Janey Gordon

Department of Communications

The Department of Communications offers a broad range of courses to prepare students for careers, graduate study, personal and social life by cultivating critical thinking and problemsolving skills, developing communication techniques for a variety of settings (e.g. person to person, small group, organization, or public), and promoting ethical sensitivity and appreciation for diversity. Consistent with these educational objectives as well as the P & T guidelines specified in the USCA Faculty Manual, the Department of Communications bases decisions concerning the promotion and/or tenure of faculty on three interconnected areas: teaching; scholarly, creative, and applied professional activities; and service.

The Mobile Phone An Artefact of Popular Culture and a Tool of the Public Sphere

[C]ontrol over media production is diverging and new, sometimes less traditional, content providers are entering the media industries. However, research on media convergence has mostly addressed stationary settings. But with the growing phenomenon of mobile information technology, it is becoming increasingly important to consider mobility as a dimension of media convergence and mobile media as a new research field. (Andreas Nilsson, Urban Nuldén and Daniel Olsson)2

Fifty Years of BBC Local Radio 1967–2017 Symposium Introduction

I joined the BBC in 1974 as a studio manager on the main network services and then in 1978, I moved over to BBCRadio London and discovered a very different type of radio service, which was BBC Local Radio. I was quickly struck by the relaxed nature of the station; the way it would immediately, within minutes, respond on air to a local London story or issue; it took pride in mentioning even traffic jams, which gave local place names that listeners would know well; the station played music from as many London cultural groups as possible and, for a young broadcaster, gave me the opportunity to see an idea through from the merest glimmer of a plan to an on air broadcast. In this symposium for the Journal of Radio and Audio Media, I am pleased to introduce four articles that examine and celebrate the development of local radio in the United Kingdom. This started with the opening of BBC Radio Leicester in November 1967, which was followed by the opening of the BBC network of local stations around the country, now numbering 40 individual stations (see http://www. bbc.co.uk/radio/stations). However even in 1967 the BBC still maintained a monopoly on radio broadcasting in the UK and it was not until 1973 that local commercial stations began to gain licenses, starting in London with LBC and Capital Radio. To many radio academics reading this in liberal democratic countries, this may seem a very late start to what appears to be a fairly common or garden-variety radio model, that is a small station serving a limited geographic area, providing a bit of national “hard” news, but with many more parochial local stories alongside a playlist primarily of light popular music. I must stress that as a child growing up in the 1950s and 60s this model was quite literally unheard of in the UK! It was not until the offshore “pirate” stations began broadcasting in the early 1960s that I heard what many would consider a traditional pop music and presenter format. Consequently, the opening up of the local radio stations, detailed by these four articles, and that broadcast local matters and events to local communities, although often appealing to a younger adult audience in its music genres, was extraordinary at the time and worth reminding ourselves of now.

Community Radio, Funding and Ethics

Introduction Community radio is defined as being a being a notfor-profit radio station, run primarily by volunteers, drawn from the community that the radio station is targeting as its audience. This might be a geographical community, for example a small town or village, for example FOD Radio, in the Forest of Dean, a rural area of west England in the UK, or it might be a community of interest, for example Takeover Radio, in the city of Leicester in the UK, which defines as its community, young people under 18 years old. The size of the area will be dependent on the local topography and the power of the transmitter. In the UK this will typically be about a 5 km radius. However in a larger and less densely populated country, such as Australia, where transmitter power may be higher, community stations broadcast to extensive remote and rural areas, as well as wide suburban and urban districts.