Digitizing radio – a discourse

October 21st, 2005 | by aobaoill |

Here in Urbana we’re in the process of working to get our new radio station, WRFU, on the air. It’s a whole lot of work, but thankfully we’ve got a good group of people working on it. We’re also going to get help from people around the country when we host a radio barnraising in association with the Prometheus Radio Project in just under a month. [Hopefully some funferal readers will come into town for the event – I look forward to meeting up with some of you.]
One of the side issues that has come up as we move towards having a station is what our online presence will be. I don’t mean our website – ably maintained for us by Tom. Rather, various suggestions have been made, and discussion had, regarding online audio. There seem to be three approaches.
There are those who are enthusiastic about the potential of integrating webstreams and other offerings into the core mission of the station. More on this in a minute. There are those who are sympathetic towards the idea of streaming the station (for example) but see it as secondary to getting the analogue broadcast up and running – webstreams etc. are something to be layered on top of the core offering. Finally – and I find myself more in this group as time goes by – there are those who urge a more sceptical, or critical, approach regarding moving towards such technologies. I’m going to try to lay out, fairly, the various approaches, as a means to explore and explain my own position. I welcome comments and responses.

My fellow IMCista, and PhD student in the ICR (Institute of Communications Research), Sascha Meinrath, is among those who hopes to see the station include webstreams, etc. In a recent interview he did for the Cook Report, in which he discussed the CUWiN community wireless project, he pointed briefly to how resources such as the radio station might be linked to that project:

We want to add other media services to what we are doing including a low power FM radio station soon to be going on air.
We want to be able to stream the audio from that station on the network so that you can access it from the Internet from outside the local area. We will also put things like IRC chat rooms and streaming video over the local wireless LAN.

Apart from streaming the station on the local CUWiN network and over the internet, a number of other technologies and projects have been suggested. At the Community Wireless Summit, held in Urbana last year, another of my ICR colleagues, Paul Riismandel, talked not only about streaming over the CUWiN network, but about other possibilities opened up by WiFi, such as having far more local audio channels than are currently possible on the broadcast spectrum, with temporary and occasional channels feasible, depending on the ‘signposting’ mechanisms one divises. He also talked about using the WiFi network as a ‘back-channel’ to feed content to the station from remote locations, possibly including volunteers’ homes. Others have suggested podcasting of various shows, allowing syndication and access by a wider audience.
There are obviously a number of different reasons for promoting these various different technologies. The back-channel idea provides a possibly simpler approch for outside broadcasts, and might facilitate participation for those who have difficulties coming to a central studio. [For some reason, I am reminded of the notion of voting kiosks, which proponents of electronic voting say could be set up in lots of non-traditional settings, such as stores, if one used a (non-public) networked electronic voting system.]
Streaming across a local network, and using the large amounts of bandwidth to encourage multiple streams – one suggestion made in the WRFU case was to have a station stream and a second stream which would transmit live feeds from performances occurring at the IMC performance space – can provide a richer service to the community, reaching those who may be outside the reach of the over-the-air signal (people have mentioned those working in basements, or on the far side of town, where our LPFM signal may struggle to reach), and perhaps facilitating a broader and more dispersed participation in media creation.
Streaming online allows a wider reach for a station, meaning a higher profile for the project as a whole (with all the knock-on benefits, such as being more attractive to funders, etc.), and allowing an engagement with a wider public. Podcasts allow easy syndication of shows, which helps with engagement, and allows maximum benefit to be had from the investment in producing a particular show.
We can imagine, too, that a show, or station, which has internet distribution as part of its vision from the beginning will structure its content and operations in a different manner to one focused locally (or which adds on distribution later). As a simple example, station IDs will be separated out from other content, and use a format that will not cause confusion when being rebroadcast on another station. A webcast station might avoid time-zone-specific greetings, such as ‘Good evening’ since listeners may be based elsewhere. David Park, who has examined the impact of webcasting on student stations, has noted that overnight shifts, previously graveyard shifts that had few listeners and were unpopular partly for that reason can now garner large online listenerships in other countries. With AIM and other interactive tools listeners can give feedback immediately, and traffic logs allow fairly precise measurement of listenership patterns (for the online portion of the audience). All of which has changed the balance in the factors that go into building a schedule.
For some people, adding features such as webcasts, while philosophically unproblematic, is a process to be layered on top of building the basic station facilities. In this context, live streams and other features are to be considered after the matter of actually getting on air has been accomplished. The main issues involve resource allocation, with digital add-ons getting secondary status because they are seen as being premium features layered on top of a basic service. Resources considered can include finances – webstreams require additional copyright licenses and specialized equipment – and volunteer availability. Given the manner in which bandwidth needs scale for webcasting, this can be a particularly expensive (and open-ended) budget item.
While I endorse this cautious and pragmatic approach towards resource allocation I also have some more far-reaching concerns. First, and perhaps most obviously, webstreams aimed at the wider internet can change the focus of a station from focusing on the local community to serving a broader, more nebulous, and less local, public. To a certain extent, whether – and how – this matters depends on the guiding model of your station in the first instance. In a previous post I touched on the two general models followed by community radio stations – a service, outcome-based, model, and a participatory, process-based model (to use some crude shorthand). If you work under a participatory model, where the station facilitates involvement by individuals, introducing a webstream does not appear to interfere with your mission, though the motivation seems limited to because it’s there.
If you work under a community service model there appear to be more obvious dangers. Unless one’s target community is technically a completely dispersed one – unless, that is, it is what Irish regulators refer to as a community of interest that is not particularly, or especially, associated with the geographic area covered by the broadcast station – introducing a webstream can have the effect of diluting one’s focus on one’s community. The critiques by McChesney, Ledbetter, and others, regarding the impact of the pledge-drive model on U.S. public broadcasting – that is, that these outlets focus particularly on attracting audiences that support the station through pledges (generally, affluent, generally well-educated, audiences) – provide an analogue of the situation that can occur here. Park notes that the possibility of support by alumni, through paypal donations for example, creates a pressure point on the scheduling policy of campus stations, as they feel pressure from alumni to maintain their existing programming policy.
In reality, of course, stations often conform not to one or other of the two archetypal models, but to a hybrid of them, as Bekken actually indicates in the piece I cited in my linked post. In this context, the temptations and pressures that can be introduced by a focus on the ‘outer face’ of a station can tend to shift the station from a participatory to service model, similar to that noted by Bekken when community radio stations increase their power output, but with the community not being defined by geographical location but in terms of those accessing the webstream. Further, a radio station is always a public face of the organization within which it is situated, but when that face is visible on a global level, the image an organization may wish to exhibit to peer groups, to grant-issuing foundations, or others, may differ from that produced by a purely participatory process, where the seemingly inane sits side-by-side with the socially relevant.
That covers webcasting, but what of the other technologies mentioned – podcasting, or ‘back-channels’ that allow individuals to remotely produce material and upload it to a station (either for later broadcast or, potentially, live transmission). I’ll deal with the second part first. There are two obvious benefits to such technologies. First, it facilitates outside broadcasts from community events – perhaps from public meetings, or local festivals. Second, it can facilitate participation by those with mobility impairments. I have no quibble with these uses.
However, when it comes to a more general use of such tools I become concerned. To a large extent, this comes from a belief in the importance of the physical nature of shared public space, a belief in the importance of co-presence. Given the sequential scheduling of radio stations, people don’t necessarily meet many more people than the people immediately before and after them in the schedule. The possibilities are, however, there and some of the most rewarding parts of doing community radio are often the linkages that are built between otherwise disaparate social groups. When individuals and groups don’t actually physically attend the station location it becomes much more difficult to build a sense of community, of camaraderie, with other station volunteers. The IMC’s focus on attendance at physical meetings can, I think, be linked in large part to an understanding of this issue.
I should note that when one is considering the issue of facilitating the involvement of different sections of the community, particularly in terms of those based in different physical parts of a town, the balance between setting up secondary studios that facilitate involvement within a certain area, and encouraging attendance at a central location, to foster this sense of common purpose, becomes a particularly complex and vexed issue.
Additionally, it is becoming increasingly practical to use in-bound technologies that can be seen as back-channels from outside the community – downloading podcasts and other files to be rebroadcast on the station, retransmitting live feeds from other stations, or from webcast operations. Such material can supplement that produced locally, making it easier to broadcast for longer periods, and can provides forms of content that would not otherwise be available to the community. I’ve previously recommended this type of solution at Flirt FM as a means to work around the tension between the station’s BCI contract, which requires 40% talk programming, and students’ desires to produce more music content.
However, it’s important to operate caution in this area. Will externally-sourced content suppress the emergence of locally produced content? Here I mean both that local listeners may be less inclined to feel compelled to participate if content is already available, and that bureaucratic barriers may develop that make it difficult for local participants to supplant syndicated material from air-time. At WEFT, for example, I understand that they have had disputes about whether it was more important to syndicate Democracy Now or to free up airtime for local participation. There are several possible valid responses to this issue – but the validity will be grounded in the model of community radio one espouses – service or participation, outcome or process.
And so, finally, to podcasts. I like podcasts, I listen to them at least semi-regularly, I’ve considered podcasting part of the show I’ll be co-producing on WRFU. They have the advantage of addressing some of the issues raised in favour of webcasts – increasing the use made of content that has taken time an effort, and which may be of interest to those who did not hear the original broadcast – without tying a station’s overall schedule to the needs and pressures of the webcast audience.
And yet, a number of issues come to mind that should be included in the mix when considering whether, or how, to integrate podcasts into a station’s operations. Podcasting can also encourage a les geographically-bounded approach to content choice – something that affects some shows more than others. Since the content is listened to by listeners at their leisure, rather than on a centralized schedule it differs in effect from webcasts (where I’ve noted the ‘time-zone-free’ effect, above) but is perhaps more significant. Dethethering listeners from a centrally-determined schedule may, on some level, increase listener agency, but it also atomizes the audience.
No longer can we have a working presumption that listeners are likely to have heard the ‘preceding’ show before this one, or that they will next hear a ‘following’ show. The effect is a special form of decontextualization, where each show becomes self-contained, unable to use wider ‘community’ bonds as at least a working assumption. Podcasting is, of course, a move towards something like Negroponte’s Daily Me, and anything that brings us closer to Negroponte’s distopian fantasies should, in my view, be treated with caution.
Podcasting is, of course, a recorded medium – it cannot be live – and this also has an impact on the manner by which listeners can interact with particular programmes. Airing live telephone calls on air, as a regular component of radio shows, is of course not necessarily integral to radio as a medium, and the approach has increased in popularity over the years – in Ireland, co-incident with increasing telephone ownership and the availability of relatively cheap national calls (and then cheap ‘freefone’ or toll-free lines). So losing the ‘live listener calls’ element on one level merely removes a recetly-adopted programme component.
On another level, though, the possibility of live listener calls is often seen as a desirable form of listener participation. [I should note that when I talk of participatory media I tend to exclude call-in shows, as I focus on participation in production, management, and formal construction of the shape of a medium.] What does it mean to move to more asynchronous communications with listeners? I posted recently about the success of the Old Timer on WEFT in attracting a large number of small pledges/donations from listeners. This was largely ascribed to the fact that he encouraged listeners to call-in on a regular basis – not necessarily to go on air, but to get a ‘shout out’ from the Old Timer a few minutes later. Obviously, most shows don’t use this format/technique, but what does it mean to favour technologies and approaches that militate against it?
I should add some final notes on that point. First, many radio shows have continually used asynchronous modes of listener input – welcoming letters, etc. I’m thinking of shows on RTÉ over the years, and also a programme I used to listen to on the Christian Science Monitor’s shortwave station, where their weekly show included a regular section with letters from listeners worldwide. [In the case of the Monitor’s show, it should be noted that it was taped and then broadcast repeatedly over a number of days, so the asynchronous approach was as close to podcasting as shortwave radio could allow.]
Second, here in Urbana WILL-AM used to broadcast a show from Chicago Public Radio, Odyssey. The show was eventually cancelled by CPR, as they hadn’t secured sufficient affiliates to make it a worthwhile ongoing venture. I was disappointed, as I enjoyed the topics discussed. However, as at least one person pointed out to me, the show was broadcast on a delay on WILL – perhaps because live airing would have interfered with more established, local shows, such as Focus 580. However, since Odyssey was designed not only as a discussion with guests, but also more particularly as a call-in show, with questions and comments from listeners, one aspect of the show was closed off to WILL listeners.
So there we have a collection of thoughts on the issues at hand. I’m not resolutely opposed to any particular technology – even webcasting, where I’ve been most vocal locally – but I do think it’s reasonable to suggest that it’s not just up to opponents to argue what’s wrong with a technology, but that supporters should have to think about not just what the benefits might be, but how identified issues can be mitigated or avoided. I suppose I’m, in large part, channelling Ivan Illich [PDF] on this. A technology is not just an technical tool, but also the culturally-determined process and context within which it is situated and operated. Using a technology just because it’s available is not always desirable. Technologies have unpredicted, and unpredictable, effects. We can, and should, not just consider whether to adopt a particular tool, but also the rules, norms, regulations, whatever, within which we will operate that tool.
I welcome thoughts and feedback.

  1. 3 Responses to “Digitizing radio – a discourse”

  2. By owen on Oct 24, 2005 | Reply

    The number one priority should be content, and how it’s delivered should be secondary. I can’t help with content, but the technicalities I can. The main thing to do is to make it as simple as possible for the viewer/listener to follow. Every step you add is another opportunity for the listener to stop bothering.
    For example, have a live stream in multiple formats (if possible), to suit different bandwidths, including 56k modem, as well has having syndicatable podcasts of various shows.
    For example – ( I know this is a different style of radio station) KEXP have very clearly on the left, links to streaming audio in 3 different formats.

  3. By Andrew Ó Baoill on Oct 24, 2005 | Reply

    Accessibility is an important point, and so you’re right about having multiple streams, and good usability, if you’re going to have webstreams. Incidentally, on the issue of multiple streams, I understand that this is why some administrators prefer to use Real Audio for distribution – because it can automatically adjust to the connectivity of the listener.
    One of the points I was trying to work through in this piece, however, is how the content we choose to produce is affected by the distribution mechanisms that will be used to deliver it. David Park’s research on college radio gives some good empirical evidence for this.

  4. By owen on Oct 25, 2005 | Reply

    The content shouldn’t be affected by the delivery mechanism, as live material is very obviously live, and will accept phone-ins, etc, no matter what. Podcasts fall into the same category as pre-recorded or repeated material, and can be treated as such.
    Again, continuing on the spirit of my earlier point, I think the main priority should be to get the basics working, and working well, before adapting additional technologies, (not that they should be neglected either); i.e. don’t forget the original priorities.

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