Radio Audiences and Participation in the Age of Network Society

Tiziano Bonini, Belén Monclús, Tiziano Bonini, Belén Monclús

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317806813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book maps, describes and further explores all contemporary forms of interaction between radio and its public, with a specific focus on those forms of content co-creation that link producers and listeners. Each essay will analyze one or more case studies, piecing together a map of emerging co-creation practices in contemporary radio. Contributors describe the rise of a new class of radio listeners: the networked ones. Networked audiences are made up of listeners that are not only able to produce written and audio content for radio and co-create along with the radio producers (even definitively bypassing the central hub of the radio station, by making podcasts), but that also produce social data, calling for an alternative rating system, which is less focused on attention and more on other sources, such as engagement, sentiment, affection, reputation, and influence. What are the economic and political consequences of this paradigm shift? How are radio audiences perceived by radio producers in this new radioscape? What's the true value of radio audiences in this new frame? How do radio audiences take part in the radio flow in this age? Are audiences' interactions and co-creations overrated or underrated by radio producers? To what extent listeners' generated content can be considered a form of participation or "free labour" exploitation? What's the role of community radio in this new context? These are some of the many issues that this book aims to explore.

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Part I
Interactive Publics (Telephone, Short Message Service, Social Networks)

1
When Speech Was ‘Meaningful’ and Presenters Were Just a Phone Call Away

The Development of Popular Radio Talk Formats in Early UK Commercial Radio

Guy Starkey

Introduction: From Brechtian ‘Pipes’ to Telephone Lines

… radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organise its listeners as suppliers.

(Bertolt Brecht 1932, reprinted in Brecht 1967, 129–130)

The understandable preoccupation today, of media academics and practitioners alike, with relatively recent developments in social media provision and use, is based not only on the steadily increasing popularity of such platforms, but also on their implications for democratic and constrained societies across the developed and developing world. It is entirely reasonable to focus attention on such elements of the social networking phenomenon as Facebook and Twitter because they have, through the levels of public participation in them, demonstrated considerable impact as artefacts implicated in the associated processes of mediatisation and communication, just as much as once did the older media of print, film, radio and television when they were new. However, some academic discourse is so preoccupied with new phenomena that it tends to discount—or at least to ignore—older media, as if they were no longer relevant. Neither this book in general, nor this chapter in particular would wish to intentionally or inadvertently do the opposite. That is, to discount the still relatively ‘new’ in favour of an unfashionable preoccupation with the ‘old’—or, perhaps more appropriately, ‘established’—media. Nonetheless, there is considerable merit in academic study in a less myopic approach than one which recognises only innovation while paying scant regard to its precursors and competitors. So, we propose here to provide some greater depth of perspective in considering some origins of contemporary social networking which are to be found in historical accounts of popular talk radio formats in a particular national context.

The early Brechtian perspective above on what today might be labelled ‘user-generated content’ reveals considerable foresight on the part of the influential German playwright in suggesting in the 1930s that what was missing from broadcast—as opposed to ‘two-way’—radio was an ability to be a medium of interactive and even peer-to-peer communication. Brecht could hardly have known that, decades later, his partially formed vision would be realised and that far from remaining merely a medium of ‘distribution,’ radio would become a medium of what he perceived to be a more desirable form of ‘communication.’ That would require listeners to become ‘suppliers’—or contributors—and thus find a voice that could be heard as well as those of the broadcasters. In essence, such notions of progress in communication technology over time as were articulated by McLuhan (2001) identified the potential for individual voices to be heard around a shrinking ‘global village.’ Nonetheless, that newfound voice brought with it some potential for a form of participation in the wider discourse often char-acterised, in the term used by Habermas (1989), as taking place in the ‘public sphere.’ That participation bore all the characteristics of the much newer model of collaborative media production identified by Carpentier (2011) as AIP—access, interaction, participation—because of the synergies present during the period among the technology, content, people and organisations involved. However, this transformation was not immediate. It happened at different times in different countries and, inevitably, in different ways. Nevertheless, although Brecht was writing specifically about radio, his notion of listeners—that is, audiences—as being able to express themselves in a connected media environment was not far removed from some of the new platforms upon which user-generated content is communicated today, and upon which is now focused so much contemporary academic attention. For a ‘network of pipes,’ we can easily substitute the network of cables and interconnections that now constitutes the Internet.

The Precursor Role of UK Interactive Speech Radio

This chapter sets out to examine, by way of example, the development of local talk radio broadcasting in one particular national context, the commercially funded private sector in the United Kingdom. Here, the catalyst for this transformation of an otherwise distributive medium was very heavy-handed content regulation, in an age when commercial radio was relatively new in the UK and presented a significant challenge to the established media, including local newspapers and even the BBC. Interestingly, the role of interactive speech radio as a precursor to some of the newer media platforms of today is even recognised by some practitioners. In October 2013, at the annual gathering of mainly radio professionals at Salford Quays in Greater Manchester for the event organised by the Radio Academy and known as the Radio Festival, a constant refrain was the notion that radio might have been the earliest electronic form of social networking. This assertion was not made and repeated several times frivolously. Even among those present in order to engage in forms of necessarily intermittent contemplation of the current state of their industry and its prospects for the future, the idea was one that rapidly gained currency. In comparing widespread use of the phone-in in radio broadcasting in the 1970s to modern-day social networking, several speakers unwittingly related the phone-in to the 1930s Brechtian vision of radio for communication rather than just distribution.

Just as media develop over time, so does academic theory, and we can also observe in radio phone-ins some characteristics of Carpentier’s model of participation (2011) they share with some of the popular new media interactivity of today. If, momentarily freed from the time constraints of daily industrial routine to reflect in quasi-academic ways on their own practices, both past and present, our practitioner colleagues are able to draw comparisons between these two superficially radically diverse paradigms, then surely we in academia should also be able to explore such a discourse, however tentative. Therefore, we intend to explore here this example of a radio market upon which tight content regulation and draconian copyright agreements imposed on broadcasters an urgent need to develop popular radio speech formats that worked in commercial terms, drawing large audiences to new radio services and enhancing the potential for commercial revenues they brought with them.

The Arrival of Commercial Radio in the UK

Privately owned commercial radio finally arrived on the UK mainland in 1973—as is documented in detail elsewhere, such as by Crisell (1994, 1997), Stoller (2010), and Street (2002). We must immediately draw a distinction between this sector, which was then called Independent Local Radio (ILR), and its predecessors on the European continent (including the English-language service of Radio Luxembourg, which began in 1933), on the high seas outside British territorial waters (including Radio Caroline from 1964) and on the Isle of Man (Manx Radio, also from 1964). The monopoly of licensed, mainland wireless broadcasting which the BBC had enjoyed from its incorporation in 1927 only began to widely appear anachronistic in the 1960s, with the arrival of up to a dozen radio stations on ships at anchor and on abandoned military forts around the coastline of the British Isles (Skues 2009). Legislation which in 1967 all but outlawed those stations and made broadcasting from ships and fixed structures offshore very difficult was accompanied by a commitment to introduce local radio run by the BBC. Then, a change of government and an election manifesto promise (Conservative Party 1970) led to the introduction of advertising-funded, privately owned local radio in 1973 (Starkey 2011). Much of the chequered history of ILR is chronicled in detail by Stoller (2010), who became a regulator of the commercial sector, but our interest focuses upon its early years, when it had been conceived on the one hand as an opportunity for private capital to make profits from radio broadcasting, but also as a second provider of public service broadcasting (PSB). This initial split personality of a radio station with a commercial resource base and a public service imperative, although now almost entirely abandoned, was imposed upon the sector in the 1970s for largely political reasons (Stoller 2010).

The worst fears of those who opposed the initiative on political or cultural grounds were that the new stations would broadcast little other than popular music in order to maximise their listening figures and, hence, profits, while denying the BBC’s more expensively produced programming of large enough audiences to justify the continuation of its public funding, a concern which persists today (O’Malley 1983). A strong licensing and regulatory burden upon the new ILR companies to include substantial amounts of content that might reasonably be deemed as providing a public service not unlike that offered by the BBC, it was argued, was a compromise that should meet the concerns of the sceptics that the introduction of ILR might become a ‘licence to print money.’

Also present at this difficult birth, and similarly not without hostile intent, was a coalition of interests in the music industry, among them copyright bodies and the musicians’ union, which quite reasonably feared that more—and more popular—music radio might adversely affect the income of songwriters, performers and record labels. The result was that stations were allowed to broadcast only a maximum of nine hours of commercially available recorded music in a nineteen-hour broadcasting day (Stoller 2010). Some of them, such as 194 Radio City in Liverpool, began broadcasting 24 hours a day, stretching the same allocation of ‘needletime’ even farther (Barham 2006). The rest of the time would have to be filled with other forms of content, including news, interviews, commercials, competitions, drama and ‘non-needletime’ specially recorded music that would generate employment for musicians. While certain specified levels of news output were a regulatory requirement, both drama and bespoke music were relatively expensive forms to produce and so there was little appetite among programme controllers for spending initially scarce advertising revenue on them in the challenging economic climate of the mid-1970s. This was a period in which several stations had struggled even to raise the initial capital to finance their launch (Baron 1975).

As a further compromise to the sceptics, another early regulatory requirement was that each station should broadcast at least minimum amounts of ‘meaningful’ speech, as opposed to what was at the time often pejoratively labelled ‘prattle.’ So, initially one frequent outcome of the awarding of an ILR licence to an applicant competing in a ‘beauty contest’–style selection process was a programme schedule offering to produce the most appropriate and appealing speech that could essentially be described as meaningful while remaining attractive enough to large numbers of listeners for the station to be commercially viable. Once on air, most radio stations in the fledgling network were committed—initially, at least—to honouring the promises made in their licence applications. At that time even minor changes to the schedules, such as reshuffling presenters around the various programmes, had to be approved by the regulator, the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), so a weakening of the commitment to public service content in general and meaningful speech in particular was out of the question. This, and the scarcity of needletime, meant long broadcasting hours had to be filled with speech—but cheaply and without scaring away audiences through being too worthy. In essence, during this period both the right people and the right organisational structures were in place to promote unknowing early conformity with the AIP model of collaborative media content production latterly identified by Carpentier (2011).

Listen to Who’s Talking: The Phone-in and the Outside Broadcast

The public service imperative placed upon the stations by the initial political wrangling and the compromise of tight content regulation meant that a certain piece of technology—the phone—was to be central to early ILR programme schedules at certain times of the day and night. The role of the IBA included approving studio equipment before it could be used on air, and because their technical provision had to meet very high standards in order for them to be allowed by the IBA to begin broadcasting, most of the new ILR stations had telephone-balancing units (TBUs) already installed before they launched, enabling the easy use of the telephone in programming. One use for this equipment was for phoning out from the studio, to conduct an interview for example, but because it was common to have as many as ten lines or more, the primary purpose of the TBU was to allow listeners to phone in. In practice, the sound quality would be only as good as the ordinary telephone line and the caller’s telephone handset allowed—that is, seldom as good as that from a studio microphone, but usually tolerable, at least for limited periods (Starkey 2013). In Brechtian terms, this interface between the studio sound mixing desk and a number of lines on the public telephone system was the very ‘network of pipes’ that would empower listeners by letting them ‘speak as well as hear,’ enter into a relationship with the radio station instead of remaining isolated and become organised as ‘suppliers’ of radio content (Brecht 1932).

Most early ILR stations embraced the technology enthusiastically, and even though the phone-in was already an established format in several other countries, because the BBC had used it only very rarely, to UK commercial radio’s new and growing audiences it had considerable “novelty value” (Fleming 2002, 137). Using the academic discourse of today, as a media platform,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Images
• Preface
• Introduction: The Listener as Producer: The Rise of the Networked Listener
• Part I Interactive Publics (Telephone, Short Message Service, Social Networks)
• Part II Productive Publics
• Index