Homepage » Community Radio » What is community radio?
What is community radio?
How would I define community radio? This is a personal answer, but reflects the rest of this section.
I was asked to define community radio and my response was “the empowerment of a defined group of people both as participants and listeners, using radio as the vehicle”. If that all sounds a bit mumbo-jumbo, it is because it was for a presentation to a group of community workers who tend to like that kind of speak.
To explain it a bit better, it is worth breaking down the various elements.
Empowerment is an essential part of any community station. Empowerment means giving people opportunities to have more control of their lives.
This could be access to information they may not otherwise heard about, for example details on grants for household improvements or understanding what to look for when buying a washing machine.
It could be access to opportunities they may not get elsewhere, such as going to somewhere new, like the Houses of Parliament, to do an interview with an MP.
It is also access to decisions makers; both at local government and national government, and other bodies such as senior police officers, heads of business etc.
Above all, empowerment is about skills building and self development. Skills include ICT, communication and language skills, team-building, working to a deadline, research and marketing skills. Once people develop these skills they gain confidence and self-worth. Through empowerment people should be able to make informed decisions about their life.
A defined group specifies that community radio is not simply for “anyone who wants to listen”. Community stations have to serve an audience, and whilst that audience could be the residents of the town in which you serve, there may well be certain groups we you want to specifically target. They are communities of interest, based on religious groups, ethnicity or age (as examples). Understanding who your audience is allows you to make editorial decisions on the content of your station; and perhaps exclude inappropriate content.
A absolute must for a community station is that it allows participation in all areas of the station. Participation allows people to get involved in a particular project, but not simply as observers or for ‘work-experience’, but as decision-makers and executives within the station. Paid staff are there to guide and facilitate the station rather than make strategic decisions (although there must also be an understanding that volunteers have a responsibility to the paid staff to protect their jobs).
So participation can take place in a number of different ways; the traditional roles such as presenters, journalists and producers. Then there are the off-air roles such as marketing, technical, administration and management. You’ll be surprised how many different opportunities there are; there may be someone who only wants to come and send out prizes, or someone whose sole interest is doing your design work. In an entirely different field (excuse the pun), in my youth work role we had one volunteer whose chosen contribution was to come on camp with us and scrub the pans. That’s all she wanted to do.
Participation, however, also comes from people who aren’t necessarily involved in the station. These are contributors to the output, and include experts, people who call a phone-in, those who take part in a competition, and someone who phones in a sport result from a local match. They are participating because they are influencing the output and the more successful stations will have a great number of these contributors to call upon.
Finally, I said audience, who I believe are often forgotten or undervalued by community radio projects. These are people who I define as “those who simply listen to the radio”; they do not participate in any way. However, a community radio station has just as much of a responsibility to empower these people as it does for the volunteers and participants in the project. As I argue elsewhere, I would go as far as to suggest that these people are more important than the participants, and a station that fails them is itself a failure.
Community radio stations have to remember the 1/1000 rule – that is for every one caller you are likely to have one-thousand listeners. There are lots of reasons why people chose not to phone-in but just because listeners tend to be silent, it does not mean they should be forgotten.
This is my personal answer to what I think community radio is all about, but it is no means the correct one.
Two websites you might find useful for further information about community radio are the Community Media Association and Communityfm.net, the latter of which hosts conferences for community radio operators.