Vera Ularu (RO)
"Give a coin for Athenaeum" campaign, that have begun in 1886, have been raised from public participation a part of the amount required to construct one the most important buildings from Bucharest. Romanian Athenaeum is a hall for symphonic music and a national monument situated in the center of capital. Here you can see the building and more details: http://fge.org.ro/en.html.
David Röthler (AT)
Financing community media activities has always been a challenge. But with the rise of the Internet and Social Media new options are explored. Crowdfunding closely related to crowdsourcing describes the co-operation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money together in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organisations. The term Crowdfunding is usually applied to raising money for planned future projects whereas the term Social Payment refers to small remunerations for content already produced. Crowdfunding & Social Payment are an innovative and still experimental approach to finance (online) content and projects utilising Web 2.0 paradigms. Among well-known platforms are Kickstarter.com, Kachingle.com and Flattr.com. This Civilmedia stream is looking forward to contributions like:
John Downing, Fulbright Visiting Professor, University of Tampere, FI
Reviewing the findings of the research presented during the Researching Community Media Audiences panel, this presentation will discuss future direction for alternative and community media research.
Maria Anikina, Journalism Department, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia
In last decades serious social and political changes happened in Russia. They cause the transformations in social attitudes and social climate, change the situation with public sector. To the moment the data show that that protest potential in modern Russian society is quite low (about 25%, Levada-center, 2011). At the same time civic activity is evidently shifting to the Internet – the number of users is increasing (in average on 19% per year, FOM, 2010), diverse sources for social activity and public discussion appear. This means for scholars the necessity to elaborate proper methods to study new audiences, their attitudes and opinion on acute topics, to analyze civil potential of modern audiences and the discussion which takes place around community and civil media. At the Faculty of Journalism (MSU) the method of multidimensional analysis of mass consciousness texts was implemented for this research goals. It lets obtain even more detailed and nuanced picture of mass consciousness than the picture created on the base of representative poll results and make some prognosis concerning the development of civic consciousness of the most active part of Russian society.
Gabriella Velics, University of West Hungary, Szombathely, Hungary
In Hungary there are only a few cases of researching audiences of community radio stations. In 2006-2008 the presenter did embark on a research project to study the audiences of two small stations operating in western Hungary in the twons of Celldömölk and Őriszentpéter, both sharing a disadvantaged status in the economy at that time, despite their cultural and touristic attractions. The local media landscape of Celldömölk, includes Radio Cell,s local TV and local biweekly paper, where Őriszentpéter has just the community radio station Triangulum Radio. The aim of the quantitative research was to understand the connection between the radio and their audiences as the habitants of this region have strong emotional relation to “our radio” and get to know further information on how they see the role of the stations in their towns, what kind of programmes they prefer, and what kind of reason and aim they assign to a community radio. Questionnaires were used to collect data about the audience’s gender, age, qualification, occupation. Among other things, the finding pointed out that the audiences placed music and entertainment at the top of their priorities, with a wish to remake the only local radio stations into a more commercial and mainstream-oriented stations, even though the local character of the stations was also highly ranked by the interviewees. The presentation will discuss these findings more in detail, positioning these practices in the wider context of the Hungarian Community Radio scene.
Andrea Medrado, London Metropolitan University, London, UK
This presentation is based on a doctoral research — a study of community radio listening in the everyday life of one Brazilian favela (Pau da Lima) located in Salvador, Brazil. However, the focus is on how rather than on what has been discovered. The aim is to discuss the methodological approach, which draws on media ethnography, and to address some of the main methodological issues that are relevant for this research.
It will be argued that the strength of media ethnography lies in its ability to provide in-depth knowledge of a ‘culture’ or environment and, at the same time, offer a holistic perspective. Clearly, a study of the role of community radio among residents of one favela demands a good degree of immersion in their daily routines.
Further, the paper looks at the three main actors involved in the fieldwork research in Pau da Lima. The presenter reflects on her own role as a researcher, explore ‘the field’ in which the research took place, and, finally, delve into issues of access and her relationship with the research participants. She recognises that being a ‘close other’ has shaped her fieldwork experience in many ways, bringing the issue of reciprocity – which is usually treated as one item among many others under ‘ethical considerations’— to the foreground of my fieldwork relations. This has informed her decision to adopt an approach to which she refer to as ‘exchange research’.
Diarmuid McIntyre, CRAOL, Dublin, Ireland
The Community Radio movement in the Republic of Ireland comprises 23 fully licenced stations which are regulated by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI). The BAI’s Community Radio Policy states that “active community participation and general listenership are equally relevant when assessing a community station’s relationship with the community served”. IRTC Commissioned Study of Pilot Community Radio Stations (1996) notes that “Perceiving and satisfying needs is not a static process and can change only through ongoing exploration with the community”. It is recognised that the diversity of stations types, communities served, length of time of air, combined with the fact that not all citizens of Ireland are in a community radio franchise areas poses challenges for audience research.
In recent years, there has been research at station-level into different elements of the audience’s relationship with the station. Though useful to the individual station, the lack of standard methodologies has meant that even where station are investigating the same elements, there can be no comparability. The level of independence of the research has varied wildly and there has been significant duplication. The limited audience research carried out in other jurisdictions, notably Australian, can inform Irish Audience research which can adopt best practices, and evolve and integrate new methodologies based on Irish circumstances.
An investigation was carried out by Diarmuid McIntyre and Veronica Santorum of Grey Heron Media at the behest of Craol the Community Radio Forum of Ireland into the feasibility of a national audience research approach. This has resulted in a proposal for a coherent framework for audience research (Mosaic). The proposed framework is built of a set of 4 standalone but complementary quantitative and qualitative elements. Each element could be separately undertaken. Taken collectively, the elements could provide the basis an ongoing national and station specific picture of the Awareness, Audience and Impact of Community Radio in Ireland. The proposed framework is currently under consideration by the Coordinating Committee of Craol.
Lawrie Hallett, University of Westminster, London, UK
For a number of reasons, professional audience measurement as carried out by Public Service and commercial radio broadcasters is inappropriate for Community Radio services. Not only is there the issue of the high costs involved, but more fundamentally, there is also the problem that such approaches are rather 'granular' (with a tendency towards inaccuracy when measuring smaller specialist services). Moreover, professional audience surveys tend to focus only on the quantitative measurement of audience size, rather than on the qualitative elements of audience satisfaction.
This presentation will use the example of the approach taken by UK Community Radio station, 'Future Radio' to obtain both quantitative data through street surveys and qualitative data through on-line questionnaires. Showing how reasonably accurate data can be obtained on a cost-effective basis, issues of accuracy and practical difficulties will also be explored.
Viviana Uriona, D Over the course of the last four years, Argentina witnessed the implementation of several important progressive reforms. One of them was a reform of the Broadcasting Act which led to countrywide changes of media structures. Triggered by the fierce disputes between Argentina's farming lobby and the government of Fernandez de Kirchner in 2008, broader social conflicts arose, involving the government and mass media, especially the newspaper "Clarín" and other media associated with its publishing house. Alternative media activists – first of all community radios and a broad coalition of diverse social movements – seized this opportunity to pursue a process of discussion on a proposed change of the media law. I will critically review the discussion and it's socio-political environment, as well as some of the highlights of the new audiovisual law in Argentina.
