Radio in Context

Guy Starkey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781350306622
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Now firmly established as one of the leading textbooks in the increasingly popular field of radio studies, Radio in Context provides students with a practical, critical and comprehensive understanding of the main principles and techniques used in radio programming. Organized around the most commonly studied radio genres and setting production within a range of different contexts – professional, institutional and historical - the text offers an ideal blend of theory and practical guidance. Readers of this fully updated new edition will continue to benefit from this core text, as it reflects important technological, regulatory and institutional changes since its initial publication in 2004 and expands on key areas such as digital radio, broadcasting over the internet, and the interplay between radio and social media. Supported by a full glossary, tips on getting into radio and exercises to develop practical and critical skills, Radio in Context is the ideal companion for anyone studying radio, the media, communications and/or journalism, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as short courses in radio or audio production techniques.
Now firmly established as one of the leading textbooks in the increasingly popular field of radio studies, Radio in Context provides students with a practical, critical and comprehensive understanding of the main principles and techniques used in radio programming. Organized around the most commonly studied radio genres and setting production within a range of different contexts – professional, institutional and historical - the text offers an ideal blend of theory and practical guidance. Readers of this fully updated new edition will continue to benefit from this core text, as it reflects important technological, regulatory and institutional changes since its initial publication in 2004 and expands on key areas such as digital radio, broadcasting over the internet, and the interplay between radio and social media. Supported by a full glossary, tips on getting into radio and exercises to develop practical and critical skills, Radio in Context is the ideal companion for anyone studying radio, the media, communications and/or journalism, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as short courses in radio or audio production techniques.

1Introduction to Radio

In this chapter you will:

learn about historical and institutional contexts for radio

use radio production equipment on location and in the studio

consider ways of applying media theory to different radio contexts.

Radio in context: milestones and motives

Listeners tuning in to radio stations hear sounds. Occasionally they may also perceive silence. It is the interplay of sounds and silence – most commonly in music and speech – that constitutes the radio broadcasts they hear today. Since a number of early pioneers, including Guglielmo Marconi, first demonstrated ‘wireless’ transmission and reception at the beginning of the last century (Crisell, 1997, 10–14), producers and audiences have played different, but often complementary, roles in making meanings out of radio broadcasts. This book examines both sides of a usually symbiotic relationship.

Making radio involves the production and arrangement of different sounds in an order that satisfies at least one purpose. Possible purposes include to inform, to entertain and to educate – three objectives that were enshrined in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Charter, under which it was incorporated on 1 January 1927. The BBC’s first Director-General, John (later Lord) Reith, adopted a rather puritanical interpretation of the Corporation’s mission, while in the 1930s commercial stations such as Radio Normandy and Radio Luxembourg broadcast to large audiences in the United Kingdom who preferred to tune in to them for their diet of more entertaining programming (see Chapter 7). Radio developed along very different lines in the United States, where it was seen more as a medium for commercial exploitation, rather than the public service model that tended to be adopted in Europe. David Sarnoff, later head of the Radio Corporation of America, is widely credited with having the idea of radio services as discrete channels of broadcasting output (Crisell, 1997, 12), and in 2011 15,587 different stations were broadcasting to a population there of more than 300 million.

In the United Kingdom, the BBC was forced to introduce its first all-day pop music network, Radio One, as late as 30 September 1967, because pirate broadcasters – such as Radio Caroline – based on ships and abandoned military forts just outside British territorial waters had demonstrated the public’s appetite for the music that had inspired the rock and roll generation and kept the sixties swinging (Hill, 1996, 206–7). Licensed, landbased commercial stations, broadcasting from the mainland, were not allowed to challenge the BBC’s domestic monopoly of radio until 8 October 1973, when the first Independent Local Radio (ILR) station, LBC, began broadcasting news and talk to London (Carter, 1998, 3). By contrast, the United States immediately favoured the commercial model, but kept stations local and regional, rather than national.

Commercial radio is used in order to persuade, to alter behaviour and to sell the products and services of advertisers (see Chapter 6), and when it is owned by private companies or individuals and run for profit, the main purpose is to make money for them. Some radio stations are run to support communities, distinguished either by geographic or socio-economic criteria, or to promote particular religious beliefs, and although the Community Radio Association began campaigning in 1983 for licensed ‘access’ radio, successive British governments resisted such calls until beginning a small scale experiment in 2002. However, the first hospital radio station in the United Kingdom was set up by volunteers in York in 1926, and campus radio began there too, in 1967, although initially these stations were not allowed to broadcast to the wider communities outside their premises. Special event licences, and from 1991, Restricted Service Licences (‘RSLs’) have enabled the running of low power, temporary stations. For example, some schools, colleges and universities have done this for educational purposes, providing training for their students, while also entertaining and informing their audiences (Gordon, 2001). Landbased pirates, some broadcasting from their own bedrooms in residential tower blocks, are often criticized for unlicensed use of the frequency spectrum to satisfy their own ‘selfish’ desire to get ‘on air’ by any means – but the development of terrestrial digital platforms for radio, such as Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) and Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM), as well as satellite broadcasting and the Internet, have greatly increased the opportunities for individuals, groups and commercial interests to reach audiences both near and far.

The list of purposes above is not exhaustive, and different elements of radio programming may fulfil more than one purpose at a time. Whatever the purpose, the motive behind it may be political, commercial, altruistic or simply the need to earn a living. During the Second World War, William Joyce (known as ‘Lord Haw Haw’) broadcast Nazi propaganda to Britain in order to demoralize the British. His attempts at persuasion were largely unsuccessful, and he was later hanged for treason. Most politicians understand the power of radio to persuade, and in 1970 Radio Northsea International, another offshore pirate station, tried to affect the outcome of the British general election by broadcasting Conservative Party propaganda. Some commentators felt they helped the party win (Street, 2002, 112). In France, in 1980, Radio K was set up in Marseilles to influence the presidential elections in favour of the Parti Socialiste (but nicknamed ‘Radio Caca’ by critics who found its approach overly didactic). Most countries operate shortwave stations broadcasting around the world, which they use to put across their own perspective on world events and their own domestic situations. The editorial stance on an international crisis usually differs between the Voice of America, Radio Beijing and Radio Moscow. There are many other examples to be found, including the BBC World Service (see Chapter 9). In some dictatorships, the government tightly controls broadcasting so that alternative views don’t get airtime – but as in many democracies, radio stations in the United Kingdom are obliged by the way they are regulated to be fair and impartial in the way they cover political issues (see Chapter 9).

A more widely acceptable way of persuading listeners to alter their behaviour is through public service announcements, or PSAs (see Chapter 6). Selling them products or services through radio advertising generates income for commercial radio stations from the advertisers, and in effect creates jobs in the radio station and often profits for owners or shareholders. Products and services often get talked about ‘on air’ without any payment being made – in interviews, packages and news items for example – and many individuals and organizations are keen to generate such ‘free’ publicity through public relations and marketing activities. Even programmes that seem intended merely to entertain can have other purposes – a music sequence might include brief speech items about healthy lifestyles or stopping smoking (Chapter 3). The BBC’s long-running soap opera The Archers was introduced in 1951 in order to educate the farming community about issues and developments in agriculture. Most listeners who tune in today, do so for its entertainment value (Chapter 8).

Exercise 1.1

Continue the table below, filling in the two blank spaces and adding more examples of radio production activities, their purposes and the motives behind the purposes. Discuss your answers in class – for example, can the play described below really entertain?

Production activity	Purpose	Motive
writing the script for a radio advert making a party political broadcast recording a radio play about HIV	to persuade to inform to create interest to inform to change attitudes to entertain	selling a product or service earning money creating employment getting more votes in an election

Institutional contexts

Ownership of a radio station allows considerable control of what it broadcasts. The lone landbased pirate is answerable to nobody – unless criminal gangs get involved – and may only be concerned that the premises may be raided, the equipment seized and criminal charges brought by the authorities. Most other radio stations are owned and controlled by someone other than the ‘on air’ talent. This may be a board of directors or simply a single individual who has invested the considerable sums of money required to equip proper studios, pay staff and meet the many other financial implications of running a professional radio station. Large groups of licensed commercial radio stations can achieve economies of scale, by sharing expertise and concentrating particular activities in skill centres, such as for production, music scheduling and personnel functions. For example, the largest in the UK, Global Radio, now produces programmes in London for broadcast on local and regional stations it owns all over the country (Starkey, 2011, 156–9). Where stations are owned by other media – such as newspapers or television – they can also find economies in the cost of news coverage, for example, or even exploit their increased control of the advertising market to push up the cost to advertisers of buying airtime and space.

Ownership may affect the editorial stance of a radio station, and newspaper proprietors are notorious for dictating what opinions should be expressed in their own titles. Different methods of funding public service radio, including taxation and subscription, may shield it from commercial and proprietory influence. In the United Kingdom the BBC’s domestic radio services have been funded by a broadcast receiving licence fee since 1922. Although the Government decides how much this will cost the public – and therefore, how much the BBC will receive – there is wide agreement that the arrangement has preserved the Corporation’s independence for much of its history (Crisell, 1994, 21, 98). The Charter imposes obligations on the Corporation, which is overseen by the BBC Trust, the members of which are chosen to broadly reflect a range of political opinion (see Chapter 9). In turn, its staff must work to its Editorial Guidelines (BBC, 2013), which set standards of taste and decency and impose rules about such issues as balance and impartiality (Chapter 9). All other radio broadcasters are licensed by a regulator – initially the Independent Broadcasting Authority (1972–91), then the Radio Authority (1991–2003), and now Ofcom, whose other roles are to maintain standards (see Chapter 9) and respond to complaints. The increasingly lighter touch of the regulators (Carter, 1998, 9), and the relaxation by the Communications Act 2003 of initially very stringent rules on ownership have created an often very lucrative environment which has proved attractive to overseas interests, such as the American group Clear Channel. Controversial mergers of large companies, which threaten to restrict choice, may attract the attention of the Competition Commission, but the localness and independence of the first wave of ILR has disappeared from all but a handful of stations, even if listeners do have a lot more choice than in 1973 (Starkey, 2011, 156–9).

Rapid grow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• How to use this book
• Chapter 1 Introduction to radio
• Chapter 2 Speech packages
• Chapter 3 Live sequences and phone-ins
• Chapter 4 Music scheduling, formats and branding
• Chapter 5 Magazine programmes
• Chapter 6 Advertisements and trails
• Chapter 7 Light entertainment
• Chapter 8 Drama
• Chapter 9 Documentaries
• Appendix: Finding work in radio
• Glossary
• Bibliography and Further Reading
• Index