List times of day you listen. How long do you listen each day? What do you listen to? What are you doing while you listen? What would you like to listen to that you are not now hearing?

Radio

-- ubiquitous medium

-- one of the great inventions of mankind because

• it broke the bound of geography in communication (to some extent)

• changed communication and its forms drastically – communicating with a mass audience was far more efficient with radio than print

• changed home life, particularly entertainment (changed our understanding of music especially)

• changed the economy (increased knowledge of goods and services

History of development of radio

-- 1887, Hertz electromagnetic waves

-- Marconi – sent code over electromagnetic waves

-- Fessenden – discovered the use of continuous waves

-- DeForest – developed receiver for these waves

-- 1912 sinking of the Titanic – first big news event that got to us quickly because of radio

-- KDKA Pittsburgh, first radio station as we know it (gathered an audience)

-- 1920s many stations competing for the spectrum turned it into babble

-- Communication Acts of 1927 and 1934 (Herbert Hoover)

For some information on how radio works, check out this article on the How Stuff Works web site.

Government involvement in broadcasting

-- government owns the spectrum

-- spectrum is limited and therefore valuable

-- who gets a license to broadcast?

-- should the government not control what is being broadcast?

-- what about the First Amendment?

Radio transformed itself in the 1950s when television entered American homes – changed from drama and entertainment to music.

Radio today

-- still ubiquitous

-- programming in formats that are very tradition and tightly bound

-- formats appeal to a demographically defined audience

-- news radio – not much except for National Public Radio

-- talk radio (not the same as news)

-- government use of radio (Voice of America and others)

-- concentration of ownership

-- 13,000 radio stations; 2,500 owned by top 11 companies

-- lives by advertising (100%) $15 billion a year

Listenership

-- 33 percent of adults get their news from radio in the mornings

-- Minorities have higher rate of listening to radio than others; Hispanic radio audience is large and growing

-- Older people listen to news; younger to music

-- Most people see radio as a local medium, but local radio news is almost non-existent in many places. Can news draw an audience locally?

-- Radio is generally less credible than television, newspapers and the web.

-- 17 percent of Internet users listen online

Radio of the future

-- radio has been bound in two ways: by geography and the spectrum

Those boundaries are being broken by

• Internet radio

• Satellite radio (Check out the How Stuff Works section on satellite radio.)

Questions?