(photo: flickr/Bent Kure CC: BY-NC-SA)

The death of radio has been predicted many times in the past decades but guess what? Radio still isn’t dead. On the contrary, it’s booming. It’s true people may not own as many radios as they used to but on the other hand, they are carrying this century’s version of a transistor radio – their smartphones – around with them in their pockets. And these magical listening devices give people the chance to hear a huge variety of radio shows and podcasts when and where they want to.

But besides new convenience, it’s also the extraordinary quality of many new radio programs that’s causing people to tune in to radio again. onMedia’s Kyle James takes a look what is being considered a new golden age of radio.

In the United States these days, something’s going on in the world of audio that I’ve never experienced before. People are waiting with baited breath for Thursday to roll around. No, it’s not for the next episode of some hit TV show like “House of Cards” or “Orange is the New Black.” They’re waiting for a radio program to be uploaded. Yes, you read that correctly – a RADIO program. Every Thursday, the latest installment of Serial is released and it’s being gobbled up by the masses. Hard numbers are hard to come by but the program has topped the iTunes podcast charts since it debuted October 3.

Serial is a long-form radio investigative journalism show during which Sarah Koenig, a producer of the acclaimed radio program This American Life, brings listeners along as she investigates a 15-year-old murder. She wants to know if the young man who was convicted, and who is now serving a life sentence in a maximum-security prison, is the one who really killed his ex-girlfriend. She explains in this very first part of Episode 1. And since then, radio listeners across the country have tuned in to listen to Koenig go through the case with a fine-tooth comb and talk to people involved. She accesses original police interviews with suspects and witnesses, tries to recreate the sequence of events around the crime, tracks down old schoolmates of the victim and the convicted murderer, and speaks at length with the man convicted of the crime.

But what makes Serial different to other kinds of documentary is largely its tone, which is similar to that used in other innovative radio shows popping up across dials and on podcast feeds; it’s casual, first person and sometimes a little uncertain. Gone is the authoritative, distant, neutral narrator normally associated with radio documentaries. It’s been replaced by a voice that reveals emotion and even insecurity. Listen to Koenig question herself in the following clip. Similarly, in the third episode of the podcast StartUp, which follows a man who knows nothing about business as he starts one up, host Alex Blumberg has kind of a breakdown on mic. “I’m about to quit my job!” he says to his wife. “I’m just one guy with this stupid little plan, and there’s a gazillion people out there with better plans that are going to make more money.” These kinds of characteristics have led some media observers to comment that radio is having its own “New Journalism” moment. New Journalism was a style in the 1960s and 70s that relied on solid reporting mixed with more dramatic literary techniques and a generous dash of subjectivity.

And Serial is not afraid of drama – obviously a murder case can be pretty dramatic but the producers milk it for all it’s worth by teasing out the information, building up suspense and then leaving listeners dangling at the edge of a cliff at the end, waiting for the next installment. Although, truth be told, it’s come in for some criticism for just that from some corners of the journalism community; is it a manipulative drama or is it is investigative journalism? It’s kind of both, actually.

Serial and StartUp are just two of the relative newcomers in this new wave of high-quality radio. Others include Love + Radio, a prize-winning interview-driven show; Strangers, true tales about the good, bad and ugly ways people relate to one another; and the upcoming Invisibilia, which weaves brain science together with personal stories.

As Slate magazine wrote: “Just like New Journalism in its early days, the shows are sometimes brilliant, sometimes frustrating and self indulgent, but always exciting and fun.” In a sense, these latest programs are piggy-backing on the success of older siblings, namely shows such as This American Life or RadioLab, which laid new radio ground, moving away from the traditional acts-and-tracks story model and taking more chances with topics, presentation and the use of sound.

Easy listening

But also what’s helped these shows get produced in the first place is the new ways of distributing audio, especially podcasting. Although podcasting has been around for more than a decade, and growth in listenership was stagnant for a while, it’s now experiencing a comeback.

According to Apple, subscriptions to podcasts through its iTunes platform reached 1 billion last year and the numbers are still growing. Many believe the future of radio listening is moving firmly from the radio set to the smartphone, especially as the devices have become ubiquitous and people get used to on-demand media consumption. More people are listening as they commute, work out at the gym or do household chores.

(photo: flickr/Doug CC:BY-NC-SA)

In addition, podcasts can be cheap to produce. There are fewer administrative issues to deal with, and they can get by with a smaller staff and a smaller budget. Plus, producers are finding that podcasts create strong bonds with their audience, which makes them attractive to sponsors and advertisers. With its combination of easy distribution, flexible formats, and what seems like a thirst for long-form reporting and good storytelling, radio is back in fashion. And this isn’t just the case in the US – look at what Radio Ambulante is doing across Latin America.

Once again, all those rumors of radio’s impending demise seem to have been greatly exaggerated.

Written by Kyle James, edited by Kate Hairsine

Photo (cropped): PatCastaldo/Flickr

With their focus on local news and local issues, community radio stations can play a crucial role in providing independent information to communities. Localized content is vital regardless of whether an area has an established media landscape or is in a post-conflict situation with newly developing media.

DW Akademie project manager and media consultant Rüdiger Maack works closely with community stations in Tunisia where he is based. Maack shares some tips with onMedia about how community radio stations can increase their viability.

What makes a community radio successful?

If a community station is to be successful, then the same rules apply to every station on the planet. This is true whether we are talking about community radios in Germany or France, where they are often amateur-run stations aimed at a small audiences, or somewhere like Tunisia, where such stations are the only alternative to state media in many regions.

– the station needs to be close to the listeners
– the station doesn’t have the right to bore its listeners
– the station needs to have a mixture of content that it wants to pass on to the listeners and what the listeners are actually prepared to listen to. That means it needs to find a balance between more serious and lighter elements so that listeners don’t switch off.

You said being close to the listeners is essential. What do you mean exactly?

Let’s say I live in a particular city. First of all, I need to find out what doesn’t already exist here – what are the topics that other media don’t cover. The second question is then: does this topic interest me? If it doesn’t, I had better abandon the idea immediately. Thirdly, assuming I want to go ahead and launch a radio for this particular segment and I think there is a demand for it and that the listeners will find it interesting enough to tune in, can I actually meet this demand with my limited financial means? And last but not least – will I find enough other people who are enthusiastic enough to actually start the adventure together with me?

Community radio is important – all around the world (Photo – Kate Hairsine)

If your financial means are limited, what can you do to make your community station viable?

It depends on the country and the legal framework. But very often, community radios are run by an association, with the members ideally paying a fee that covers at least part of the station’s costs. In many countries or cities, there might be some sort of funding available. Try to find support. If you can convince your community that the station is important, maybe they will find a space for you that you can convert into a studio, or pay your electricity bill, or offer free internet or a technician who can check your equipment. In some countries, you are also allowed to run advertisements on community radio. In short – you need a lot of improvisation and creativity, also in terms of money.

Can you give us an example of the kind of creativity you are talking about?

In Tunisia, I have seen some really creative examples of how to create public attention, which heightens the chances of attracting funding. For example, most radios here start up on the web before getting access to a FM frequency. One of our partners simply put its shows on onto USB sticks and handed them out to coffee shop owners, and taxi and bus drivers in the region. Another station we work with is now broadcasting on FM. They are looking for private funds so they need to be able to prove to potential advertising clients that people in the region actually listen to them. But they don’t have money to make a study. So one afternoon the presenter said to the listeners – “Wherever you are now, if you are in your car and listening to us, I’ll count to five, then everybody start honking”. And people did. The boss recorded what happened from the office balcony in the center of town and now they show the video to potential clients to prove how big the audience is.

Is broadcasting on the internet also an advantage?

I don’t think that any radio can do without a website today. In Tunisia, and in many other countries, community stations can make use of the fact that very often, large parts of the community live abroad but are still very attached to their community, more so than to their home country. So if they find local information on the internet, they might also be willing to support the station financially. Or you can turn it around and ask them to participate and produce a show for the radio from abroad.

Rüdiger Maack is a seasoned journalist who spent many years working for German public radio, including a four year stint as a correspondent and studio head based in Rabat, Marocco. Maack has now returned to Northern Africa where he is now heading DW Akademie’s office in Tunisia. Maack has previously contributed to onMedia where he talked about the difficulties of interviewing a former rebel leader in Liberia. You can also read about how Maack sees the social changes happening in Tunisia.

Interview by Sarah Mersch, edited by Kate Hairsine

An IRN roving reporter calls in his election report from a polling station

The elections in Sierra Leone in November 2012 marked another important test for the country’s democracy and stability some ten years after the end of its civil war.

To help provide accurate and impartial coverage of the elections, local radio stations and international partners worked together to produce IRN – the Independent Radio Network. This temporary cooperation gave many Sierra Leoneans across the country access to up to date and independent election reporting. DW Akademie’s Kate Hairsine was one of the international trainers mentoring IRN journalists and looks back on how this innovative network covered the elections.

Even in the middle of the night, the sounds of the Independent Radio Network (IRN) blared though the bedroom window of my guest house in Freetown. It seemed simply everyone in Sierra Leone with a radio was tuned to the network in the lead up to the 11 November 2012 elections.

Whether I was eating breakfast at a backstreet cafe, catching a minibus or buying bananas at the markets, IRN’s theme song blasted my eardrums from first thing in the morning to deep into the night.

Walking down a potholed road on the way to buy some food one evening, I met Umaru Karoma, who like a lot of people in Freetown had a radio glued to his ear. I recognized IRN’s theme song straight away.

“We are all listening to IRN,” Umaru said. “Everybody wants to know about the elections.”

Radio vital for information

Even on-duty policemen listened to IRN

Radio is the most important medium of communication in Sierra Leone. One of the poorest countries in the world, it has a high illiteracy rate and newspapers are virtually unobtainable outside of the capital, Freetown.

To make the situation even more difficult, although the media in Sierra Leone is relatively free of government interference, it is extremely difficult for Sierra Leoneans to access impartial and credible information. This is because many of the newspapers and radio stations are biased towards one particular party or another.

As for the public TV and radio broadcaster SLBC, the European Union Election Observer Mission (EUEOM) noted that it gave “access to political parties and candidates through free-airtime programmes”. However, in news bulletins and election related programming “SLBC showed biased coverage in favour of the ruling party” – the APC.

Hence, the Independent Radio Network filled a vital role. IRN was originally established back in 2002 to cover that year’s national elections. It’s primarily funded by international donors and the network has developed a reputation for producing independent and unbiased content.

Covering the country

Together with two other trainers from DW Akademie, I worked with IRN journalists for two weeks helping them with producing and planning their election coverage. And all three of us were incredibly impressed by the quality of IRN’s election programming and the effort they took to ensure their reporting was accurate and balanced.

There was barely room to move in the IRN hub

And the hub of this exceptional reporting was the tiny, cramped and hot IRN studio in the center of Freetown.

Normally, IRN preproduces three hours of weekly programming for distribution through its 28 partner stations across Sierra Leone’s 14 districts. But for the elections, IRN ramped up its programming to broadcast live, around the clock, from election eve until the day after elections. It then reported live three times a day until results were announced six days later on November 16.

This was a mammoth undertaking that was two years in the making, involving hundreds of reporters in the field, as well as a multitude of hosts and producers.

For the first time IRN joined forces with Cotton Tree News, a news and information service with its own partner stations. The temporary partnership meant around 90 percent of country had access to the live IRN radio coverage, making it akin to a national broadcaster.

Roving reporters

Pivotal to IRN’s election coverage were the 630 roving reporters from the partner stations to monitor selected polling stations across the country – effectively to be the “eyes and ears of the nation”. Each reporter was equipped with Le 200,000 ($45) and 250 units of phone credit. In the lead up to the elections all of the reporters attended election reporting training and were also given a copy of IRN’s excellent Reporters Handbook.

An IRN reporter sits with election observers

Starting from election day, the journalists called in to the central hub and reported on all the election day processes: whether a polling station opened up on time, if voting was running smoothly, if people could vote freely or if all those who wanted to vote were able to by the time the polling station closed.

And for some of the reporters, simply getting to their allocated polling station was a grueling exercise. Sulaiman ‘Storm’ Karoma from the IRN partner station, Radio Democracy, spent two days traveling to the remote village of Yiffin in the northern Koinadugu District. The final 50 kilometers of his journey involved a tortuous six hour motorbike ride down a washed-out muddy track.

Karoma says it is was “important” he was sent there because he provided eye-witness information from somewhere where there were no national or international observers.

According to Karoma, the polling station opened late because the truck carrying elections materials got bogged and the materials had to continue on motorbikes. Some ballot boxes were missing for part of the day as were screens for the polling booths.

“It is incumbent on us as journalists to have an idea of what it is like at a particular place during elections,” he said when he returned to Freetown. “That is the first time that a reporter has been sent there and a lot of people want to hear from places that are excluded.”

In the 2007 elections, IRN had a pool of 420 reporters. According to IRN coordinator Ransford Wright, having such a large number of reporters for the 2012 elections was “a major advantage” because it meant being able to get updates from all over the country.

Quashing rumors

Because of a transportation ban on election day, journalists couldn’t use minibuses or okada motorbike taxis to move around as usual (most journalists in Sierra Leone rely on okadas to get around).

This meant every journalist who was able to beg or borrow a car or motorbike was roped in to be an ‘on call’ reporter, who sped to a polling station when there were rumors of tension or wrongdoing. That way, IRN could double check the situation on the ground for themselves before going to air with a story.

This is especially important in a society where rumors often play a big role in inflaming tensions.

Team effort

Back at the IRN office in Freetown, at any one time, dozens of journalists crowded around a giant table, writing radio scripts, ringing potential interview partners and editing reports. Down one side of the cramped room, producers manned the four telephone lines – one for each of the country’s four districts.

The IRN producers worked furiously to coordinate the information coming in and organize the programs. IRN’s election coverage was also supported by BBC Media Action and Search for Common Ground, an international NGO dedicated to peace-building.

Amara Bangura, from BBC Media Action, said the whole coverage was “strengthened” as a result of so many people working together.

“If you can divide the job … at the end of the day you put together everything and have an amazing program.”

And in a boost for all of those who worked on IRN’s election project, the Commonwealth election observers noted in their official report that although “most of Sierra Leone’s media was openly partisan”, IRN “provided impartial news and information on the election.”

If you’re living in one of the Ghanaian cities and towns with broadcasters participating in the new Our Radio! project, somebody might come to your doorstep to ask these questions. Audience research is underway.
A total of 1700 interviews are being conducted, two to three hundred in each of the regions where one of the nine radio station partners in the project is located.

Trained research interviewers have a questionnaire with around 50 questions for randomly selected respondents designed by the research organization Pragma Solutions. It was tailored to the needs of the radio stations by station managers at a research workshop held in May.

Giving a say to the audience

Mavis Akotey of Pragma Solutions, who is supervising the interviews in the town of Enchi at the western border of Ghana, didn’t need to coerce respondents to participate. “People are actually happy to be asked what they think about the radio stations in Enchi”, she says.

Gerry van Dyck, Team Leader of Pragma Solutions, adds: “Even though we are living in a democracy, people feel their opinions don’t go anywhere. But now they do.”
Van Dyck has been working in market research for around 25 years. He’s leading an organization with eleven full-time employees and up to 300 people employed on a project basis.

At the moment, Pragma Solutions is working on three projects simultaneously and a team leader went out for a week to accompany interviewers in their field work.

“That’s necessary to get feedback from the interviewers,” Gerry explains. In the field he realized that interviewers need to be very conscious about the difference between programs (which exist and which people may like or not) and topics (which people are interested in, although they might not be covered in existing programs).

Listen to Gerry van Dyck, team leader at Pragma Solutions!

Logistics of research

Every day the completed questionnaires are being sent from the Upper East, Northern, Western and Central Regions of Ghana, where the field work is conducted, to the Pragma office in Accra. And while interviews are still going on, research staff have already started counting questionnaires, extracting the answers to open questions and coding the closed ones using statistical computer software. Once that’s finished, Pragma staff will analyse the data and write a report, which will be presented at a workshop with journalists and program directors of the Our Radio! stations in Kumasi.

Author: Aarni Kuoppamäki

Frequently they’re busy doing something else, are impatient and fidgety. Sometimes they even leave you with no word of explanation. And if they do return their attention to you, they expect you to be as friendly and courteous as if nothing had ever happened.

Of course that is exactly what you will do without a trace of resentment. Here’s how:

1. Be a good interpreter. Convey and explain complex subject matter in a way that listeners can easily understand.

2. Be a good spokesperson. Pose questions as if you are representing the listener. You’ll come across best when your listeners have the feeling that they would have asked the very same questions.

3. Be prepared. Being well-prepared is half the battle. Read the newspapers every day and stay on top of the latest.

4. Be firm, but not impolite. Your listeners will judge you by how you interact with figures of authority. Brash impoliteness is equally as bad as servile worship.

5. Be a good “scrounger”. You thrive off the hard work and efforts of others. Respect and acknowledge the work by your colleagues on your editorial and production team.

6. Proceed without prejudice. It is much more productive to help eradicate stereotypes than to introduce your own biases.

7. Be brief and precise, even when there is nothing tougher than omitting something that you consider important.

8. Be a team player. Engineers, technicians and production managers react to the way you behave and treat them. Often they provide ideas that are crucial to the program.

9. Don’t speak from the gut. Opinions shouldn’t be instinctive or emotional, especially if you’re not very familiar with the topic. Expressing doubt or presenting a different opinion in the form of a question, on the other hand, is a fundamental and necessary tool for moderators.

10. Don’t be vain. Modesty is a prerequisite of good journalism and at least as important as curiosity. Experience has shown that whoever starts thinking too much of him or herself is already heading toward their own downfall.

By Oliver Pieper

Translated by Deborah Friedman
Photo credit: LeeLeFever @ Flicker