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This article, within the context of the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Community Media Association (CMA) in 2023, and its role within the context of British radio history, will draw on grey literature from the CMA digital archives, including policy statements, policy briefings and background material for the lobbying actions during the period 1997–2007. First-hand material to be discussed will draw on interviews with key actors involved in policy-making until the introduction of Community Radio into legislation, as well as on press releases, statements and policy documents of the regulators Radio Authority and the Office of Communications, policy statements and documents published by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, statements from the BBC and commercial radio representatives and parliamentary records of the debates on community radio legislation. The analysis and discussion of this material will help to establish the role of the main players in policy-making and regulation and how events unfolded between the outcome of 2 May 1997 general election, when the Labour Party took power, and 20 July 2004, when the Community Radio Order (CRO) was approved. It will also trace the development of the lobbying action of the CMA, the discussions and the tensions preceding the government's approval to go ahead with a new sector. It will argue that, despite having the merit of introducing a new sector in licensed radio broadcasting, after three decades of community media activists campaigning, the Labour Party fell short on its promises of funding the sector in its initial phase, denying it a solid and sustainable start. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to reflect on community radio and television in this post-conflict times. To do so, an approximation is made to sustainability as a central category resulting from the balance between economic, political and, particularly, sociocultural aspects. Secondl, two experiences are reviewed: This is how radios sound for the peace in Colombia and the Community Media Conversation. They serve as a pretext to know its reality, its scope and limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vision Australia Radio (VAR) is part of the Australian Radio for the Print Handicapped (RPH) community radio network providing a radio reading service to listeners with a vision impairment. Like mainstream media, it faces the challenge of ensuring the service is fit for purpose in the digital age. There is little preexisting research on the behaviour and interests of the vision-impaired as a discrete audience demographic. This paper reports on a survey of listeners to VAR in Perth, Western Australia, which gives an insight into their current listening habits and identifies some of the challenges in meeting their future needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the qualitative results of an investigation carried out on community radios in Ecuador, based on two questions: what has happened to the local stations that, in 2014, took advantage of the opportunity opened by the Organic Communication Law to become community? Have they achieved economic, institutional and social sustainability? Fieldwork has focused on the analysis of four case studies. The results, obtained through in-depth interviews and participant observation, put on the table a discussion: the distance between the expectations that we find in the stations as a result of the approval of the LOC and the reality shown when, five years later, begins the reform of the lawt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The promulgation of the Broadcasting Service Act (BSA), which contains a three-tier model of the broadcasting system, was supposed to revolutionise the broadcasting media sphere in Zimbabwe. It was supposed to change the dynamics of radio broadcasting in Zimbabwe by increasing the opportunity for public, commercial and community broadcasting sectors. However, the three-tier model of broadcasting has remained on the paper, creating a strong debate on community radio licensing among media activists, practitioners, academics, the government and other media policy stakeholders on the government's reluctance in issuing community radio licences. While some studies have focused on the strategies used by community broadcasting activists to communicate with their target audiences in Zimbabwe, this research seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on community broadcasting policy and the contestations which have resulted in the impasse of the licensing of community radios in Zimbabwe. Based on the Four Theoretical Approach to Community Media, in-depth interviews with Zimbabwean media policy stakeholders as well as documentary analysis, this study explores the contestation of ideas that characterised community broadcasting reform processes in Zimbabwe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows in a concise way the proposal of a model for reception studies of community radios. This is result of a collaborative research process with five community radio stations in Bogotá, Cundinamarca, Boyacá and Santander. Under the assumption that it is an open model and that it does not claim universality, the authors leaves some guiding theoretical and methodological assumptions and presents a route so that other community radio experiences can adapt it to their own history and contexts of conformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first community radios began to emerge in Brazil in the 1980s as a part of the illegal radio broadcasts that occur from the 1970s under the inspiration of the so-called European pirate radios. You are already included in the legislation for broadcasting services; in addition, there are many radios in activity illegally in the country. The work verifies the current panorama of the radio in Brazil evidencing its clandestine appearance and its specificities through the case study of a radio with characteristics of emission that operated clandestinely for almost two decades in the interior of the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The literature about community radio in Kenya has focused on sustainability challenges, but not much on existent production practices and audience evaluations of the station. Koch FM is a community radio station located in Korogocho, a slum in Nairobi, Kenya. The station aims to provide alternative information, education and entertainment content. Producers at the station and community members who make up the station's audience have different perceptions of Koch FM's role. While the producers envision Koch FM as the provider of information and a space for community voice, the community evaluates the station's performance based on parameters drawn from commercial broadcasters. Consequently, the station acts as a space where sometimes-contradictory ideals play out. In exploring these contrasting viewpoints, this article highlights contextual production practices and the shifting audience expectations facing community radio in Kenya's vibrant radio broadcast environment. The data are the outcome of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community radio in Australia is now well established and considered an important part of the radio sector, however, in today's economically driven world it is at the bottom of the media money pile. In order to argue for its continuing existence, funding and development in an ever-changing media landscape, some means of capturing its value is essential. This article describes the development of a theoretical framework of value for community radio. The content of the framework was achieved by, first, examining, community media/radio literature through five relevant lenses of analysis. Secondly, a subsequent meta-analysis was applied to consolidate the framework. In order to test the utility of the draft theoretical framework of value, three case studies were conducted with different types of community radio stations in Perth, Western Australia. Two primary research methods were used: interviews with staff and audience focus groups. The testing exercise provided a multimodal insight into the values of community radio as reflected in real life practice. The analysis revealed how value was perceived by participants across three stations as personal motivations, and second, that value at individual stations was contingent upon the characteristics of the individual community radio stations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community radio is one of the resources that can give ordinary or disenfranchised people a voice. This opportunity can be increased through the combination of community radio and mobile phones. Using focus group discussions, face-to-face interviews and observations, this article examines how this combination can improve ordinary people's participation in media production and in public life in Malawi. It also examines the extent to which marginalized people are using mobile phones to voice their concerns through community radio in Malawi. I argue that the proliferation of mobile phones can accord community radio stations increased ability to give people a voice through use of text messaging and phone-in programmes. It can also expand the resources with which ordinary people have a voice. When people are accorded the right to voice their concerns and be heard, they can remove a major communication barrier that prevents them from enjoying the life they value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community radio has become an important alternative to mainstream media in many countries. Since 2001 more than 7,000 stations have begun broadcasting in Thailand, making it the global leader in this type of broadcasting. This study surveyed Thai radio listeners and found community stations enormously popular; nearly two-thirds of respondents listened daily, mainly for music and local information programs. However, many listeners did not have a good understanding of community radio, and this likely hampered stations' ability to recruit volunteer workers needed for day-to-day operations. Stations therefore need to educate listeners about this medium in order to build community support. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the community media sector may be reported as established and well developed in Western Europe, it has grown considerably more slowly in almost all countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The literature on community media in Europe is also Western oriented -- most of the publications about this sector centre on countries which were located on "the better side" of the Iron Curtain and have been written by Western authors. This paper is the first attempt to look at the problem of community media in Central and Eastern Europe in general and present the specific problems of community media development in this region from an Eastern perspective. According to the Mapping Project of Community Media completed by the Community Media Forum Europe in 2012, the community media sector is legally recognized in only four countries from this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has neglected to address the question of whether practitioners and the community groups served by community radio see it as a conduit of community empowerment and social change. This article explores this question through in-depth analysis of four community radio stations in Ireland. The central finding is that, while community stations subscribe to most of the ideals of community radio, practitioners do not generally see the stations as sites of social and political empowerment. Moreover, this outcome is not recognized as a benefit by the communities served by the stations. This is the case because of the policy framework, cultural traditions and training programmes central to community radio in Ireland, the weakness of linkages between stations and community groups and the failure of the latter to understand the unique remit of community radio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It's no secret that the representation of migrant groups in the media has been particularly problematic, as has been their access to mainstream media, and both issues have attracted a great deal of research. Far less attention has been paid by researchers to how these groups respond when they experience such difficulties, and the various forms of media they use to engage with a variety of issues pertinent to them and their settlement experiences. This article uses data from two projects: Australia's first, and to date only, national study of community radio audiences; and a more recent case study of a community radio station undertaken in the course of research into talkback radio audiences. It reveals that community radio stations and programs provide migrant communities with a space in which they can discuss and negotiate their civic and social rights and responsibilities. Drawing on the reflections of audience members who listen to and call specific radio programs, this article explores the under-examined but vital role performed by these stations and programs in the social and civic lives of immigrants. It reveals that ethnic community radio programs are helping some audience members to formulate notions of good citizenship, and thus engage with democratic processes, which is vital to feeling socially included. The research reveals immigrants are using community radio proactively to reach out to and connect with the broader Australian community, while also reminding themselves of their homeland, culture and language. However, this article warns that researchers have largely focused on the 'good news story' of community broadcasting and suggests that a more critical approach to future research is warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kothmale Community Radio (KCR) is one of five community radio stations operated by the government-funded public service broadcaster Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC). Community radio was originally introduced to Sri Lanka under an UNESCO-DANIDA1 funded project called Mahaveli Community Radio (MCR). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a content analysis method, this study examined the way in which 111 radio stations in the U.S. are using the social network system, Twitter. Results of the study revealed that there was only a weak correlation between stations' average quarter hour share and the number of followers of stations' Twitter sites. Also, music stations had more promotional tweets, while news stations provided more news items for their audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This experimental study tested localism's influence on listener first impressions of radio programs and stations. Subjects heard program excerpts manipulated to test ownership and locality of origination. Dependent variables were affective response and medium credibility. Respondents in a Southeastern U.S. city (n = 331) heard excerpts manipulated to sound either locally originated or national, on stations ranging from low-power FMs to national groups such as Clear Channel Worldwide. Results showed slight preferences for local origination and a marginal preference for local ownership. Combining the independent variables in a 2 × 2 test strengthened differences, but the interaction term was not significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the important role plays by media in setting up and supporting community radio in India. It describes ways on how they can support a radio station including raising awareness about the potential of community radio for faster development and volunteering expert time for training in the technical fields related to community radio. It discusses the important role plays by community radio for everyone, particularly in remote areas of the country. It relates the challenges in setting up a community radio including finance, skills and technology. It offers information on some ongoing community radio projects such as the Namma Dhwani in Karnataka and Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan in Gujarat.

The article discusses the important role played by donor agencies in setting up and supporting community radio in India. It describes ways on how they can help and support a radio station including contribution to a national fund for cash grants to assist start up and initial running costs, the donation of appropriate equipment, and contribution of capacity-building and local content creation. It discusses the important role plays by community radio for everyone, particularly in remote areas of the country. It relates the challenges in setting up a community radio including finance, skills and technology. It offers information on some ongoing community radio projects such as the Namma Dhwani in Karnataka and Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan in Gujarat.

The article discusses the important role plays by government ministries in setting up and supporting community radio in India. It describes ways on how they can help and support a radio station including contribution to a national fund for cash grants to assist start up and initial running costs, the donation of equipment or premises, and contribution of capacity-building and local content creation. It discusses the important role plays by community radio for everyone, particularly in remote areas of the country. It relates the challenges in setting up a community radio including finance, skills and technology. It offers information on some ongoing community radio projects such as the Namma Dhwani in Karnataka and Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan in Gujarat.

The article explores the revenue structure and possibilities of community radio in India. It discusses the philosophy and three aspects of community radio. It mentions community radio projects in which nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working in the grass root levels including the Alternative for India Development (AID) Project in Daltanganj, Voices Project in Budhikote, and the Deccan Development Society (DDS) Project in Pastapur. It relates funding for robust community radio experience, as well as the radio policy guidelines in the country. It describes the important role plays by UNESCO in community radio.

This paper looks at the role of community radio in agriculture and rural development. It states that if used in conjunction with other modes of promoting agriculture and development, community radio can play an effective role in promoting social change. Using examples and analysis from India, the paper aims to demonstrate the linkages between rural radio, agriculture and rural development and offers recommendations on how to increase the effectiveness of radio in rural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study of community radio in Andhra Pradesh, India. It discusses the important role plays by community radio in social change. It explores the genesis and background of community radio. It discusses the status of community radio in India as of January 2009. Furthermore, it relates the status of campus and community radio stations in Andhra Pradesh, particularly Mana Radio and Sangham Radio. It explores the community radio policy and explains why Campus Radio Stations are more in number than community radio.

The article discusses the important role plays by the United Nations in setting up and supporting community radio in India. It describes ways on how the UN can help and support a radio station including contribution to a national fund for cash grants to assist start up and initial running costs, the donation of equipment, and contribution of capacity-building and local content creation. It discusses the important role plays by community radio for everyone, particularly in remote areas of the country. It relates the challenges in setting up a community radio including finance, skills and technology. It offers information on some ongoing community radio projects such as the Namma Dhwani in Karnataka and Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan in Gujarat.

The article discusses the important role plays by civil society in setting up and supporting community radio in India. It describes ways on how civil society can help and support a radio station including contribution to a fund for cash grants to assist start up and initial running costs, the donation of space or building, and contribution of local content materials. It discusses the important role plays by community radio for everyone, particularly in remote areas of the country. It relates the challenges in setting up a community radio including finance, skills and policy. It offers information on some ongoing community radio projects such as the Namma Dhwani in Karnataka and Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan in Gujarat.

The article discusses the important role plays by community radio in socio-cultural, political and economic development in India. It discusses the advantages of community radio for everyone in the populated areas and remote corners of the country. It examines the concept, purpose and importance of community radio. It presents some elaborate definitions of community radio by experts worldwide including José Ignacio Lopez Vigil, Louie Tabing and Carlos A. Arnaldo. It also discusses the important role of community radio as an agent of social change worldwide.

Modern-day Africa, like the rest of the developing world, faces increasing social, economic, political, and cultural development challenges, addressing which relies on strategies that have included the use of media and communications toward actively engaging communities in policy formulation and implementation. Radio has borne a huge share of this responsibility, because the medium is pervasive, local, extensive, flexible, available, readily understood, personal, portable, speedy, and efficient. This article discusses the challenges of using radio as an instrument of mobilizing and engaging with communities on the African continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kothmale Community Radio and Interorg project in Sri Lanka has been hailed as an example of how a community radio initiative should function in a developing nation. However, there is some question about whether the Kothmale Community Interorg Project is a true community radio initiative that empowers local communities to access ICT services and to participate freely and equally or another ?feel-good? project controlled by successive, repressive Sri-Lankan governments and international partners, as alleged by its critics? After two decades of operation, the evidence shows that the Kothmale project is a cautionary tale about what can go wrong when an ICT project is not strongly promoted as a community-based enterprise. The biggest lesson that the Kothmale model can teach us is that control of community radio must be in the hands of the community exclusively if it is to succeed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes you happy in your daily activity at the radio? This question was asked to more than forty community radio practitioners from all over the world in the framework of a research on community radios as a social movement. People were encouraged to reveal their feelings and elaborate on their inner motivations for joining the radio station. Three main points could be singled out from the interviews: the idea of the radio as a 'free space' for the articulation of views and opinions, the role of community radio as amplifier of voices of other social groups, and the collective dimension of projects. This article draws on interview texts using the method of discourse analysis to illustrate motivational frames of community radios activists, providing an original view of the radios, often considered 'only' as producers of alternative audio material or mere 'infrastructures', while the dimension of motivations and feelings is often neglected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a mass democratic movement ended the 17 year Pinochet dictatorship in Chile in 1990, social activists saw community radio as an ideal medium for participatory democracy and for articulating grass roots needs and demands. However, the initial upsurge of grass roots radio activism was squelched by government delay in enacting enabling legislation. The provisions of the law that was eventually approved made the license application process onerous for grass roots organizations. Community radio was also adversely affected by the overall decline in grass roots social activism which reflected both widespread disillusionment with the government's limited reform agenda and deliberate government policies to bring about social demobilization. As a result, although community radio has become well established, with over 300 legal stations plus others operating without licenses, it has not fully realized its potential as a social activist and democratic medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars tend to agree that the weak implementation of affirmative localism in US media is primarily due to either the failure of regulators to enforce the principle, or the unworkability of the concept of localism itself. By ‘affirmative localism’ I refer to efforts to foster geographically based local identities and local public spheres through a licensee's program service. This study revisits the history of localism to demonstrate that early regulators were not primarily concerned with fostering affirmative localism, but instead used discourses and structures of localism as part of a class-based project of cultural and economic modernisation of local communities through radio. In this view, regulatory concepts such as local program service and local trusteeship were used to reduce local distinctiveness, limit program diversity, and retain content control with nationally minded regulators in Washington. These regulators' corporate and cosmopolitan vision of modernity is problematic in many ways, but their relative success in using localism to advance that vision calls into question the Federal Radio Commission's reputation for weakness and incompetence. It also suggests that affirmative localism, since it was actively suppressed by regulators in the formative years of US radio, cannot be considered a failed or unworkable concept for broadcasting policy in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rural community radios created in El Salvador at the end of the long civil war in the early 1990s have facilitated the growth of what is defined locally as civil society, influenced by a range of international discourses. This paper explores the particular meanings that ‘civil society’ took on in these regions. It focuses on local organizations that represented many sectors of the public which had been invisible or marginalized from the public sphere in the past—campesinos, women, rural small business. These participatory radios provided crucial ways for these organizations to reach their constituencies, enlarge them through promotion and educate and inform them in ways that reinforced and catalyzed their other efforts. The broadcasts strengthened civil society by helping these new social actors to emerge, bringing their views and issues to the forefront of the local public sphere and introducing them into national debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community radio is a form of noncommercial broadcasting designed to serve audiences in a specific geographic area. In recent years, community radio has become a viable alternative to both commercial and public radio, which produce nationally oriented programming designed to attract mass audiences. The value and impact of community radio can be seen through the work of Allegheny Mountain Radio, a three-station network serving a rural and geographically isolated region of southern West Virginia and Virginia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a historical account of Bush Radio, the oldest community radio station in Africa, based in Cape Town, South Africa. The creation of Bush Radio's precursor, the Cassette Education Trust (CASET) was a pivotal moment for the emergence of community radio on the continent. This people's history of Bush Radio tells the full story through the voices of the founders and staff, together with other sources of historical data. The article argues that although the apartheid state constructed essentialist racial and ethnic categories, CASET and later Bush Radio constantly positioned themselves in a space of liminality to interrogate and redefine these categories. Privileging an instrumentalist approach, this article shows the connections between ideology, politics, and economics as they converge to form the industrial structure, the political environment, and the cultural product of broadcasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on community radio licensing and policy. An examination of community radio legislation worldwide finds a sector dominated by a dearth of policy. There are countries with well-established community radio sectors, such as Australia and Ireland, and those where community radio is still unrecognized, such as Japan and Malaysia. Often, there exists landscapes of unlicensed micro-radio stations in places without a licensed community radio.

The article explores the types of alternative or community radios found in western and third world countries. It highlights the establishment of the community radio station KPFA in Berkeley, California in 1949, which has served as the first moment in the history of community radio. The complaints of the third world countries on the unjust effects of allowing information to be manipulated by powerful nations are also emphasized.

India has so far clearly given half-hearted treatment to public service, community, educational and development broadcast networks and to the promising channel of people empowerment through community media. North Bengal has great cultural diversity, it is a happy example of integration of many ethnic communities. The objective of this study is to point out the high potentiality of the community radio as the medium of communication and people participation especially for the ethnic communities of North Bengal. The domain of the study is the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on a project which engaged in a pilot initiative in collaboration with VOICES and UNESCO to improve information communication in the rural areas of India. Namma Dhwani (ND), a group that manages and runs a narrow casting and cable casting programme, has been formed under the project established in Karnataka. It identifies features of the project including a well equipped recording station, computers, printer, cameras, photocopier and more. Bringing a technology within reach of the poor and voiceless, ND has three trained staff running the centre and several volunteers to help in the production of the programmes.