with relevant content at convenient times. The article is based on fieldwork in Zimbabwe, from 200003, involving interviews with RZ staff, its listeners and observation notes. Scheduling was examined as part of the temporal and spatial aspects of RZ broadcasting, discussing how the radio service has adapted itself. Radio speaks to changed, and rapidly changing, structures of everyday life, and such change is not solely national- or mediacentric. How differences in rural and urban structures of daily life, weekly routines and national reception contexts form part of an ongoing challenge for national radio broadcasters similar to RZ is shown.

This article identifies radio in Africa as an important social space for interrogating the everyday lives of its listeners. By focusing on a specific Kenyan radio play Not Now, the article explores the thematic concern of forced marriage and its moral implications on listeners. Importantly, Not Now is pointed out as part of a larger programme of radio drama in Kenya, Radio Theatre, which engages with issues of the quotidian. The debate on forced marriage is therefore a segment of themes explored in radio drama in Kenya that revolve around the domestic sphere and which eventually, it is argued, form part of the quotidian debate.

All radio broadcasting is live in a sense, whether the material is spontaneously generated, as in a chat show or a running commentary, or pre-recorded, as is the case with a compact disc or a tape. In all cases, it is heard on the receiver in the same moment that it is transmitted from the studio. Before 15 December 1986, almost all Chinese radio broadcasting was either pre-recorded or consisted of prescripted continuity and time checks. But after that date a situation gradually developed in which as much as 75 per cent of speech content was spontaneous: neither pre-recorded nor scripted word-for-word. It is this sort of radio that is commonly referred to as live in China - and this is the sense in which I shall use the word live throughout the rest of this essay. As the station that pioneered the development, Radio Guangdong is immensely proud of its position in Chinese broadcasting history. The implications for local culture have also been immense. So great is its sense of pride and achievement in leading the major reform of broadcasting in China that, in 1999, Radio Guangdong marked its fiftieth anniversary by compiling and publishing a collection of essays that charted and reflected its last thirteen years of broadcasting practice.

Community Radio in Bolivia: The Miners' Radio Stations, Alan O'Connor (ed.), (2004) Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 150 pp., ISBN 0-7734-6392-5 (hbk), 64.95