Community Radio on Waiheke Island: A case study
Brent A. Simpson
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Film, Television & Media Studies, The University of Auckland, 2009. i
Abstract
Community radio has a complex relationship with community and to the wider mediascape in which it exists. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the development of a community radio station on
Waiheke Island, New Zealand with particular attention paid to how the characteristics of this particular community impacted the development of the station. A review of the sociological, anthropological, and political interpretations of community was also undertaken as a means frame the relationship of media to community.
The study presents a qualitative case study of the non-profit community radio station, Waiheke Radio.
This research consisted of interviews with volunteer members of the station as well as the personal experiences and communications of the author who was also a volunteer member of the station itself.
The thesis aims to engage in a form interpretive sociology in which the community of both Waiheke
Island and the community of Waiheke Radio are examined through the lens of interviews with, and observations of, individuals who are members of both.
The author found that volunteers of the station as well as local residents had varying perceptions of the stations 'success', and were often conditioned to appeal to traditional media metrics like listenership figures in order to determine value. The author suggests that this is not a valid metric in the case of community radio and offers alternative means to evaluate community media. The author also recommends that community radio re-consider the notion of audience in light of societal changes brought about by the internet, but also finds that the core values of community media mean that community radio is well placed to take advantage of such changes. ii
Dedication
Firstly, my son Jackson Cash Simpson who on the 24th of April, 2008 flipped the switch that put
Waiheke Radio on air and who has patiently, and not so patiently, been to the radio station more times than he might care to remember. This is so you remember. And to my partner Michelle who has unconditionally encouraged and supported my writing of this thesis and, with very few conditions, has also supported my radio habit. iii
Acknowledgements
The development of community radio on Waiheke Island has been a long and varied project that has engaged the skills and patience of a wide range of people from diverse backgrounds. I would like to acknowledge all the people on this little island in the Hauraki Gulf who have helped transform
Waiheke Radio from an idea in a coffee shop to a reality. I would particularly like to thank all the many wonderful volunteers who keep this little jewel in the gulf going with their dedication and hard work – in the end it is really less about radio and more about, as the saying goes, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
I would also like to thank Nabeel Zuberi and Luke Goode, my supervisors from the Department of
Film, Television, & Media Studies at the University of Auckland, for their advice, criticism, and support; and Amelia Lawley for proofreading this thesis. iv
Table of Contents
Introduction...... 1 A brief history of radio in New Zealand...... 6 Deregulation...... 9 Ownership...... 13 The General User Radio License (GURL)...... 15 Community Radio...... 22 Theories of Community Media...... 29 Community Radio on Waiheke Island...... 56 Waiheke Island...... 58 The Local Mediascape...... 60 History of Waiheke Island...... 62 Characteristics of Community...... 65 Brief History of Radio on Waiheke...... 73 Waiheke Community Radio ...... 76 Funding and Sponsorship...... 79 Local News and Citizen Journalism...... 87 Conclusion...... 92 1
"Community radio is 90% about community, and 10% about radio." Zane Ibrahim (2009), founder of Bush Radio in Cape Town, South Africa.
Introduction
Old habits die hard, and often the oldest never die at all. My earliest introduction to live music coincided with the development of the arena rock show pioneered by legendary San Francisco promoter Bill Graham in California in the early 80s. His multiple-artist arena shows were spectacular displays of massive-amplification meets massive-marketing and as a kid I bought into it vigorously.
And I bought the t-shirts. Going to an arena show was as much about getting the t-shirt as it was about revering the latest guitar hero. I have never quite managed to develop much fashion sense beyond that music t-shirt habit, but it was just such a music t-shirt that ultimately led to my involvement with community radio in New Zealand - many, many years after attending my last arena show.
Chris Walker, a volunteer on the local radio station on Waiheke Island, Beach FM, produced and presented a weekly New Zealand music show called Counting the Beat as well as co-ordinating presenters for the weekend local news and events show, Island Life. While waiting to disembark from the Waiheke ferry one day in 2003 he began a conversation with me based solely on my music t-shirt habit, and we quickly discovered that we shared common tastes in music. Later, in our second commuter conversation, he spoke to me about his involvement with the local radio station and I expressed a long held but unsatisfied desire to participate in radio. So began my involvement with radio on Waiheke Island.
My involvement began by being thrust into the position of one of four presenters for the long-standing weekend news and local affairs show Island Life that Walker coordinated. I received some minor 2 training totalling about two hours behind a piece of equipment that was for the most part totally foreign to me; and by the time my first solo broadcast came up I had barely mastered the buttons, let alone the art of talking into a microphone or interviewing people live on air. Much to my chagrin I quickly began to dread going on the radio. I had very few contacts in, or knowledge about, the community at that time to warrant me presenting a community news and events show, and I didn't particularly want to talk to people. I had originally thought that I was signing up to do a show that mostly involved playing my favourite music.
Fortunately, I was short lived on Island Life and not long afterwards, feeling somewhat more comfortable behind the broadcasting desk, I attained my desired specialist music slot, developing a show called the Hauraki Hoedown that played alternative country music and other Americana for two hours on a Monday night. I presented this show for over three years until Beach FM ceased broadcasting in 2008. During this time I came to develop an appreciation for independent radio, and for the potential of community radio on the island. Towards the end of The Beach's tenure as the local broadcaster I had introduced blogging to the station's website and experimented with streaming and podcasting; a few us had also begun to consider some of the content as a valuable oral history of island people and began recording interviews from Island Life and archiving them on The Internet Archive, a
US based non-profit web site which offers permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.
The Beach failed for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the tension created between the station's owner/manager who maintained commercial intentions in a geographical locale that was unlikely to be able to support it, and the desires and motivations of unpaid volunteers to actually create a community style radio and community programming. These two positions were irreconcilable because without a not-for-profit or some kind of alternative governance structure in place to mediate 3 the financial operation of the station, volunteers were not willing to invest time and effort beyond their shows to expand the station in directions that they had no input over. Questions of commercialism and broadcasting economics, spectrum allocation, station governance, audience-building, and the will of individuals to create localised media content are a part of the story of radio on Waiheke, and are likely similar issues that are faced by many community radio stations in New Zealand and beyond. How these questions unfold and are answered in the practice of creating, running, and sustaining a community radio station are likely to determine its success or failure.
This thesis is informed by my continued participation in community radio in New Zealand and as such involves elements of a participatory action research methodology. As a member of the Waiheke
Community Radio Trust my involvement in community radio is currently active and ongoing and my understanding of the complexity of this medium within the community context and the broadening mediascape within which radio finds itself are unfolding as I read, write, and research. It is therefore my hope that this research will impact in some way upon the direction of the community broadcaster
(Waiheke Radio) that I am writing about here, as it attempts to create a sustainable radio media service for the Waiheke community. The tradition of participatory action research involves an element of self- reflection and change whereby individual researchers change themselves, support change in others, and then work together to change the institution or group directly involved in research (McTaggart, 1991). It is within this tradition that I am aiming to undertake such a form of qualitative research with the goal of improving the performance and quality of the community broadcaster with which I am most intimately involved. The unfolding of my involvement as presenter, trustee, station programmer, trainer,
Web developer and, more recently, author of a submission on national community broadcasting funding policy, is a story of personal transformation – from consumer, to producer, to theorist, and reflects how the act of participating in community media production is an act of self-expression.
Embodied in these personal acts of participation, self-expression, and community engagement are 4 implications for the functioning of modern communities and democracies.
Participatory action researchers are for the most part concerned with situations of social change, the weakening of the means to meet human needs, and the rise of anxieties, fears and alienation due to the effects of globalisation and other political and economic situations (Wadsworth, 1998). Community radio and community media projects may often emerge as a response to media concentration and the negative effects that result from mediascapes dominated by multinational commercial media organisations. At other times they may simply be the result of almost hobbyist intentions and only over time and with increased input by volunteers morph into community based projects. Community radio, the medium I am mostly concerned with here, appears as groups of individuals and volunteers attempt to localise broadcast media. When they do so their collective aspirations and beliefs in what radio is and their relationship to their listeners, who are for the most part synonymous with their geographic community, shape the form and content of their broadcasts and ultimately the character of the station.
Like any sizeable technical endeavour however, broadcasting inevitably costs money. The localism of community radio may have the adverse affect of limiting the ability for stations to sustain themselves financially and may result in tensions between non-profit ideals, present to combat the perceived negative effects of advertising, and the need to keep the station funded and sustainable. Also as the station evolves, increased participation necessitates a more complex management and governance structure and engenders a more complex relationship with the community within which it is entwined.
Questions of power in regards to who the station represents (just what is this “community” that is being broadcast to?), what viewpoints the station expresses and for whom, and how groups develop the means to organise the collective of individuals that begin to play a greater role in shaping the identity of the station, are all questions that will be engaged with in the case study. 5
The individuals that constitute the bulk of the narrative that drives the case study are diverse in their outlook, their backgrounds, their experience with radio, and their politics as media producers. While substantial amounts of media studies are dedicated to reviewing the impact of global mediascapes on individuals and societies, community media studies should study how the personal impacts on participation in the production of localised media and on the relationships that such media can have on the social structures within which such individuals act. Through interviews with station volunteers and other participants in the station's production, administration, and governance I hope to gain a richer understanding of how community radio impacts the lives of individuals and communities and the ties between the two1. In this sense the thesis is also a form of ethnography in that it aims to engage in a form of Weberian interpretive sociology in which the community of both Waiheke Island and the community of Waiheke Radio are examined through the descriptive lens of interviews with, and observations of, the individuals who are members of both. VanMaanen (as cited in Harper, 1992, p.
141) suggests “we need more, not fewer, ways to tell of culture. The value of ethnography from this standpoint is found not in its analysis and interpretation of culture, but in its decision to examine culture in the first place; to conceptualise it, reflect on it, narrate it, and, ultimately, to evaluate it”. The motivation for this research lies in the relationships I have established with the individuals who make up Waiheke Radio and my experience living on Waiheke Island and participating in local media, and satisfies a desire to reflect on this experience, narrate it, and evaluate it.
1 This project was confirmed by UAHPEC on May 18th, 2009 as a low risk project. 6
A brief history of radio in New Zealand
It is an oft quoted but rarely well documented meme of New Zealand radio that New Zealand has more radio stations per capita than any other country in the world. While television has been a relative latecomer to New Zealand, only establishing universal service in 1962, radio has had almost universal coverage in the country since 1926 (Pauling, 1994). It is particularly useful to put the development of community radio in the context of the history of radio in New Zealand as this history is quite unique in its abrupt shifts from almost total government control to almost complete deregulation.
Like many broadcast media the development of the means to communicate via radio preceded the availability of content to broadcast. In New Zealand this was due to the fact that the motivations of early radio enthusiasts were for the potential profit that could be gained from the manufacture and distribution of radios rather than the broadcasting of content. Government was largely absent from the emergent industry until radio was brought onto the radar of government due to the involvement of post office officials. These officials were concerned with spectrum scarcity and the allocation of frequencies rather than the nature of broadcast content. By 1935 a newly elected Labour government attempted to establish a national broadcasting service in New Zealand in the image of the BBC. This service was to be modelled after the philosophical and managerial principles of Lord John Reith and his vision of radio as a medium to "educate, inform, and entertain". In Reith's view the burgeoning modern democracy of England constituted a move towards a participatory politics that required a more educated and informed public, and that radio was a tool that could be put towards this use. As was the case though with many enterprises borrowed straight from the 'old country', the much smaller listening audience in New Zealand, their wide geographical dispersion, combined with limited financial resources meant that the New Zealand service was to be only a poor and somewhat ineffective 7 simulation of its homeland elder brother (Pauling, 1994).
Prior to full government intervention in broadcasting the Radio Broadcasting Company of New
Zealand Ltd had been created after an agreement with the Postmaster-General to establish and operate radio stations in the four main city centres. By 1932 the number of stations licensed by the Post and
Telegraph Department and under the management of the company totalled 40. In 1932, after a commissioned report on national coverage outlined the difficulties in universal coverage due to the unique geographical nature of New Zealand, the New Zealand Broadcasting Board was created to give financial aid to a number of private broadcasting stations operating in areas where reception of the
Board's stations was unsatisfactory. The Broadcasting Amendment Act 1934–35 charged the Board with the responsibility of supervising the programmes broadcast by private broadcasting stations with the obvious aim of unifying the whole system.
The Board was to be short lived though and in 1935 the country elected its first Labour government under the leadership of Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage. Savage was arguably the first New
Zealand politician to understand the significance of broadcasting to political success, having been greatly assisted into the office by the influence of one broadcaster, Colin Scrimgeour. Scrimgeour was a presenter on the popular Auckland radio station 1ZB who had strong sympathies for the Labour Party and a devoted audience. The Labour party had faced much opposition from the conservative press of the day in the run up to the election, and Savage, seeing the value of broadcasting for the future of political success, eventually made himself the first Minister of Broadcasting and is recorded as having said, “It's a grand thing to have a hand on radio these days” (Pauling, 1994, p. 7). It was from this point on that radio in New Zealand would become inexorably tied to policy, legislation, and the vagaries of
New Zealand politics so that even by as late as 1961 the NZBC remained a highly regulated and controlled government department. It would not be until as late as 1989 that the grip of government to 8 authoritatively affect and shape radio markets in New Zealand was relinquished through almost total deregulation.
1961 also saw the Broadcasting Corporation Act establish the legality of privately owned broadcasting stations, but the NZBCs extended review of the need for such stations, not surprisingly perhaps, reported little need, and no private applications were sought after (Pauling, 1994, p. 11). Not until 1967 and the broadcasting of pirate radio station Radio Hauraki in Auckland from a ship outside of the New
Zealand 12 mile territorial limits did the power of the consumer (most notably a youth culture consuming popular music) pressure government policymakers to remove the overarching powers of the
NZBC and truly legitimise the activities of private broadcasters. This was achieved by the creation of the New Zealand Broadcasting Authority in 1968. This body became the ultimate arbiter of broadcast licensing in New Zealand until 1973 when the Labour government under Roger Douglas, also the
Minister of Broadcasting, initiated widespread changes to broadcasting policy, essentially ushering in the modern era of NZ radio. Douglas' policies came without any parliamentary debate and no discussion with current broadcasters and essentially broke up the NZBC into three separate and independent corporations overseen by the Broadcasting Authority. The Broadcasting Authority was to provide common services to the three corporations such as transmission facilities, news gathering, and the development of advertising and content standards.
For most of its existence, the history of radio in New Zealand has been the history of tight government control and intervention. The control of ownership, governance, and the kinds of messages that were transmitted are a legacy that, compared to the original BBC model, have meant that New Zealand’s experience with a public service broadcaster buffered from the direct influence of government has been minimal. It was not until the later part of the 20th century that the state almost completely relinquished control of radio in New Zealand, and the system became one of the most deregulated in the world. 9
Deregulation
In 1987 a report by the neoliberal think tank the New Zealand Business Roundtable entitled
Telecommunications In New Zealand - The Case For Reform (Fountain, 1987) suggested that the country introduce a system for allocating and pricing radio frequencies based on a competitive tendering process. This type of spectrum management was influenced by the writings of British economist Ronald Coase (1960) who had argued in an article The Problem of Social Cost that law and regulation are not as important or effective at helping people as lawyers and government planners believe. Coase’s Theorem argued specifically in light of spectrum allocation that property rights should initially be assigned to the actors gaining the most utility from them. Canterbury economist John
Fountain who was commissioned by then Minister of Broadcasting Richard Prebble to report on spectrum management was highly influenced by Coase's work on radio spectrum management and the notion that an unfettered process of bidding on rights, essentially an auction, would be the best way to result in an efficient outcome. Prebble was aligned with Roger Douglas, the leader of the right-wing faction within the Labour Party who supported the privatisation of state assets, the deregulation of the economy, and the removal of trade barriers such as tariffs and subsidies. The party's traditional left- wing faction strongly opposed all these policies but by 1988 the Cabinet had created a committee to investigate how such changes to broadcasting might be brought about.
The underlying objectives of this committee’s investigation were to maximise economic efficiency in the use of the spectrum within New Zealand, to examine the scope for achieving a financial return to the Crown, and to evaluate and recommend practical options for the implementation of an allocation and management regime (Radio Spectrum Management, 2008). The Officials Coordinating Committee on Broadcasting 1988 report was released in August of that year, and laid out the basis for the free- 10 market reforms that were to follow. As Brian Pauling (1994) puts it in his overview of the history of radio policy in New Zealand:
The impact on radio was immediate and immense. Gone were all the restrictions previously imposed on private radio. Gone too were the support systems previously enjoyed by Radio New Zealand as a state corporation. With the previous limit of 15% overseas ownership totally abolished and all restrictions on cross-ownership other than those affected by monopoly provisions in the Commerce Act removed, radio entered in 1988 a new era, with new agendas and new debates. (p. 34)
The legislation consisted of two new acts: The Radiocommunications Act which dealt with the way that broadcasting licenses were to be allocated and administered, and the Broadcasting Act which covered the regulation of broadcast content as well as the distribution of the Public Broadcasting Fee. The
Public Broadcasting Fee was to be used to fund particular programs and services, and later become
New Zealand On Air.
The legislation was helped along this extreme path by strong lobbying from the private commercial sector who pushed for the reforms and most notably for the opening up of the radio spectrum. In what
Matt Mollgaard (2005) has referred to as a “lolly scramble” (p. 226) the resultant spectrum auctions were infamous for the somewhat dubious ways in which radio companies played the vague edges of the new law in order to obtain lucrative spectrum allocations in prime markets. In some cases very low prices were paid for major urban frequencies as the rules for the earliest auctions stipulated that the winning bidder need only pay the price of the second highest bid price. This was changed in later auctions to the winner paying what they had actually bid, but in one famous example it resulted in a
Dunedin student picking up a television frequency for one dollar.
While the intent of deregulation was that free-market principles would result in more diversity of 11 choice and subsequently wider scope for the airing of disparate viewpoints, in 2009 this could hardly be considered to have occurred within New Zealand. Matt Mollgaard (2005) discerns three overlapping phases in the history of New Zealand radio since deregulation in 1990: proliferation, consolidation, and concentration.
Proliferation refers to the first four years of deregulation. In this period many small operators acquired frequencies and broadcast formats that were aimed at core consumer audiences. With radio markets not having reached the saturation levels they would later achieve, competition for retail advertising revenue was low and comfortable profits were had by many. The second phase, consolidation, leading from around 1992 to 1998 saw a growing interest by corporates in radio markets. Corporate players began purchasing small radio stations and networks to create economies of scale and generating profits from cost-cutting exercises and the more efficient exploitation of advertising markets. Competition in the growing commercial radio market also led inefficient radio operators, possibly already feeling the pinch from the rejection by large clients and agencies who at the time were favouring television advertising, to go out of business or sell to these larger conglomerates. In the third phase, concentration we reach the current market conditions that have ultimately resulted from deregulatory policy (Mollgaard, 2005).
Atkinson (1999) has also reflected on the process of deregulation that occurred in New Zealand in the late 1980s, describing deregulation as “an over-reaction – to the excesses of regulation” (p. 19).
Atkinson focuses on the split that occurred in the development of funding models to support public service broadcasting organisations. The funding agency, at that point the Treasury Department but later to become New Zealand On Air (NZOA), was split between offering a bulk-funding or a programme- by-programme model. Ultimately they chose a sort of compromise, funding television on the programme-by-programme model, and Radio New Zealand on a bulk-funding scheme. Atkinson 12 suggests that unwittingly they “concocted a clever social scientific experiment” (p. 19) with this split; the result being that the 'official' proposition, that of the treasury department who favoured the programme-by-programme funding model, has ultimately failed to create a public service television broadcaster; while bulk-funding, favoured by the BCNZ, has maintained and supported a genuine public broadcaster in the form of Radio New Zealand.
The premise of deregulation was that a free market would equate to a competitive market, but the primary error in this thinking is the economic fact that media products are not like other products and that competition rules that protect markets from monopolies or anticompetitive behaviours do not influence media content and quality. Atkinson's analysis of the failure of deregulation to create a public service television broadcaster in New Zealand provides a simple breakdown of media economics:
Media Economics: Why Deregulation Doesn't Result in More Diversity 1. The marginal costs of production and distribution in media are close to zero. 2. The disparity between first and subsequent copy costs enhances potential high returns from economies of scale and scope. 3. Market signalling of preferences from final consumers to producers are weak. 4. Media markets are heterogeneous, with strictly limited product substitution, whereas competition policy is more appropriate to homogeneous markets. 5. The policy emphasis on homogeneity is discontinuous with the democratic requirement for diversity. 6. Where there is non-price competition between advertising-funded media, the Hotelling effect creates an undue tendency for competitors to imitate each other. 7. Competition policy is insensitive to problems posed by multimedia firms which compete in several markets but are dominant in none. 8. Competition policy could conceivably tolerate what democratic theory could not: a huge but efficient provider in a contestable market with no barriers to entry.
Atkinson, 1999.
Deregulation ultimately sowed the seeds for ownership concentration, not diversity. Concentration of 13 ownership is antithetical to the development of a media that contributes to a healthy public debate and a quality public sphere. Atkinson suggests that “even in our most competitive media market, radio, content diversity and reliability of information are more evident in the reserved portions of the spectrum than in the free market sector” (p. 20).
Ownership
Currently in New Zealand two multi-national media companies have emerged as owners of over 80 percent of the available spectrum. Canadian based CanWest’s successful takeover of RadioWorks in
2000 and its purchase of one of two remaining commercial frequencies in Auckland in 2004 gave it about 44 percent of the commercial radio market. The Radio Network, a conglomerate two-thirds owned by Tony O'Reilly's Independent News and Media based in Ireland, and one third by Clear
Channel, a media conglomerate company based in the US, owns another 47 percent of the available commercial spectrum.
The transformation of spectrum into a tradeable commodity within New Zealand throughout the 1990s resulted in a country with more radio stations per capita than any other country in the world (Story &
Brown, 1999). Shanahan and Duignan in 2005 reported that in 2004 there was one radio station for every 5,250 New Zealanders, compared with Seattle, USA with a 1:50,000 ratio; Sydney, Australia
1:250,000; London, England 1:350,000; or Papua, New Guinea 1:500,000. This high ratio is quite striking, yet given the large number of stations present across New Zealand the diversity of ownership
(and subsequently content) has decreased significantly over the period of deregulation.
Driven to meet the demands of offshore investors by cutting costs both TRN and CanWest have also turned to networking their brands across the country from a common source. Networking has been 14 made possible by the advent of new technologies enabling stations to automate scheduling and broadcasting of programmes and music yet retain the inclusion of some local advertising production.
For commercial operators networking also meant much larger national audiences to sell to advertisers at a lower operating cost and was thus highly attractive once again to advertisers in control of national brands. More automation meant less staff were required for production in outlying areas and so staff numbers have been cut back regionally and existing positions restructured into sales and marketing positions. In most cases the programming elements of the larger branded networks are still situated in
Auckland, the most attractive commercial market for radio in the country, and so the largest New
Zealand city has the most say in what is played over these networks (Shanahan & Duignan, 2005).
Networking has also stimulated considerable discussion around the loss of the local in New Zealand radio. Industry practitioners driven by economic imperatives will argue that networking is actually advantageous for listeners, providing better programming, more entertainment, and more high-profile personalities than would be available if emphasis were on more local programming, and that radio, viewed as a business rather than a social or public service, is greatly served by following a centralised network model. The contrary argument is well known to media scholars with most lamenting the loss of the diversity of viewpoints that results from the consolidation of ownership of media outlets. With only two primary gatekeepers of radio both located in Auckland, it is highly likely that content on these network stations is significantly influenced by these populations rather than “any market further down the financial and audience pecking order” (Shanahan & Duignan, 2005, p. 30). The impact of consolidation on geographically located musical cultures has also been examined by DiCola and
Thomson (2002). They found that local artists do not gain airplay as easily on network brands and in
New Zealand the unique legacies of locales such as Dunedin have possibly fallen victim to a degree to the requisite to produce more mainstream sounds in order to achieve radio airplay. Shanahan and
Duignan (2005) also suggest that the trend towards homogeneity of format-specific elements is 15 supported by the commercial radio networks in New Zealand. They note the similar format structures that are in place across the range of stations, with high-profile breakfast shows reliant on talk and entertainment and a music-intensive playlist throughout the rest of the day. Music is sourced from a
“limited number of gatekeepers residing in Auckland,” (p. 39) with overlapping genres that target 'at- work' consumption, thus maximising audience numbers and advertiser appeal. Increased networking has reduced the presence of any local material to mostly commercial content with the occasional live crossover from a client's location or live breakouts to the odd local event of significance (mostly of significance to marketers of the station itself.)
The General User Radio License (GURL)
There is little doubt that deregulation has had profound impacts on the landscape of New Zealand radio. In terms of talking about the emergence of new community forms of radio that have occurred since the opening up of the Guard Band in New Zealand (which facilitated the development and broadcast of Low Power FM operators), it is worth quoting one industry person interviewed by
Shanahan: “the major positive impact of deregulation on the business of radio was just that – radio became a business, not just a recreational pastime for enthusiastic amateurs” (as cited in Shanahan &
Duigan, 2005). The suggestion that an overwhelmingly pro-business ideology was in the long-term an overall positive move could be contested from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. A recent
Australian study researching media from the perspective of serving community interests, either as a vehicle for increasing political participation or as means towards facilitating cooperation and understanding between diverse cultures within an increasingly pluralistic society, reported a strong desire from local communities for more local media ownership and more diversity of content
(Meadows, Forde, Ewart, & Foxwell, 2007); the very factors that are lost through rampant deregulation favouring open markets driven solely by business prerogatives. By 2000 there was very little diversity 16 in the radio offerings available to the city centres of New Zealand, and this lack of diversity was a partial incentive for creation of the General User Radio License, or GURL, that enabled the addition of
Low Power FM operators to broadcast at very low cost and with very little government intervention.
The Fifth Labour Government of New Zealand was sworn into office on the 5th of December 1999. It came into power on a wave of dissatisfaction with nearly a decade of free-market and economic reforms driven by the National government which had begun with a radical market restructuring of the economy by the Fourth Labour Government in the 1980s under finance minister Roger Douglas.
“Rogernomics” as it become referred to included a quick and sweeping range of policy changes that included cutting agricultural subsidies and trade barriers, privatising public assets and controlling inflation through monetarism. Many in Douglas' own New Zealand Labour Party saw these changes as a betrayal of traditional Labour ideals. By the election of the Fifth Labour Government a new philosophical approach was being adopted by many of the party based on principles of Third Way politics that were being championed at the time by Bill Clinton in America and Tony Blair in the
United Kingdom and recast by the New Zealand Labour Party as social democracy. Broadcast Minister
Steve Maharey was a leading proponent of social democracy which sought for the establishment of much closer partnerships between state and civil society organisations. Citizen engagement and increased access to communications technology were an essential ingredient towards a new form of state services and involvement in the policy making processes of government. In a seminar hosted by the Foundation for Policy Initiatives in Auckland in 2001 on what the Third Way meant in a New
Zealand context, Maharey had this to say in relation to communications and broadcasting policy:
The implications are clear – government will be required to promote universal access to information and communication technology to ensure there is equal access to information and thereby prevent the stratification of society into haves and have nots. (Maharey, 2001) 17
In August 2001 the Ministry of Economic Development's Radio Spectrum and Broadcasting Policy
Group issued a discussion document entitled The Future of the FM Band (Ministry of Economic
Development [MED], 2001). The document sought input on the use of frequency band 100-108 MHz which had recently been cleared for FM broadcasting. One of the proposals seeking feedback was for opportunities for low power broadcasting in the top end of the 100-108 MHz band (i.e. 106.6-108
MHz). The ministry recognised that in the USA such Low Power FM broadcasting was attracting increased interest and lobbying by proponents of more localised radio broadcasting. In the US specific licensing arrangements were available for stations with power levels up to 100 watts while in other countries low power (less than 1 watt) stations did not require specific licensing. In the US such low power broadcasting (around 10 watts) was termed micro-power and was lobbied for by the Americans for Radio Diversity (ARD) group who wanted the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to authorise such transmissions. Since the 1970s stations broadcasting in the 10 watt range were almost inevitably operating as pirate stations. In 1999 the group was successful and the FCC issued a Notice of
Proposed Rule Making which established a low-power service. The group was assisted by the fact that the majority in the FCC at that time were Democrats who were supportive of community access and services, and sympathetic to the Third Way policies that were characteristic of the government of the time (Hilliard & Keith, 2005).
The Broadcasting Policy Group in New Zealand considered three alternatives for licensing this type of low power operation (Ministry of Economic Development, 2001) :
• utilisation for “in-fill” coverage in order to expand the coverage of high and medium power FM broadcasting in some areas;
• for “very modest” non-commercial broadcasting. The low power could ensure a true ‘local’ flavour at a low cost;
• operation of a “very modest” commercial broadcasting service on a localised basis. Again, the low entry cost could be attractive to small-scale broadcasters. 18
The results of this discussion document appeared in November of 2001. A large number of respondents expressed an interest in using the top part of the upper FM band for both commercial and non- commercial localised low power services, and some even suggested that more spectrum should be allocated for this use in the lower FM band. The existing community broadcasters in New Zealand, referred to as Access broadcasters, however, considered that these frequencies would not result in sufficient coverage to receive NZ On Air funding, a response that could be somewhat expected given possible increased competition by new community broadcasters to their primary income source. Nearly all respondents considered that there was a need to manage the use of these frequencies to ensure that they were used for their intended purpose and did not exceed power restrictions, and many felt that there was the potential for unregulated use to result in interference with other radio frequencies. There were mixed views on whether these frequencies should be made available free of charge, or through the allocation of licences by auction or in return for a fixed fee (Ministry of Economic Development,
2001).
By April 2002 the 'enthusiastic amateurs' gained access to a small broadcasting window that was opened up by Paul Swain, the Minister of Communications and Marian Hobbs, the Minister of
Broadcasting. The LPFM spectrum was now freely available, outside of the auction process and was subject to very little regulation or other restrictions. It facilitated a sort of wild west of localised broadcasting to emerge across New Zealand.
The inclusion of Low Power FM broadcasters into the general mediascape was also attributable to technical conditions of spectrum allocation. The outer guard bands of the overall FM broadcasting band cannot be licensed for use at the high powers typically used by broadcasting services as this would cause interference to adjacent aeronautical and land mobile services. The Radiocommunications
Regulations 2001 were amended in 2002 to grant a provision for what was termed the General User 19
Radio License for Low Power FM Broadcasting Short Range Devices, or GURL. Whilst the primary purpose of LPFM licensing is to protect services in adjacent frequency bands, it has also facilitated a low budget entry into a form of local broadcasting. The GURL is a license designed specifically for transmission on the frequencies specified in the license by means of radiocommunication transmitters intended for local-area broadcasting and known as Low Power FM Broadcasting Short Range Devices, or LPFM Broadcast. The regulations permit the broadcast of LPFM on seven frequencies in the Lower
FM band from 88.1 to 88.7 MHz and eleven in the Upper FM band from 106.7 to 107.7 MHz. An exception to this rule was made for Auckland whereby transmissions were disallowed on the frequencies 88.5, 88.6, and 88.7 within 120km of the Auckland Skytower; this was due to a former frequency allocation made to an Iwi radio station, Mai FM, in Auckland in accordance with a treaty claim over spectrum allocation for Te Reo Maori broadcasting. The terms and conditions of the GURL are actually quite minimal. This overall lack of regulation has resulted in a niche broadcasting environment with considerable latitude and freedom in the broadcasting of Low Power FM in New
Zealand, but it has also created some controversy between such broadcasters themselves as well as angered lobbyists for commercial broadcast interests.
Broadcasters are only allowed to broadcast on 500 milliwatts of power or one half of a watt, and are allowed no more than one LPFM transmitter within a 25km radius that is broadcasting substantially the same programme (including simulcast or re-transmission) as the original transmitter; they are required to broadcast the contact details of the person responsible for the transmissions at least once every three hours; and they are bound by the definitions and restrictions on broadcasting content as laid out in the
Broadcasting Act 1989. Most significant though in the GURL was the 4th condition: frequency coordination. It states that:
(5) Frequency use is on a shared basis and the chief executive does not accept liability 20
under any circumstances for any loss or damage of any kind occasioned by the unavailability of frequencies or degradation to reception from other transmissions.
This condition was elucidated on in more detail in a publication from the Ministry of Economic
Development in 2004 where the Ministry recognised that “coordination between users can minimise the risk of interferences between services” (MED, 2004). The MED made the suggestion that user groups or associations be established to “coordinate installations for the equitable utilisation by all users of the available frequencies” (MED, 2004).
While the creation of the GURL has freed a space in the spectrum for small radio stations including hobbyist broadcasters, community radio stations, ethnic broadcasters, and alternative stations, to be established and broadcast for relatively low cost, the lack of regulations has had its problems in the scramble for spectrum within the more populous cities in New Zealand. The prohibitively expensive fees paid for entrance into commercial spectrum markets and the stringent requirements for establishing non-commercial broadcasting has for most of the history of radio in New Zealand meant that access to the airwaves has been limited to those that could afford it; but along with these licensing regimes came certain assurances around the right to broadcast free of interference and the right to legal recourse should conflicts arise. The almost completely unregulated conditions of the GURL though have at times meant that in densely populated centres like Auckland there can be considerable jostling between competing LPFM broadcasters. The regulations provide no stipulations about how stations should be supported or funded, or what kinds of content they can carry (a point that is often contested by commercial media lobbyists to the government), and there is no regulation of what types of stations can utilise the limited available spectrum. It is fairly apparent that the spirit of the GURL has been to enable access to spectrum for those that could not otherwise afford it for broadcasting, but it is also evident that the Ministry of Economic Development does also not wish to be involved in any kind of monitoring of the available spectrum. This has resulted in some frequencies being occupied by stations 21 attempting to recreate localised commercial models of broadcasting, as well as full-frequency commercial stations occupying LPFM frequencies and creating localised stations that are essentially just subsidiary stations of their commercial operation. This latter instance has received quite a lot of criticism among LPFM groups in New Zealand who have suggested a change in the GURL to avoid this situation.
A fairly typical example of the types of problems that can arise from the almost completely unregulated LPFM landscape occurred in New Plymouth in 2008. On October 14th 2008 The Taranaki
Daily News ran an article entitled, Tune in, turn on, get miffed that exemplified the possible problems that could emerge due to the lack of any regulatory policy surrounding the GURL and the broadcasting of Low Power FM. A LPFM station in New Plymouth who had been broadcasting for over two and a half years and that was listened to by “taxi drivers, rest home residents and older people who appreciated the old style music and absence of advertising” (Scott, 2008) started having its signal overpowered by a nearby station, One Christian Radio, which began broadcasting Christian music on a nearby frequency. The Ministry of Economic Development Radio Spectrum Management compliance manager Chris Brennan repeated to the paper that the terms of the low-powered FM licence clearly stated there was no interference protection and two stations could broadcast on exactly the same frequency if they wanted. He suggested that the Ministry tried to encourage a level of co-ordination among stations, but that co-ordination appeared to have failed in New Plymouth and the two stations were at odds with each other. With the space between frequencies having been minimised to the 100 kHz range instead of an earlier 800 kHz such interference between broadcasters is likely to happen.
The potential power of the GURL though in smaller centres like New Plymouth is easy to see. One
Christian Radio which in an earlier article from October 8th, 2006 claimed to cover up to 75% of the city of New Plymouth is being run as a non-profit, sponsor driven station which owner James Cope 22 described to the Taranaki Daily News as wanting to “play a part in the community and add to the enrichment of New Plymouth. We want to make a difference" (Burnell, 2008). A 75% coverage of one of the countries major city centres is a fairly substantial number of potential listeners. The urban population of New Plymouth is estimated at 51,000 so One Christian Radio is possibly broadcasting to a potential audience of over 38,000 people.
This story initially came to my attention through the LPFM radio newsgroup on Yahoo! In the discussion that ensued amongst members of the group many expressed that until such time as Radio
Spectrum Management modified the GURL to include some mandatory requirements, situations like this would only increase and get worse. This situation would be exacerbated by the desire of many
LPFM broadcasters to have the minimum power levels of broadcasting raised to either 1 watt or 5 watts from the currently existing 500 mW requirement. The general feeling seemed to be that the current
GURL requirements don't work and that they have led to a free for all that would promote, as one poster suggested, anarchy and disharmony.
Community Radio
Community radio in New Zealand can be broken down along two licensing regimes. The government withholds a certain number of full-power frequencies from the market that are reserved for non- commercial community based broadcasting. Currently there are 35 frequencies in this category nationally and there are 20 stations broadcasting on such frequencies. Eleven of these are termed
Access stations and in the eyes of policy makers and funders are considered the 'official' community broadcasters in New Zealand. Access stations apply and receive government funding from New
Zealand On Air (NZOA) monies and are all not-for-profit organisations that utilise a variety of fund- raising techniques to supplement this provision. A general requirement for funding from NZOA for 23 community stations like the Access stations is that the possible audience for their transmission be in the vicinity of 50,000 people or more.
In 2008 NZOA provided a over $2.4 million to Access radio stations (NZOA Annual Report, 2008). In
2003 the Association of Community Access Broadcasters (ACAB) reported on its website that its members created:
• 94,690 hours of local radio on air
• Thirty-two thousand hours (31,803) of community content
• Over twenty-five thousand hours (25,530) of which is 36c content
• 73,000 hours of personnel working in training, engineering and technology, community capacity building, promotion, fundraising, administration and radio management. (ACAB, 2003)
In 2003 this represented a median contribution of $62 to each hour of 36c content. The ACAB website also states that the “revenue needed to provide all capital expenditure and between 20% and 46% of operations funding comes from the broadcasters themselves or by station fundraising. The need for potential broadcasters to pay for airtime is the primary restriction on access.” (ACAB, 2003)
There are though hundreds of LPFM broadcasters across New Zealand broadcasting to local communities a diverse and eclectic range of radio content ranging from those that emulate the standard music faire of commercial stations possibly via an automated playlist or with the occasional presenter, to religious fanatics broadcasting 24 hour intelligent design messages, radical political stations like
Chomsky FM broadcasting rotations of recorded Chomsky lectures to suburban Aucklanders, and community based radio organisations providing local and alternative news and events to their respective communities as well as supporting local artists and musicians. It is more with this latter description: a community based LPFM station engaged in community programming that I wish to 24 engage with in the bulk of this thesis. Community based broadcasting differentiates itself in the Low
Power mediascape from hobbyist incarnations of LPFM broadcasting by engaging with the community in which, and for which, it transmits on a multitude of levels. It cannot be defined only by recourse to geography, but includes the social dimensions of communities, as well as inevitably the political. I hope that by painting a picture of the activities, debates, successes and failures of a young community station on Waiheke Island to be able to suggest ways that community media are making significant interventions into the larger mediascape.
Amongst other forms of community based media, community radio and LPFM stations are testament to the fact that we are increasingly not just consumers of media products but also producers and participants in our own localised forms of media. As participation in the practice of media creation is simplified due to the increased availability of the technological tools required to create such media as well as a lowering of the former economic barriers associated with expensive traditional media creation and distribution, the possibilities for community media are strengthened and their place within the mediascape is deserving of further attention by media scholars and policy makers.
The origins of community radio lay in a mythology of what Peter Lewis calls, “a tacit acceptance of a political economy perspective” (Lewis, 2002, p. 55). This view almost systematically equates open access and community ownership with the production of radio with an alternative perspective from that which is available from commercial radio providers. Lewis suggests that this perspective has somehow
“excused analysis of the text” (p. 55) and that such an analysis has often been omitted as an object of research. Texts, in this case radio programmes, should ultimately reflect, or not, whether a diversity of viewpoints actually exists that is so often hailed as the hallmark of local and independent media production, and which is also an assumed natural by-product of the access philosophy of radio which shall be discussed later. Is it actually the case that self-confessed community stations in New Zealand, 25 or even non-descript Low Power FM broadcasters, given the technical and policy limitations of their license (the GURL) produce and broadcast content that is either more community or locally focused than their commercial counterparts? A textual analysis of the content of such stations would be a valuable enterprise within New Zealand. If it is true that community stations are broadcasting more local and diverse community content then this would align with the government's (at least a Labour government's) intentions behind withholding parts of the spectrum from the marketplace. Such findings could be used to advocate for a more equitable baseline for the establishment of policy guidelines around the public funding of community based radio content.
The government funding body New Zealand on Air (NZOA) currently only considers the eleven traditional Access radio stations within New Zealand for funding, a criterion that appears solely based on an assumption that only these Access stations are providing programming that meets the requirements of Section 36(c) of the Broadcasting Act 1989.2 Whether other types of stations such as smaller, localised community based stations are creating such content is not considered by the agency as a criterion for funding, and in fact the agency maintains a distinct bias against what it considers community broadcasting but a researcher would be hard pressed to locate a substantial definition from the agency of what it considers community as opposed to access radio.
The political-economy approach to community media emphasises the role of powerful economic players in the establishment of dominant media forms and outlines their possible influence over the public sphere and democratic discourse, while often arguing for a polemical position whereby community based media may be seen to contribute towards rectifying this imbalance. It will also be useful though to examine on a micro level the tensions that may actually arise inside non-commercial community broadcasters in regards to their own operating and funding models. Ellie Rennie (2006) has
2 Section 36(c) of the Broadcasting Act 1989 requires that the government provides the means to ensure that a range of broadcasts is available to provide for the interests of: women, youth, children, persons with disabilities, and minorities in the community including ethnic minorities. 26 recently pointed out how the anti-establishment, anti-commercial stance of many community radio stations may actually work against their long term economic sustainability, and it is apparent from my own review of the LPFM stations within New Zealand that as many are established as go defunct, possibly due to the hardship in raising sufficient funds to stay on air. Balancing the economic necessities of running a small volunteer run radio station while maintaining non-commercial non-profit ideals can be tricky - a point I will return to in the case study of Waiheke Radio. Hopefully this study may provide a small lens for looking at how civil society and non-profit media organisations might mediate the predominance of the notion whereby media consumers consider broadcast media products to be essentially provided for free. If advertising is removed from the formula of freely accessible media how can non-profit organisations maintain themselves outside of the market? And is this really still a goal of stations that may consider themselves community based stations?
The study of community media is quite different than the study of mass media; the primary focus of research must be on the individual as a member of a specific community, not the individual as an element of a mass audience. Community can be viewed in geographic terms3, in some cases more as a community of interest, and in many cases as both. The research presented in this thesis is derived from a broad theoretical framework that approaches community radio on two levels: firstly, an individual level whereby the personal actions, motives, expectations and aspirations of volunteers and station staff are queried; and secondly on a social system level, looking at the specific context or community that the station is participating within and serving, be it a city, neighbourhood, or interest group (Hollander,
2002). In this case the context is an island community located within proximity of a large metropolitan city.
3 Traditionally radio in its nature has technical geographical limitations – radio waves only travel so far from their origin, and in fact regulating the power with which radio waves can be transmitted is a tool for regulators to manage radio spectrum. This geographical limitation has been overcome to a degree in recent years with the ability for many smaller stations to stream their content on the internet to a potentially global audience. 27
In late 2008 NZOA released its Review of NZ On Air's Regional Funding Policies for Radio and
Television. This paper was the result of a consultation paper that had previously invited submissions from interested stakeholders about the funding policies for regionally based radio and television. Of interest here is a key theme that comes through in the report which “clarified that NZ On Air's funding policies should make a distinction between access radio and community radio services. The two services operate differently and provide different services” (NZOA, 2008, p5). NZOA considered the differences between access and community as such:
Access radio primarily serves community programme makers who want to make programmes to communicate with specific listeners. The emphasis of the access radio station is to provide facilities to programme makers. The station allows the programme makers to choose and control the content of their programmes. Consequently the programme maker has editorial control, although the broadcaster is still liable overall for any breaches of broadcasting standards, or to Court action as publisher of the broadcast. The Access radio station derives non government income from charging the programme maker a fee for the airtime used.
Community radio broadcasters usually maintain editorial control over what programmes are broadcast by deciding what programmes are acquired and produced for broadcast for a particular group within New Zealand, sometimes defined by region, but sometimes also defined by ethnicity and/or special interests. Not all community radio services receive NZ On Air funding. The community broadcaster derives non-government income from advertising and sponsorships. (p. 5)
The report also suggests that as part of a “public policy framework” policy should be implemented to achieve the objective whereby “broadcasting is used to enhance democratic and civic participation among regional and local populations” (p. 6). This was suggested as being a key role of access radio, but by their earlier definition not a role often performed by community radio.
In a response to this report that I made on behalf of the Waiheke Radio Community Trust (of which I 28 am a trustee) and on the bequest of NZOA, I suggested that these assumptions were not founded on any formal qualitative or quantitative analysis of the sector (Access and community based stations), and that such analysis is currently lacking within New Zealand. While the Regional and Community
Broadcasting Policy Framework 2006 (Ministry of Culture and Heritage, 2006) clearly promotes localism in programming the current funding report, without much support, arbitrarily privileges
Access broadcasting as being the only form of radio that can deliver such localism. The assumption that the access philosophy necessarily enhances democratic and civic participation is for the most part no longer accepted by practitioners. The 'open door' policy that is the basis for access models of broadcasting while increasing platforms for free speech on the airwaves does not necessarily equate to the types of community building that is the basis for much contemporary political thought around the development and function of civil society. If New Zealand On Air is truly dedicated to supporting the framework by promoting local broadcasting services, then surely it should be time to review the vastly changed social and technical environment that many locally based broadcasters are operating within instead of relying on definitions of access broadcasting that they first created in 1981.
Part of the intent of this thesis will be to explore via a descriptive case study the unique tensions, barriers, failures, successes, and individual and collective aspirations experienced in the development of a single community radio station operating in a unique community environment. In conclusion we might return to review the existing policy implications in light of the study, which at least will attempt to articulate some principles of community based broadcasting that might also be tested in other cases. 29
Theories of Community Media
Peter Lewis (2002) in an essay entitled Radio Theory and Community Radio proposes that the “study of community radio, by definition a marginalised form, might thus be doubly disadvantaged ...” (p. 47).
He is referring to a general lack of scholarly research on radio, and the lack of a robust radio theory, all of which is further compounded by even less scholarly output devoted to community radio. If this is the case, then researching community radio in New Zealand might truly be described as either wandering into a complete wasteland, or, on a more positive note, with the excitement of entering uncharted waters. It is with the latter metaphor that I will attempt to fill my sails in this endeavour, but it will be a journey that will require much extrapolation from international approaches towards community radio before sailing into New Zealand waters. Internationally the lack of attention to community radio is beginning to be remedied in the works of Nick Jankowski, Ole Prehn, Peter Lewis, Clemencia
Rodriguez, and more recently Ellie Rennie and Kevin Howley, although such work does not always necessarily refer directly to community radio and may instead use terms like alternative media, radical media, and citizens media and include radio broadcasting as one of those media practices.
This plurality of terms hints at an initial problem: the sheer multiplicity of definitions and labels for community radio and community media in general. The diversity of interpretations of community and on how radio might serve and be influenced by a community focus are part and parcel of this field.
Hopefully the study of community radio may go some way towards increasing and deepening our understanding of both concepts: community and radio. While recognising that a totalising definition will never be adequately established, this chapter aims to map out some of the more recent treatments of the subject and establish some methodological bases for the case study that follows. 30
The most obvious yet contentious term to begin to unpack in community radio is community. In any context the term is a slippery one. Erik Freedman (2007) refers to it as elastic and powerful, “an authorising signifier, ready to be differentially deployed (attached to an agenda), yet always linked to an economy of discourse that simultaneously invokes inclusion and exclusion” (p. 176). In terms of media studies the community in community media is often defined by what it is not; it is generally not a global or nationalised form of media. Community radio is primarily a localised form of radio production and broadcast. Its content is for the most part produced in the same locale in which it is consumed and by individuals who live in that locale. The nature of this content is often community or culturally focused in its message and may provide an alternative viewpoint on global issues to that presented by mainstream radio services. The rise of the internet as a distribution platform, and technologies like live streaming and podcasting have more recently enabled even smaller stations to widen access to their content, and to source content from locations outside of their geographic community but that the station feels has relevance primarily to the local community audience.
With almost universal deregulation of media markets in Western capitalist societies, including New
Zealand, and the rise of neo-liberalism as the predominant form of organising such societies, most media forms have adopted market and efficiency driven approaches with an increased emphasis on market research, audience maximisation, and network strategies. The result has been media programming and content mostly oriented towards societal or global rather than community audiences
(Carpentier, Lie, & Servaes, 2003). Much community media may be defined by the provision of broadcast content that global or national forms of media cannot produce due to the pressures of commercialisation. This “freedom”, often associated with community media, emphasises the construction of an alternative perspective to the hegemonic discourse of mass media, and embodies a long-standing tradition in the development and theory of community radio. 31
It may be useful to examine the community/society distinction in greater depth. Community in community media often refers to both the group to which the producers of the media content belong, as well as to the group that consumes the media product. The creators of community media messages are actually somewhat indistinguishable from the consumers or audience for these messages. This conflation of producer and consumer is in contrast to the abstract notion of either a public as consumer in terms of a Public Service broadcaster, or the distinct producer/consumer dichotomy that is a characteristic commercial production of mass media products. In the latter, society replaces the public and is perceived as a relatively homogeneous market towards which messages are transmitted; messages that are tailored for the society in which they are to be consumed. These messages may be of a commercial or public service nature but the distinction between the values and profession of the producer and the needs of the consumer remain for the most part intact.4 This distinction is significant as we shall see because it problematises the creation and broadcast of media content for community broadcasters whose participation in the circulation and consumption of messages, and in their conception of the audience, is not as clear cut as it is for commercial or public service broadcasters.
The distribution of media content to a community suggests a smaller subset of the larger society is being catered to by producers. The narrow distribution of community media may impact the form and subject of community media, setting it apart from content tailored to appeal to either a mass or societal level or to global marketplaces. Localisation versus globalisation poses interesting questions in regards to the goals of community media projects and practices, particularly in light of digitisation and the rise of networks. In the case of radio for example, for the first time in its history even the most small scale radio broadcasters have been able to use the medium and the distribution platform of the internet to reach global audiences, facilitating the possibility for highly localised and community created content to be available for global consumption. Similarly the distribution of content over the internet has meant
4 "In the early days of Broadcasting House we decided what was good for listeners. They really didn't have a choice. We knew what was good for them. We didn't ask them, we broadcast a product and they listened - they didn't have any option." Lindsay Yao. Quoted in Broadcasting House: 1963 - 1997. Edited by Whitirea Publishing, NZ. 1997. 32 that community radio station programmers may also be tempted or pressured to carry content of a global or international nature on local radio.
In one of the most recent full scale treatments of the subject of community media, Ellie Rennie (2006) broaches the question of community versus society in greater depth than most by focusing on the distinctively political resonances that discussions of community imply. Politics has been at the forefront of the development of community media whose historic origins lay in the development of a democratic response to corporate ownership and control over media production. Most authors agree that community media are media that allow for access and participation and may include a wide range of activities and outcomes from micropress, community radio, access television stations, or community based internet projects. More recently certain manifestations of global online or virtual communities are included in this broad definition of community media by expanding the definition of community beyond geographic or cultural similarities to embrace communities whose participants communicate via online spaces.
The key concepts of access and participation emerged from the democratic realignment of media advocated for by community media activists of the 1970s. During this period the global implications of media were coming under scrutiny, exposing the inequitable distribution of communications resources among regions of the world. Studies noted that the internationalisation of media and communications technologies were being designed to serve the needs of industrialised nations and reiterated the role that media, and particularly mass media, played in the development of societies (Carlsson, 2005).
International agencies like UNESCO led significant debate and research around media on an international scale which culminated in the The New World Information and Communication Order
(NWICO), a term coined by the MacBride Commission. This UNESCO commission, chaired by Nobel
Peace Prize winner Seán MacBride, was charged with the creation of a set of recommendations that 33 might make global media representation more equitable. The MacBride Commission report entitled
Many Voices, One World (UNESCO, 1980) outlined the main philosophical points of NWICO including long-standing issues of media coverage of the developing world and unbalanced flows of media influence.
The long term effect of this global conversation was a continued emphasis amongst scholars and activists of the political implications of media. It is within this tradition that Rennie (2006) argues that it is a “politics of community ... deeply rooted in democracy's intellectual traditions” (p. 16) that is manifest in the development of community organisations and community media. She suggests that such organisations may in fact display alternative forms of governance that is often at odds with dominant systems. Community media functions in the realm of civil society, and as such may be contrasted against hegemonic forms of media. It is in this civil arena that Rennie suggests that community organisations may “challenge us to reassess the way in which liberal democracy itself is managed” (p.
16).
Communities are complex entities that are constantly being redefined in light of political, social, and technological shifts. Returning though to the strong association of community media with alternative viewpoints, amateur production values, and non-hierarchical governance structures Rennie argues that while the alternative approach may provide some insight into what community media does (or attempts to do) differently than mainstream media it can also prove to be problematic by focusing the discussions on only one aspect of community media, that which is often associated with the mythical origins of such media (and in particular community radio) in terms of activist, idealist, and counterhegemonic principles. Rennie sees community media as acting solidly in a community sphere and as such finds it appropriate to promote a definition of community media in terms of investigating the “limits of liberalism by exploring the value of communities and how community benefits may be 34 enhanced” (p. 25).
Communitarianism is a political and philosophical thesis that opposes the exaltation of the individual that is characteristic of liberal individualism. In its activist or vernacular manifestations, communitarianism advocates for the inclusion of community as a subject of politics, and supports types of collective action around shared interests, purposes and values, and whose institutional forms are separate from the state and the market. Organisations such as registered charities, non- governmental organisations, community groups, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy groups, etc., what may be termed civil society organisations, are used as platforms for promoting the public interest.
Communitarianism is congruous with civil society theories in that it emphasises the need to balance the individuals rights and interests with that of the community as a whole, suggesting that our autonomous selves are also shaped by the culture and values of the community and not in an appeal to a liberal argument dependent solely on a “state of nature”. The liberal view takes citizenship as the capacity for each person to form, revise and rationally pursue his or her definition of the good (Mouffe,
1992); but communitarians object to this on the grounds that it privileges self-interest rather than a
"natural" desire to join with others to pursue common action towards a common good, and it does not allow for the notion that community might play a large part in constituting the identity of individuals.
Communitarians believe in the revival of a civic republican view of politics, emphasising the notion of a public good, prior to the individuals desires and interests. For communitarians civil society then becomes an active domain where individuals through their associations, allegiances and self-organising groups and networks exist and function separately from the immediate influences of the state or the market but are, as is argued by civil society theorist John Keane (1998), understood as part of the political process. It is in the realm of civil society that many community media organisations and groups may be seen to be participating. 35
A common theme throughout much philosophical communitarianism is the loss of community; an assumption that is seen as the root of much contemporary political woe. Frazer (1999) finds in this approach a consistency with the foundations of modern sociology, focused on “the conditions and consequences of the historical transition from traditional to modern societies, from community to society …” (p. 44). Certain characteristics of modernity are inferred as being the result of these historical transitions. A preoccupation with alienation, capitalist relations, and bureaucratic rationality constituted a large part of the sociological project which sought to resolve these societal conflicts.
Frazer sees an invalid causal link being made between these ills and the loss of community, as well as the contentious assumption that the reinstatement of community is the solution to these ills. The philosophy of communitarianism has been criticised by academics (Frazer, 1999, Caney, 1992) on the basis that it rarely establishes an adequate definition of community, and that the term itself is slippery, ambiguous and vague and can be used in a variety of ways dependent on the position being defended.
This nature of the definition of community though can also be one of its strengths as the vagueness of the term can be used to create political coalitions between disparate or pluralist groups.
Rennie is careful not to repeat accounts that mistakenly view civil society as completely distinct and removed from the market; arguments that establish a dichotomy whereby non-profit alliances are
“good” while the market is “bad”. She acknowledges the existence of a mutual dependency between the two and her approach is rather to examine the tensions that arise between community media and market participation, particularly the anti-commercialism that is associated with community media and how this may actually work towards further marginalising the non-profit sector while reinforcing the power of the commercial sector. She suggests a third approach to the problem whereby non-profit motives and relationships between community based organisations are seen as “legitimate participants in governance” (p. 35) and suggests that the non-profit sector be identified as a alternative model to a 36 bureaucratically organised power base that is highly influenced by private economic actors.
Rennie's association of community media with civil society allows her to frame the discourse of such media in a way that differentiates it from the attention paid to the more radical and progressive aspects of programming and production that are often associated with community media. She suggests that while such studies are important they may cause us to overlook the more mundane aspects of community media or what McClure (1992) refers to as quotidian politics. Mundanity as such does not mean that community media are by any means necessarily passive players in the political or policy contexts in which they exist. The state's role in defining legislative frameworks around broadcasting policy and standards and spectrum distribution and management in the case of radio and television, impacts on how media can be implemented at a community level. The state often continues to ignore the needs of local manifestations of media in favour of national public interests that may return greater political (and economic) credit but also be highly susceptible to powerful economic players as has been earlier mentioned. But, as Rennie suggests, in a rapidly changing communications arena community media may be functioning as an effective and alternative means of information distribution that has largely gone unrecognised as well as establishing new models of governance, sustainability, and participation that are contributing towards a rethinking of the relationship between communities and the state.
Rennie considers the possibility that Third Way political theories may constitute a more adequate framework in which to investigate the contemporary relationship of community media organisations that are acting within a civil society context yet still dependent upon the policies of the state.
Referencing the work of British sociologist Anthony Giddens, Rennie points out the centralised placement of community within Third Way theories. The Third Way tenets according to Giddens that are of interest to the discussion of community media may be summarised as follows: 37
• An unhindered market economy is at odds with social justice but also the realisation that we exist within global system that is no longer applicable to old school socialism.
• Governments should be more centrist, developing more of an activist role between markets and social issues.
• The state should not dominate markets or civil society but still needs to regulate both.
• The formation of a social contract that links rights to responsibilities.
• Governments should invest in skills rather subsidising the inadequacies of markets;
• There must be a connection between social and economic policy.
• Full employment is achievable by adapting to technological change rather than propping up ailing industries. (Rennie, 2006, p. 38)
While Giddens' Third Way suggests a stronger role for community organisations within a civil society context, some critics have pointed out that it constitutes a difficult path for actual policy formulation and that the communitarianism present in the theory has had minimal real influence on the existing operations of political parties who continue to resist relinquishing control to local authorities and governance structures.
Regardless of whether policy makers carve out spaces or allocate sufficient public funding to develop community media organisations, their presence in many communities worldwide suggests that there remains a continued and resilient will to establish their creation and development. By locating community media as part of civil society Rennie argues that we may begin to view such media as a means to complement existing systems rather than strictly as a means to counter or overcome them.
For Rennie (2006) this theoretical framework is useful in
... understanding what community broadcasting is seen to achieve – what compromises are reached between government and citizens, what corrections to existing structures – and how it attempts to reshape communication. The tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of civil society can help explain how and why community media performs, and is treated in a particular way. (p. 41) 38
Community media, while sharing some characteristics of its mass media counterparts, is unique in its' struggle for access and participation. While these democratic principles are often found at the core of such media and have been the focus for much scholarly descriptions of community media, Rennie warns against our continued emphasis on only these aspects of community media which tend to position community based media in opposition to mainstream media. She suggests that future theories need consider that community media involves “... ordinary folk producing all kinds of stuff, some of which may be hard to even recognise as democratic” (p. 186). By shifting the theoretical focus away from political principles to the more mundane aspects of community media practice Rennie argues that what is revealed is a common thread of all community media - that it “deals in representation” (p. 187) and self-expression. Representation is not even necessarily the representation of overtly political issues or manifest in media forms such as news (often the domain of mainstream media) but that community media represents the individual and the community (pp. 186-187). The political dimensions of community media are embellished by theoretical constructions and ideological mission statements of broadcasters but embodied here in the personal, in the act of representing oneself and one's ideas through media, through an act of participation. It is the act of participation and self-expression which has the greatest implications for contemporary democracy.
The combination of media participation and self-expression has led some theorists to refer instead to citizens media. Most notable in this field is the Colombian US-based media and communications scholar Clemencia Rodriguez who coined the term, and co-founded and facilitates
OURMedia/NUESTROSMedios, a global network of researchers and practitioners of alternative media, community media and citizens' media. Rodriguez applies contemporary theories of citizenship to community media studies in an attempt to bridge divisions between liberalism and communitarianism and to emphasise how activities of ordinary citizens in informal networks can be transformative processes for both participants and their communities (Rodriguez, 2002). 39
Rodriguez draws upon the work of Chantal Mouffe to argue for a semantic shift from alternative media to citizens media. This shift privileges an analysis of community media that engages more closely with the actions of individuals in theorising community media enterprises. Mouffe sees citizenship as a democratic concept rather than a legal status conferred by birth or extended residency; as such it is “a form of identification, a type of political identity: something to be constructed, not empirically given”
(as cited in Rodriquez, 2001, p19). Thus citizenship is constructed through participation in everyday political practices. Rodriguez (2001) refers to its active nature and suggests that as citizens “actively participate in actions that reshape their own identities, the identities of others, and their social environments, they produce power” (p. 19). This participation in multiple actions within multiple spheres breaks from any understanding of citizenship as expressed solely through activities like voting or protesting and for Rodriguez suggests that citizenship be reformulated to include all the ways in which power is enacted and citizenship expressed including in forms like “the collective transformation of symbolic codes, historically legitimised identities, and traditionally established social relations” (p.
20). Participants in the creation of community media are enacting their citizenship by engaging with symbolic codes and communication, and renegotiating the traditional identities and social relations like producer/consumer, amateur/professional, that constitute a feature of much media practice.
In light of this, Rodriguez proposes that the term alternative media be abandoned, to be replaced by citizen's media:
Because “alternative media” rests on the assumption that these media are alternative to something, this definition will easily entrap us into binary thinking: mainstream media and their alternative, that is alternative media. Also, the label “alternative media” predetermines the type of oppositional thinking that limits the potential of these media to their ability to resist the alienating power of mainstream media. This approach blinds our understanding of all other instances of change and transformation brought about by these media. (p. 20) 40
The alternative label misses the personal transformation that both Rodriguez and Rennie suggest is at the heart of participating in community based media. The act of an individual given access to the ability to participate in media production is a political one – it requires and necessitates consideration by the individual and the group of the power inherent in broadcasting to communicate messages, tastes, preferences, and viewpoints to a community of listeners. Rodriguez states that citizen's media implies:
... first that a collectivity is enacting its citizenship by actively intervening and transforming the established mediascape; second, that these media are contesting social codes, legitimized identities, and institutionalized social relations; and third, that these communication practices are empowering the community involved, to the point where these transformations and changes are possible. (p. 20)
Rodriguez is careful to warn against seeing citizens' media activities as “unified, homogeneous political actors with clear, rational agendas” (p. 21). This approach, derived from viewing political actions and social movements as linear and conscious processes, has led commentators and policy makers to dismiss community media as not displaying enough political potential to warrant public support or be eligible for funding designed to contribute to the construction of democracy. In the place of describing such media as emerging from a place of non-democracy and progressing straight towards full democracy, she suggests that we should “approach democratic communication as a live creature that contracts and expands with its own very vital rhythms – rhythms which often have very little to do with the linear, preplanned, and rational processes that inform our scholarly inquiries” (p. 22).
Democratic forces are constantly in a state of negotiation with the non-democratic and citizens' media may contribute to strengthening the democratic, if even only such successes are temporary or ephemeral. Theorising democracy as essentialist or static concepts misses the “real texture of power negotiations” (p. 23) and the fluidity of the democratic process. While the democratic potential of community media may on the surface appear minor compared to established effects of large scale 41 mechanisms like public service broadcasters or lobbyist groups, this should not deter intellectuals from engaging with it as more than merely a side-note of political media studies. Rodriguez notes:
The apparent lightweight quality of the political action should not lead us into a “black hole” of political pessimism, but on the contrary, should convince us of the necessity to create new conceptual ways to capture this politics in flux. (p. 23)
Community media have however generally been ignored by media scholars (and for the most part, policy makers), and their presence is largely absent from the canonised subjects of media studies. As the product of a broadcasting era, media studies has been mostly concerned with “mass society, mass communication, mass persuasion, and the formation and control of public opinion” (Merrin, 2009, p.
19). Recently, scholarly treatment of community and media has surged somewhat with the occurrence of online or virtual communities and the scope of what constitute the media has been enlarged to consider the internet as a means for both the creation and distribution of media content and as a locus of convergence of media forms. But this shift has for the most part just ensconced the new media as a legitimate subject for analysis, but one which for the most part continues to be treated within the same methodological and theoretical frameworks (political economy, cultural studies, globalisation) that have been applied to traditional broadcast media forms. The invigoration of media studies by the internet and particularly the early and ongoing analysis around virtual or online communities
(Rheingold, 1993; Turkle, 1995), and the rise of citizen journalism (Goode, 2009), could shed light on our understanding of just how face-to-face communities and media are intertwined and interact.
Howley (2005) in Community Media: people, places, and Communications Technologies has argued that a lack of scholarly attention has enabled mainstream media to renew its criticism of community media as just a playground for amateurish media practitioners, hobbyists, and extremist ideologues.
Howley begins his book with a stunningly flagrant example of the exclusion of three reporters from a community radio station in Madison, Wisconsin from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) meeting 42 in Washington, DC in 2000. The reporters, like their counterparts in the commercial and public service media, had completed applications for access well before the application deadline yet were denied press accreditation without explanation. After repeated requests for clarification as to why their applications for accreditation were denied they were told it was because they worked for a “community radio station” and that the IMF's position was to “... not provide press accreditation to public access
TV, community radio, nor student or academic publications to attend our meetings” (p. 13).
For Howley, this and other examples reveals how community media actually “inhabit a highly contested field of social, economic, and political relations” (p. 15) where the hegemony of the dominant media institutions to shape public opinion, champion neo-liberal economics, further consumerist cultural practices, and influence communications policy, are called into question by community media practices. For Howley community media initiatives are “one of the more effective strategies in the global struggle to democratise communication and ensure local autonomy in the wake of rampant media privatisation and consolidation” (p. 16). The effect of media privatisation and consolidation has attracted much scholarly attention, particularly the undermining effect of such processes on democracy as inequitable access to communication channels becomes an increasingly common feature of neo-liberalism and free markets. But often many writers have approached ownership consolidation and decreased diversity by concluding that this can be rectified by policy changes enforcing diversity of ownership through limits on monopoly or regional ownership, or supply arguments in defence of greater government support for public service broadcasting networks, thus ignoring the work and potential of citizen or community media organisations to provide a means for increasing the diversity of voices in the mediascape or to combat ideological biases in mainstream media.
Like Rennie's application of Giddens' Third Way theories to support a stronger role for community 43 organisations in civil society and for the inclusion of community media as a legitimate field for media studies, Howley turns towards Jürgen Habermas' formulation of the public sphere to provide a theoretical framework through which to examine the relationship of communication to democracy.
Habermas' formulation of the public sphere as a realm insulated from the influences of the state and the market provides a space in which the “public comes to understand and define itself, articulate its needs and common concerns, and act in the collective self-interest” (Howley, p. 19). Habermas presents two key conditions for the establishment of a robust public sphere, and that are also highly relevant to the theory and praxis of community radio (and the arguments levied against it by traditional media outlets), and to the basis for policy decisions particularly around the area of public funding for such media. The two conditions identified by Habermas (1992) are: the quality of discursive practices and the quantity of participation within this discourse. In the New Zealand context at least, the quantity of participation is a primary, yet misguided, criterion for access to public funding for community television and radio and infers that quality is a necessary result of quantity. Quality and quantity though are at the core of the weakening of the public sphere in contemporary society, and their erosion is a feature of the globalising effects of commercial media, state intervention and the corporatisation of public and private life.
The quality of discursive practices in Habermas' conception refers to the ability for the public sphere to support “rational-critical debate based not on the speaker's identity or social standing, but upon the reasoned and logical merits of an argument” (Howley, p. 19). The quality of the public sphere is eroded by persistent legislation enabling the increased consolidation of ownership over the various forms of modern mass media production; creating an environment where fewer and fewer people wield an enormous, and largely unchecked, power to influence public opinion. As has been previously discussed, New Zealand's commercial radio landscape is essentially dominated by two international media conglomerates and one national broadcaster. Many writers on the relationship between media 44 and democracy consider that at the very heart of democracy lie the vagaries of public opinion, and that the dialogue that takes place in and between the citizenry that form this public opinion is, for the most part, stimulated, if not almost wholly created by the modern mass media (Baker, 2002; Herman &
McChesney, 1997). The quality of public opinion and political participation is influenced by access to diverse media channels, which is argued to result in more informed and active political participation.
Media consumption affects public opinion to such a degree in Baker’s (2002) view that the political consequences of its consumption for modern democracies and their institutions constitutes a major positive externality, whereby the political and social benefits of a comprehensive media environment far outweigh the costs associated with the production of such media.
The power wielded by highly commercialised and consolidated mass media organisations impacts not only the formation of public opinion but also has considerable influence on political policy making.
Corporate influence on ownership laws, spectrum allocation, and government funding arrangements is well documented (McChesney, 1999), and policy recommendations that challenge corporate interests receive little air time on the mainstream media. The swing towards policy designed to privilege markets for commercially oriented broadcasters has impacted the programming and goals of national public service broadcasters who have had to re-orient themselves towards more commercial formats and content in order to retain audiences and justify government support for their operations.
The position of Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) is worth considering in light of community radio.
On one side the centrality of democracy, often articulated as a Habermasian defence of the public sphere, is expressed as a forum in which the contending viewpoints of society come together and, through processes of rational and critical deliberation and debate, scrutinise the workings of public and private powers to forge consensual public opinion. As has been suggested the media play a formative role in diffusing diverse opinions and bringing them into such a dialogue, and PSB has been identified 45 by certain authors as an embodiment of this public sphere ideal (Born, 2006). This decidedly modernist ideal is often still articulated in defence of PSB by writers and policy strategists.
Commentators in defence of this argument though are in the process of updating the PSB definition to advocate for media systems which enable more pluralist forms of address among multiple public spheres. Public Service Broadcasters like the BBC are, in this vision, crucial vehicles in the creation of spaces for online civic discourse to take place. This vision, often articulated as a shift from Public
Service Broadcasting to Public Service Communications, is part of the current digital strategy of the
BBC and aims to unify informal and formal aspects of a national public sphere (Coleman, 2004). The support of community based media, and radio in particular, by public service broadcasters may be a strategy that allows national PSBs to strengthen their ties to an increasingly alienated or disinterested public as well as promoting a plurality of voices to emerge in the mediascape.
Community media however exists on an antipodean pole from the global reaches of transnational mass media organisations. The globalisation of mass media brought about firstly by satellite communications infrastructures and more recently the internet has concentrated significant power into the hands of mostly Western corporations. Technology, coupled with neo-liberal economic and regulatory policies has enabled the convergence of once discrete media industries, facilitating the creation of new cultural forms as well as revealing opportunities for synergies between content creators/owners, hardware manufacturers, distributors, and marketers (Jenkins, 2006). The combined mergers of these formerly discrete industries as well as transnational licensing agreements has created mega-corporations (e.g. Disney, Sony, News Corporation, etc.) with global reaches and powerful frameworks for the production of culture. In light of such transnational media flows and forces, community media may be viewed as complex forms of “resistance and subversion” (Howley, 2005, p.
35). The ideological pull of global mass media though may also act act against community forms and practices which also display evidence of complicity and submission, as much as they do signs of 46 resistance and subversion.
For Howley, community media form a site where global and local forces interact and collide. Jesus
Martin-Barbero's application of the Marxist interpretation of mediation (as cited in Howley, 2005, p.33) - whereby social actors utilise media and communicative forms and structures to navigate the forces of history, culture, economics or the material world – highlights the complexity of communication in the construction of national and cultural identities. Howley suggests that community media producers are constantly mediating the practices of mass media towards their own local contexts and needs - poaching forms and practices associated with global producers yet investing these with their own social experiences to produce localised versions of accepted styles and forms. This “tactical response” (Howley, 2005, p. 34) is a reaction to the commodification and homogenisation of culture by mass media. Community media also create “strategical alliances” (p. 34) whereby groups like social service agencies, political activists and others whose goals are antithetical to the dominant power structures can publicise oppositional messages that may find little sympathy from the mainstream media. Such alliances serve to diminish the effects of political and economic systems that cater overwhelmingly to special interests by assisting local communities in organising and participating in the political process. Community media also support local arts and culture organisations and performers by promoting, and producing and distributing productions, thus providing local cultural autonomy in the face of the homogenising influence of national media industries and privatised global media environments. Howley also notes that often as a physical space, community media organisations may also function as one of the few public spaces where communities can “debate political issues, to celebrate local cultural heritage, and join together as a community” (p. 35), and can be seen as counteracting a climate of political apathy and social alienation that is characteristic of much contemporary society. 47
Howley's description of community media’s “strategic” and “tactical” interventions into media culture by community organisations almost suggests a kind of David and Goliath struggle where smaller players are constantly throwing rocks at the heels of their oppressors, but he also notes through reference to the work of Martin-Barbero that while community media can “provide a unique site to illuminate hegemonic processes: community media demonstrate not only signs of resistance and subversion but evidence of complicity and submission as well” (p. 35). This kind of media Stockholm
Syndrome whereby we are all hostages to the forms, values and preoccupations of mass media production is often present in community radio stations where volunteers may not actually be critical or resistant to mass media at all, and in fact wish to reproduce programming styles that are common in our daily consumption of mainstream media form and content. This may be further exacerbated by a
“dismissive attitude” (p. 36) towards the media products of volunteers or non-professionals by mainstream media and public service broadcasters. Associating community media only with a radical or alternative perspective (a perspective that Howley admits many community media producers may actively embrace) also serves to underscore an “adversarial relationship” (p. 36) that may exist between dominant and community media. Howley suggests such misconceptions may also account for the general lack of scholarly attention that has been paid to community media.
It is important we recognise in the study of community media the many overlapping levels of exchange that take place between mainstream and community forms of media. At times symbiotic, at others parasitic or antagonistic, these relationships play an important role in helping to define the identity of community media (Carpentier, Lie, & Servaes, 2003). The place of community media within the overall mediascape provides us with a set of unique cases to “interrogate the process of identity formation through communications technologies, and to examine the dramatic impact of social and technological change on the everyday lived experience of disparate groups within a geographically based community” (Howley, p. 38). 48
Four general theoretical themes can be seen to emerge from the literature of community media and may assist us in organising research within the field. Jankowski (2002) identifies these perspectives as: democratic theory, cultural identity, community, and operational environment.
Democratic theory is often closely associated with notions of access to broadcasting media and the role of community broadcasters within the democratic process. The near causal relationships though that may often be assumed within this perspective are worthy of further research, yet such a project would require extensive audience analysis within a particular community to determine whether listening to community radio changes the behaviours or political actions of listeners. Audience research is outside the scope of the case study presented here, but it is worth touching briefly on some principles of democratic theory that may be relevant in relation to this study, and that will help us frame the type of functions that I believe community radio may perform that differentiate it from commercial or public service broadcasting.
Atkinson (1999) refers to political matters as distinctly “other-regarding”, by which he means that politics in pluralist societies are dependent on “the real interdependence of otherwise antagonistic groups who find a mutual interest in playing by an agreed set of rules …” (p. 22). As individuals identify with certain groups in society it is the media that assists these groups in the creation of shared understandings. The benefits of media are for Atkinson not so much individualistic, but in the creation of a public sphere in which, “Freedom of speech and the press are democratic ideals, not so much because they produce individual benefits (though they may do that as well), but because they supply a basis for collective decision-making” (Atkinson, 1999, p. 23). Community, as shall be discussed later is a decidedly politically charged construction that often exists in such an antagonistic relationship with its surroundings, yet which is also often called upon to provide a cornerstone from which to engage in 49 questions of identity and nationalism. Community media can provide platforms for speech and expression on a local level that help individuals and groups situate themselves as actors in regional, national, and global issues.
Cultural and group identity is a rich vein in the literature, research, and practice of community radio.
Ethnically based community radio stations, for example, are found in many parts of the world and are often the means for minority linguistic or ethnic communities to broadcast in their own language.
Within Auckland city the Access station Planet FM is such a station, catering to programme makers producing and broadcasting a range of radio content in over 40 languages. Such broadcasting may act to help groups retain unique forms of expression particular to their own ethnic group as well as contend with “separation or incorporation of ethnic media within larger communication systems” (Jankowski,
2002, p. 362). Planet FM has emerged to specifically address Section 36(c) of the Broadcasting Act
1989 which recommends that government support the development of broadcasting aimed at ethnic minorities whose media needs are not well met by commercial broadcasters.
Mediascapes are not “natural landscapes” (Hollander, 2002, p. 39). The types of media that are present within a particular geographical area are dependent on the characteristics of the community within which they appear; quantitative characteristics such as size, for example, may impact on the amount of advertising revenue that can be made available which may subsequently impact the form of media present whether commercial or non-commercial. Physical features such as mountainous areas may affect the technicalities of broadcasting; or the dominance of one language will influence the predominant tongue used in broadcasting. Keith Stamm (1997) has also suggested that involvement in community media is dependent upon certain characteristics of individuals within a community that he called “settling stages”. Stamm’s research suggests that at least for community radio, use was actually marginally higher amongst members of the community in the stages he referred to as drifting and 50 relocating. Janowitz (1952) in an earlier study also found a positive correlation between community media use and community integration. Janowitz suggests that individuals pass through a process of socialisation whereby becoming settled into a community consists of various stages of establishing community ties and that community media use can be associated with the development of such ties.
These ties are most often communicative in structure and form the basis of social communication structures or what Hollander (2006) refers to as community communication. Community communication as a research field takes as its focus the “individual as member of a specific community” (p. 33) and Hollander suggests that community media targets people “in their quality as citizens of a specific region, city, or neighbourhood” :
It is this quality as citizens that enables them to see the relevance of the topics presented by community media: not politics in general, but local politics; not national sports but local sports; not crime in general, but crime in the community. (p. 33)
Hollander suggests that the concept of community communication is a useful device for looking at the influence of the characteristics of communities on the types of content that community media produce.
He views community communication as a process more akin to sharing than the one-way transmission of messages.
The operational environment that community radio finds itself within is largely determined by capital costs associated with broadcasting environments, and the processes and activities stations undertake to secure financial support and sustainability. As stations grow in size and membership the organisation of the station may no longer be able to be run solely by volunteers. This overall operational environment is impacted by popular perceptions of the superiority of free markets to support media products, and by government policy that may ensure the survival of non-commercial activities by broadcasters and community groups alike. There are though powerful lobbies working against the growth of community media in New Zealand and elsewhere which cannot be ignored. Recent 51 submissions by the Radio Broadcasters Association (RBA) for example, which represents commercial broadcasters in New Zealand, have suggested that there is no justifiable demand for more diversification of radio broadcasting in New Zealand and that localism was a minor factor in attracting audiences (Radio Broadcasters Association, 2005). This is essentially at odds with the philosophical and operating basis of many community based stations as well as incongruous with recent research in the Australian context which suggests listeners actually desire more localised radio content (Meadows,
Forde, Ewart, & Foxwell, 2007). The RBA also strongly lobbied for the establishment of a registration fee for Low Power FM operators within New Zealand as well as regular technical compliance audits.
Carpentier, Lie, and Servaes (2003) in an essay entitled, “Multitheoretical Approaches to
Community Media: Capturing Specificity and Diversity” suggest that the only way to really capture the characteristic diversity of community media is to apply a multitheoretical approach that combines two media-centred approaches and two society-centred ones. Their approach establishes a set of arguments that highlight the importance of community media in some areas, yet can also be used to analyse the weaknesses of and threats to community media. By simultaneously applying a diversity of theoretical approaches towards the examination of community media they hope to avoid the monotheoretical mistake of focusing on certain characteristics while ignoring others.
Media-centred Society-centred Autonomous identity of CM Approach #1: (Essentialist) Serving the community Approach #3: Identity of CM in relation to Approach #2: Part of civil society other identities (Relationalist) An alternative to mainstream Approach #4: Rhizome Carpentier, Lie, & Servaes, 2007. 52
In the media-centred Approach #1, Serving the community, community media are oriented towards a community regardless of whether community is defined in geographic, spatial, or in terms of communities of interest that may include online communities. The relationship between the community medium and the actual members of the community is characterised by access and participation and transcends the mostly one-way communication characteristic of commercial mass media. This is two-way communication best summarised by Berrigan as “media to which members of the community have access, for information, education, entertainment, when they want access. They are media in which the community participates, as planners, producers, performers. They are the means of expression of the community, rather than for the community” (as cited in Carpentier, et al.,
2003, p. 224). Carpentier et al., describe participation as “a process where individual members (of a community) have a certain degree of power to influence or determine outcomes” (p. 224).
This approach towards community media emphasises the relationship between broadcaster and community and Carpentier et al. suggest that it is the validation and strengthening of community that is significant in this strategy. Often these approaches to community media are built upon facilitating access and participation by community members who select topics and create content that is relevant to members of the community, thus “empowering them by signifying that their statements are considered important enough to be broadcast” (p. 225). These types of community media organisations are often also established with the goal of opening up channels of communication for misrepresented, stigmatised, or repressed social groups. They warn that this approach can create situations of dependency of the station towards the community who may be “more or less equally interested in communicating” (p. 225) thereby trapping the broadcaster in a relationship that requires considerable means and effort to maintain the two-way relationship.
In the second approach, Community Media as an Alternative to Mainstream Media, community media 53 is based on what it is not, or as having a negative relationship to mainstream media. Alternative community media based organisations in this conception are often small scale, independent, diverse, horizontally structured, participatory carriers of non-dominant and counter-hegemonic discourses and stress the importance of self-representation (Carpentier, et al. 2003). This approach emphasises both an organisational and a content level and shows that community media can exist independently from the state and the market. Supporting Rennie's argument alternative media show that more balanced and horizontally structured ways of organisation are possible. Carpentier, Lie and Servaes (2007) suggest that,
the critical stance toward the production values of the 'professional' working in mainstream media leads to a diversity of formats and genres, and creates room for experimentation with content and form; in this fashion community media can be rightfully seen as a breeding ground for innovation, later often recuperated by mainstream media. (p. 227)
The downside of the alternative approach, what Carpentier et al. refer to as media situated in an
“antagonistic relationship” (p. 227) towards their mainstream counterparts, is a weakening of financial and organisational stability. The marginal, they claim, are given low political priority and may be victimised by government policy around the availability of funding or access to spectrum. They may also be denied access to other funding sources who perceive them as unprofessional and limited in their capacity to reach larger audiences.
The third approach views community media from a societal perspective as part of civil society, and positions community media as independent from the state and market. This approach views community media existing as a crucial locus for “the expansion and deepening of democracy” (Carpentier, et al.
2003, p. 228). Community media organisations are viewed in this light to be participating in a revival of democratic interests mostly through a commitment to community participation. Community media 54 can exist as a sort of third media organisation in a Commercial media – Community media – Public broadcasting triumvirate. With the dominance of a neoliberal discourse on media policies and the hegemony of the marketplace in such discourses some public service broadcasters have adopted more market driven approaches, replacing niche and regional programming with content aimed towards audience maximisation. The end result has been to orient these broadcasters more towards the societal level, and less towards the community level (p. 228). Thus community media plays an important part of civil society by increasing levels of media participation and by allowing people to “learn and adopt democratic and/or civic attitudes, thus strengthening (possible forms) of macro-participation” (p. 229).
Quoting Ole Prehn, Carpentier et al. suggest that this approach reflects a struggle between community media, the state, and the market and that commercial mass media and a commercially influenced public service media may view community media as “contenders in a Darwinistic struggle among commercially oriented media” (Prehn, as cited by Carpentier et al. 2003, p. 229). The rejection of advertising as a financial means of support may put community media in a weakened financial position, and in some countries such media may also be considered as a threat to repressive states.
Carpentier et al. also suggest that the horizontal structuring, emphasis on community involvement, and open participation that is characteristic of this mode of community media can also lead to a certain degree of inefficiency and not necessarily equate to such desirable political outcomes.
The final approach borrows terminology from Deleuze and Guittari's metaphor of the rhizome to describe how some community media “tend to cut across borders and build linkages between pre- existing gaps” (Carpentier et al., 2007, p. 230). In this approach community media establishes a myriad of connections with civil society organisations and movements, markets, and even the state. Such organisations may not be ideologically pure or dominated by a single vision but are instead fluid and open to contingency and in this sense are contrasted against the functional rigidity of strictly 55 mainstream or commercial counterparts. Carpentier et al. suggest that the elusiveness of a rhizomatic media makes it difficult to “encapsulate in legislation” (p. 231) which in turn may guarantee its continued independence. At the other end of this position is the threat that such media, by establishing linkages with the market or the state in order to ensure financial viability, may also be at risk of incorporation by either of them.
Almost every element of the theory is manifest within the following case study on a community radio station, Waiheke Radio. As a nascent organisation ruddered by a volunteer crew with a variety of motivations, community ties, and social standings the station is largely still evolving and in some ways seems to be progressing through a community radio “stations of the cross” where questions of access versus audience building, local politics, musical format, sponsorship versus advertising, member compensation, and an almost non-existent governance structure, all seem as if they have to be addressed or overcome for the station to evolve into a truly accomplished, sustainable, and localised community media organisation. The case study tries to locate the station within a unique community environment – that of an island; a geography that influences the relationship of the station to its constituents and the larger mediascape. 56
Community Radio on Waiheke Island
To understand people who live on islands you need to respect their own self belief in independence and right to do things a different way. We are different citizens – no two ways about it. We think outside the square. (W B Carrig, letter to the Gulf News, 2009)
On March 27th, 2009 the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance released its eagerly anticipated report on how Auckland should be governed in the near future. The Commission had been established by the Labour Government in July of 2007 and by the end of October of that year they had appointed three Commissioners and developed the terms of reference for the investigation. The Commission's aim was to examine and report on what local and regional governance arrangements were required for the
Auckland region over the foreseeable future. The Commission's report proposed the dissolution of the
Auckland Regional Council5 and all seven territorial authorities existing within greater Auckland, to be replaced with the creation of a new single unitary authority called the Auckland Council which came to be popularly referred to as the “Supercity”. After a period of public consultation, where over 3,500 written and 550 oral submissions were made, the Commission identified two broad, systemic problems that were evident in current Auckland local government arrangements:
• Regional governance is weak and fragmented.
• Community engagement is poor.
Of the 3,500 written submissions that were made to the Royal Commission, over one third of them were from Waiheke Island. Given that Waiheke's population of approximately 8,000 people makes up only 0.6 percent of the entire Auckland region population, the large number of submissions resulted in the Commission feeling ultimately obliged to visit the island for period of public consultation so that
5 The Auckland Regional Council Group (ARC Group) manages the region's air and water quality, its growth and development, regional parks, public transport, the coastal and marine environment, and natural and cultural heritage sites. http://www.arc.govt.nz/council/about-the-arc/about-the-arc_home.cfm 57 oral submissions could be made by island residents.
Chris Walker, a member of the Waiheke Community Radio Trust made a written submission on behalf of the Trust six months before community radio would actually commence broadcasting on Waiheke but in the midst of its establishment period. In the submission he stated that:
The support of the Waiheke Community Board and the local councillor has been significant to the setting up and running of our organisation, the Waiheke Community Radio Trust. They have supported us with funding, in the process of obtaining an appropriate venue, and by encouraging our plans for the future. This relationship has been facilitated because local representatives are accessible to the community of Waiheke and understand the needs of Waiheke people.
and,
It is important that local communities have the ability to make funding decisions at local level to support and resource community initiatives, such as the Waiheke Community Board’s support of the Waiheke Community Radio Trust which provides both a service and means of community engagement to local people. This can be done fairly and effectively if there are clear parameters of decision making at local/regional levels. There needs to be room for interpretation based on local knowledge and the ability to act on this rather than just making recommendations. (Chris Walker, submission to Royal Commission on Auckland Governance, 2009)
Community radio on Waiheke Island was nursed to fruition in the midst of a particularly politically charged atmosphere. As much as its establishment involved the erection of transmitter poles, the wiring of the studio, and the development of a station logo, it also rested on the outcome of our lobbying local politicians to act on our behalf, and included a radio submission of opinion to a Royal Commission.
Community radio on Waiheke was to be a form of media at the service of local residents; it was intended to service their information needs, arguing that these were not well served by radio from 58
Auckland city, and it was established to provide a means for individuals to communicate and engage with their community in an open and accessible way.
In many ways, as I hope to outline, the establishment of community radio on Waiheke provides a means to strengthen the very aspects of community that the Royal Commission on Auckland
Governance identified as a weakness in the larger surrounding governance structures. In Rodriguez's terms the presence of this type of “citizens' media” constitutes a “strategy of legitimizing the local”
(Rodriguez, p. 51) by making the local the primary subject of media attention. Community radio on
Waiheke can act as an amplifier for local messages by providing a platform for the creation and distribution of messages by residents, community leaders, and elected local officials. The station reinforces the symbolism of community by providing a structure through and around which the symbols of community coalesce; and by establishing itself as a communicative enterprise that constructs the cultural codes of belonging (Delanty, 2003). As a participatory media environment staffed solely by a range of volunteers the station also creates a space where a plurality of voices are united into a communication community. The station itself as a civil society group, establishes its own sense of belonging by constructing and sharing in its own symbols and ideals, and by promoting its goals as the collective goals and aspirations of the wider community.
Waiheke Island
Waiheke is typical of many modern localities in that it has lost much control over most of it's local institutional systems and welfare. Over the last twenty years the administration of the island has become increasingly centralized and administered by Auckland city bureaucracies. Local voluntary associations are now forced to connect with city, regional, or national agencies of control and reflect a typical structure of residential politics. The L-shaped structure typical of many modern localities has 59 been described by Postill (2009) in his study of two Malaysian suburbs and equally applies to the
Auckland City and Waiheke Island relationship. A vertical axis representing the three tiered structure of government (city, regional, and state) and a horizontal axis that represents a variety of non- governmental agencies “led by prominent residents and marked by the non-hierarchical, egalitarian ideology of 'community'” (p. 5). Postill goes on to say that:
These two sectors can be regarded as sub-fields with their own characteristic logic and dynamics, with leading residents struggling to assert their autonomy from the governmental sub field and elected politicians striving to demonstrate their tireless dedication to resolving local issues … To be well regarded within this horizontal sub-field, local residents are expected to freely volunteer their time and labour in exchange for symbolic not financial rewards. (p. 5)
Stamm (1985), writing about community newspapers, has described these horizontal non-government agencies as acting like “pressure groups” linking the self-interests of local people to the centralized political process that exists at the levels of city, state and nation. In this sense community politics often involves the balancing of local and non-local interests. Stamm perceives that this is the true value of local newspapers, that they serve as “a forum for expression of local self-interest in the face of conflicting interests from outside. In this capacity, the newspaper becomes the defender of local self- interest” (Stamm, 1985, p. 145). Waiheke Radio exists within a similar tradition yet differs most notably from the local newspapers in its total reliance on volunteer hours6 and non-profit orientation.
While local newspapers are for the most part highly supportive of local goals and interests, they remain loyal to journalistic traditions and are commercially run enterprises. Waiheke Radio differs by maintaining autonomy from any commercial imperatives and serving the community by promoting a sense of openness whereby people with little or no prior experience in broadcasting can contribute to the mission and content of the station.
6 In a survey I conducted in September 2009, station volunteers were contributing over 100 hours per week towards the running of the station. 60
The Local Mediascape
I am not a member of Waiheke politics. But I always vote for the local community board. That is my chance to have a say. Because we are a community with three local newspapers as well as being small enough to trade news on the grapevine, I feel very capable of choosing the leaders for my community. I know such leaders are held to accountability both because they see their constituents on a daily basis, whether it be on the ferries, the local supermarket, the local weekly well-attended outdoor market, and any other number of places, and because their actions are reported via community media. (Carol Handin, submission to Royal Commission on Auckland Governance, 2009)
For its size Waiheke has a unique media environment supporting a fairly large number of community based media organizations and initiatives. As of this writing there are two local newspapers - The Gulf
News and The Marketplace, a volunteer run cinema, a film-makers collective, and a local Wikipedia styled wiki called Waihekepedia that aims to be “an informal encyclopaedia about Waiheke by islanders themselves” (Waihekepedia, 2009). There are numerous blogs promoting local causes like the ferry and transportation watchdog group blog Fullerswatch, which aims to be a place for residents to “keep a critical eye on transport monopolies affecting island life” (Fullerswatch, 2009), and the
Transition Waiheke website which provides a forum for discussing Waiheke's participation in the
Transition Towns movement, a grass roots approach to making communities more self-reliant in the face of peak oil and climate change.
The case of the local newspapers is interesting to note and worthy of exploring in more detail in terms of the richness of the local mediascape. The Gulf News is an independently run weekly paper, and has been published on the island since 1973. It is an audited member of the New Zealand Community 61
Newspapers Association and is easily the most iconic of all local media on the island and the only one not freely available. The paper is for sale in a variety of outlets around the island including the
Auckland to Waiheke ferry service. The Marketplace by contrast is freely available community newspaper published every Wednesday and delivered to Waiheke homes; it is also distributed on the ferries and at island businesses and tourism outlets. First published in May 1998 it grew in size until
Australian owned media conglomerate Fairfax Media bought it from its local owner/publisher in
August 2008 to add to its roster of over 60 New Zealand community newspapers. Until early 2009 there was a third paper on the island, the weekly tabloid newspaper called The Waiheke Week. The paper was freely available and was owned by former National Party president Michelle Boag, her husband and the papers publisher Mervyn Bennett, and the managing director of Mainfreight NZ , Bruce Plested. In contrast to the other local papers, The Waiheke Week took a pro-development stance. The paper was published every Thursday and was available at stands across Waiheke and on Fullers and Sealink sailings, though initially it was also delivered to island homes. The Waiheke Week was purchased by
The Gulf News in 2009 and was re-framed as The Waiheke Weekender. The focus shifted towards more of a broadsheet style paper aimed at the tourist market.
A relationship between community media use and the nature of the community has been highlighted by both Stamm (1997) and Janowitz (1952). Community is constantly in a state of flux, constituted as it is by individuals in various stages of settling and developing ties to people and groups. These ties are communicative in structure, forming the basis of community communication which in the context of an increasingly insecure world assists individuals in the development of a sense of belonging (Delanty,
2003). The Gulf News for example establishes a sense of belonging by publishing and prioritizing a considerable number of letters to the editor, so many so that it at times apologizes for not being able to publish them all; it also caricatures the primary themes emerging in this public forum via a cartoonist's representation of the issues. Another regular feature of The Gulf News is the 10 Years Ago feature, 62 located just before the letters to the editor section and which features short reprints of news stories that occurred exactly ten years ago from the date of the present publication. This feature contextualizes island issues in a historical context creating in readers (and writers) a linear sense of their place in
Waiheke history.
History of Waiheke Island
A strong sense of community on Waiheke Island is undoubtedly due to its geographic character as a small island, but it is also a result of the continued manifestation of the ethos of the original Pakeha settlers. As mentioned earlier in regards to the sheer amount of submissions to the enquiry into
Auckland governance, how decisions are made that affect the island and its residents are of keen interest and they may garner considerable local media attention, appear in the numerous blogs maintained by island residents, or even stimulate community meetings. The island is home to large number of activists, campaigners, and academics from the two universities located in downtown
Auckland city. Residents possess slightly higher levels of education than those reported in the city
(Statistics New Zealand, 2006), and are keen and often adept at participating in local governance decisions, as well as being well informed and active in a range of national and global political causes and issues.
The geography of the island has influenced the development of a unique set of community characteristics compared to other areas within the Auckland region. Waiheke is located 17km from central Auckland and is a 35-40 minute ferry ride from the city's downtown piers. It is the second largest island in the Hauraki Gulf, after Great Barrier Island and its proximity to Auckland means it has become New Zealand's third most populated island after the North and South Islands. The island has an area of 9324 hectares and a permanent population of around 8000 residents. 63
The island has been coveted as a strategic locale for settlement, as a land rich in natural resources, as a place of immense natural beauty, and as a supportive environment for alternative views and lifestyles.
Early histories and archaeological records suggest that the island has had regular human habitation since the earliest Mā ori arrived in the area but has only been permanently settled since the 14th century when Ngati Huarere from the Coromandel, a colony from the voyaging canoe Te Arawa, assumed control of the island, establishing a number of Pa (fortified villages) and greatly increasing the permanent population. By the 18th century Ngati Paoa became the dominant iwi and it has been estimated that there were around 1000 Mā ori living on the island. Ngapuhi warrior Hongi Hika from
Northland laid waste to the islands' inhabitants in 1821, most of whom either fled or perished.
Eventually Ngati Paoa returned to Waiheke and the population increased to around 500 by 1830
(Auckland City Libraries, 2008).
The first recorded visit to Waiheke by Europeans was that of the Rev. Samuel Marsden in 1820, who is recorded as having said that Waiheke was “as large as the Isle of Wight and contained much good land” (Auckland City Libraries, 2008). The presence of numerous large Kauri trees on the island was of great interest to ship builders and began a highly lucrative trade in the wood until around 1850 at which time the trees were all but gone. Deforestation of the Island continued as other trees were felled for house foundations, fence posts and firewood.
In 1838 Thomas Maxwell made the first land purchase by Europeans on the East Coast, near
Man’O’War bay. By 1845 the number of European settlers had reached 45 and the clearing of bush, land purchases, and settlements increased with the establishment of farming. Most early settlements were on the eastern end of the Island and around Onetangi. By 1868 most land had been sold to
European settlers and only Te Huruhi (the area around Matiatia) remained in Ngati Paoa hands and 64 little more than 40 Mā ori remained on the Island. In 1876 the first Post office arrived and in 1882 the first school opened at Te Matuku Bay with a roll of 27 pupils.
In 1901 there were 162 people recorded as island residents in the census, but Auckland residents were flocking to island bays for regattas and picnics. During the 1880s Waiheke was regularly accessible to
Aucklanders by steamer excursions and had became a popular destination for day trippers. In the 1920s major subdivisions appeared on the island at Orapiu and Ostend in 1916, Onetangi and Surfdale in
1921, Palm Beach in 1922, Rocky Bay in 1923 and Oneroa in 1924. The impact of these subdivisions was that no longer were visitors restricted to just day trips but it was now possible for people to own baches for holidays or retirement. In the absence of any local government, these subdivisions were private ventures carried out independently following Public Works regulations that made landowners responsible for their own roads and wharves. These subdivisions eventually generated their own self- contained communities, many of which are still represented today by historic community halls, stores and post offices.
The island is now an extremely popular tourist destination. Most recently the tourist guidebook
Frommers promoted Waiheke as one of its top 10 tourist destinations for 2009. There is a common urban myth that the population of the island swells to around 20,000 during the high tourist season.
This number has never been confirmed by any accurate or official count but is nonetheless a figure regularly quoted by locals regardless of the lack of actual figures. Many of the islands' businesses are highly dependent on this influx of seasonal tourists and the island is marketed by Tourism Auckland as the “Jewel of the Gulf” with wine-making, olive production, and arts and crafts listed as “significant industries” (Tourism Auckland, 2009).
Waiheke had no form of local government until 1921 with the formation of the Ostend and Orapiu 65
Roads Boards which presided only over the establishment and development of roads. Other areas like building, wharves and health continued to be supervised at a distance by government departments and the Auckland Hospital Board. In the absence of close government regulation, a local culture of independence, self reliance and individualism developed on Waiheke island, an ethos which is strongly felt to this day. The formation of the Waiheke County Council (with authority also over the inner gulf islands) in 1970 brought full local government to Waiheke although in 1989 this council was finally amalgamated with Auckland City and Waiheke essentially became a suburb of Auckland (Auckland
City Libraries, 2008).
This culture of independence and self-reliance continues to be a defining and controversial feature of community on the island. There is a common perception, often repeated in letters to the editor and in regards to many local campaigns and issues, that Waiheke is not well served by city based bureaucrats who do not understand “island life” and the island could be said to embody a form of governmental communitarianism in terms of its local politics which are often highly influenced by community groups or individuals who are perceived to possess a large amount of social capital. A similar argument was repeated in defence of the establishment of a community radio station - that the island was not well served by radio broadcasts originating from Auckland city, and that city and government policy makers did not understand the local community's desire for some local form of broadcast media.
Characteristics of Community
Waiheke Island's population differs slightly from Auckland in a few ways that are worth highlighting.
The island has a slightly different age profile compared to the Auckland region with 13 percent of people on the island aged 65 and over, compared with 9.9 percent of the total in Auckland. On the 66 opposite end of this scale, there are also comparatively less children on the island than on the mainland with 19.1 percent of the population aged under 15 as compared to 22.1 percent for the Auckland region.
Of all the households on the island 60 percent of them are considered one-family households, but this also includes 1,080 (or 33 percent) that are one-person households. Throughout the Auckland region one-person households only make up 19.6 percent of all households. The population is well educated with 46.6 percent of the population having a post-school qualification, compared with 42.5 percent of people throughout the Auckland region (Statistics New Zealand, 2006).
In one sense the island is painted by the census as considerably less culturally diverse than the
Auckland region as a whole with 82 percent of the population European as compared with 56.5 percent in the Auckland region. This difference is highlighted in the census by the considerably lower numbers of Asian and Pacific Islanders present on the island as compared to the mainland, but is irrespective of, and does not reflect to any degree, the diversity of the over 50+ nationalities that might be represented within the European category. The most common birthplace for people born overseas who are now living on Waiheke Island is the UK and Ireland, compared with Asia for all of the Auckland region. In one interview I conducted with Waiheke Radio presenter Marie-France Duhamel, she reflected on her experience of diversity on the island:
I have been very pleasantly surprised by how many people we got to know; very quickly. To be honest in the first year we got to know more people than we knew in the 16 years we spent in Auckland. And all sorts of people; we really know all types of people on the island. Very diverse people. Diverse perspectives as well on many things. (Marie-France Duhamel, Personal Communication, 2009)
Diversity of the island community is often referred to as a characteristic that impacts on the mission and goals of community radio. It is considered important that as a community station Waiheke Radio reflects such diversity by being open and accessible to a wide range of people to utilise the station to 67 create and broadcast radio content. In this sense diversity provides an eclectic pool from which to draw for programming and content. But diversity also creates problems for the station's programming and audience-building mission. Audience-building was perceived by many people involved in the radio station as being linked to the station's ability to identify a homogeneity of taste within listeners, thereby creating a dedicated listenership by selecting music and content that would reinforce the similarity between individuals, not celebrate their difference. Bob Mansell, a long time participant in radio on the island, suggests that:
You're hard up against it with Waiheke, because there is such a diverse culture of people here in eight and a half thousand people. You've got everything from screaming fucking idiots about politics, to fucking junkies rolling around in the bushes in Ostend. You've got boaties that live on boats. It is very diverse. (Robert Mansell, Personal Communication, 2009)
During our conversation Mansell also highlighted another dimension of Waiheke's diversity – economic diversity. There is common perception amongst many people that the island is becoming a sort of playground for the wealthy who harbour a pro-development philosophy. This is a commonly held viewpoint amongst long time residents, many of whom may have moved to the island as a specific lifestyle choice, eschewing access to the increased economic opportunities of the city.
This is a small community, but a lot of the people in this community have been here a hell of a lot longer than the newbies that have been here since the year 2000 – 'cause that's when this community started to change was the year 2000. Because Aucklanders discovered this as a playground and they realized that there was some really nice property to be had out here; there was a good boat service, and most of them were in the upper pay echelons and could afford to fork out their $400 monthly ticket or whatever to go backwards and forward to work. (Robert Mansell, Personal Communication, 2009)
The permeation of the traditional boundary of the Waitemata Harbour by commuters who move 68 seamlessly backwards and forwards to work is quite rightly a significant event for the social, and political constitution of community on the island and Mansell asserts an economic disparity between long term islanders and recent Auckland immigrants. The introduction of high speed ferries to Waiheke
Island has meant that in some respects the island is now considered essentially another suburb of
Auckland. A trip that formerly took two hours one way was suddenly reduced to 35 minutes each way, a commute that for some people may have been considerably shorter than their previous commute by car or even public transportation in an increasingly car congested city.
The economics of living on the island are given more serious consideration by Basil Holmes, an elderly long time Waiheke resident and political activist, in his submission to the Royal Commission on
Auckland governance. Holmes' statement is interesting not only for its vision of the island as turning into a gentrified playground for the wealthy but in his acknowledgement that the island has a range of meanings, that there are 'versions' of the island that endorse particular narratives of progress and resistance:
There is a mischievous version of Waiheke perpetrated by the shallow ends of the media, tacitly encouraged by certain city officials, more openly by would-be developers and their noisier but minority of friends on the island. The myth is that the island is to be a haven for the very wealthy, and therefore the future shape and economics of the island has to be geared for this, including the assumption that wealthy islanders can pay with ease for expensive capital works. Actually the population of Waiheke remains a cross section of the NZ demographics and the prospect for example of retired residents being driven off by economic challenges arouses quite a depth of negative feelings. The people who have created the modern Waiheke island and this includes veterans of WW2 should not be so treated nor should anywhere in the Hauraki Gulf become virtually out of bounds for ordinary New Zealanders for economic or other reasons. This, least of all, by the Commission making recommendations that can, even accidentally, cause this form of economic apartheid or as some call it economic cleansing. (Holmes, 2008) 69
Both Mansell's and Holmes' quotes highlight the significance of boundaries in the definition of communities, a concept outlined most succinctly by the anthropologist A. P. Cohen in his seminal text on communities, The Symbolic Construction of Community. Cohen's thesis is that community is essentially a cultural construction with a strong symbolic dimension, and that as the geo-social boundaries of community are undermined, blurred, and weakened, the symbolic expressions of community increase in importance and are actively reasserted (Cohen, 1985). For many long term residents for example, the former boundary of the Waitemata Harbour has been weakened, permeated by fast ferries and a commuter class that has changed the economic and social character of the island forever. In doing so they also participate in symbolically invoking a past where life on Waiheke was simpler and more subsistent, where less contact with the bureaucracies of metropolitan Auckland meant more independence, and where there were less city style infrastructure developments like footpaths or street lighting. The introduction of a commuting class has softened these boundaries, brought Auckland and Aucklanders onto the island and created a convenient scapegoat for explaining the rapid changes that the island has undergone.
Unlike earlier theorists who viewed community as consisting of territorial dimensions and structural features such as a collections of institutions like family, market, activist organizations, parent-teacher groups, government, church, etc., Cohen suggests that community is both an ideal and a kind of symbolic reality. As a powerful symbol held in common by its members its meaning is also as prone to variability as are its members' unique orientations. As Cohen states:
In the face of this variability of meaning, the consciousness of community has to be kept alive through manipulation of its symbols. The reality and efficacy of the community's boundary – and, therefore of the community itself – depends upon its symbolic construction and embellishment. (p. 15)
While there are numerous examples of the symbolic construction of community, one that has become 70 quite ubiquitous on Waiheke is the prevalence of a number of car bumper stickers that profess certain qualities of the community that set to contrast the island from Auckland city and the mainland. The three most notable are:
1. I'm a local,
2. People's Republic of Waiheke, and
3. Waiheke Island: Far enough behind to be ahead.
The first of these acts as a direct symbolic representation of a person's relationship with the island, differentiating the driver from the possibility of being mistakenly identified as a “townie” or a tourist.
The townie/local dichotomy is a particularly prevalent sentiment heard repeated in the summer months as the population of the island swells with tourists, often from Auckland, who flock to Waiheke beaches and holiday rental properties. Waiheke Radio is also expressed in its promotional messages and by presenters as the “local” radio station. This statement symbolically constructs Waiheke residents as being culturally different than those that are merely visiting the island and creates a sense of self and belonging amongst residents who are most likely to register the presence of such stickers, as identify with the conditions that make being a local unique.
The second sticker, People's Republic of Waiheke, has seen increased patronage in recent years, originating firstly as a popular t-shirt sold at the local market and then at one of the local shops in the main village. As almost total control of island issues now emanates from centralized local government in Auckland city the proposal of an island republic, a state without a monarch, suggests a scenario that removes Waiheke from its subservient relationship with Auckland city leaders and decision makers. It must also be read though in terms of a desire for a return to community governance as opposed to the remoteness of regional and national politics, removed so far as they are from their constituent elements.
Cohen points out that large scale governments can no longer act as a relevant “referent of people's 71 identity” (Cohen, p. 106) and that as such people become “politically introspective and reach back to a more convincing level of society with which to identify” (Cohen, p. 106). This sentiment has been reflected in recent island politics with the controversial proposal in 2009 by a local community board member to the Local Government Commission, and supported with over 1000 signatures, that Waiheke be allowed to split from Auckland city and join with that of Thames/Coromandel instead. The primary motivation for this proposal was the suggestion that Waiheke was more akin to, and had more in common with the rural character of Thames/Coromandel than Auckland city, and that Auckland City
Council did not understand how the islands' needs differed from that of a large metropolis who did not share its rural/village sentiments or characteristics.
The third sticker, “Waiheke Island: Far enough behind to be ahead” reflects what anthropologists call a symbolic reversal; a sort of inversion of the norm whereby a minority group elevates a characteristic placed upon it by an outside group in order to emphasize its social cohesion. On many occasions, for example, my admission of living on Waiheke Island has been met with a popular saying amongst long time residents of Auckland of living on “Granola Island – full of fruits, nuts, and flakes.” The suggestion that Waiheke is a community mired in another political era and full of hippies, outcasts, and dropouts, is a common refrain. This sticker's affirmation of a certain slowness, a type of cautious reservation about the type of rapid development that might be high on the political agenda of metropolitan decision makers7, is held up as a positive characteristic that unites Waihekians in a progressive agenda where a slower pace of life affords greater insight and reflection into the future of the island.
There is a great deal of nostalgic sentiment on Waiheke Island amongst long time residents. This may be partly due to the abrupt changes ushered in by the nearly synchronous inclusion of Waiheke Island
7 The saying actually derives from a battle over Auckland City's desire to redevelop the Matiatia harbour, the primary entrance into Waiheke Island, as a tourist destination. Locals see Matiatia as a transportation hub. 72 into Auckland City and the introduction of fast ferries which established a kind of clearly defined event horizon demarcating between a period of relative isolation and a rather rapid population increase and social change. Community is often bound to a sense of nostalgia on the one hand, and to a political and civic ideology on the other whereby participatory involvement in community development acts as an experiment in righting the social ailments associated with modern global challenges. Waiheke has a considerably liberal lean to it with all current members of the community board identifying as
“independent”8 and Denise Roche the Auckland City Councillor for the the Hauraki Gulf Islands who was also the candidate of the Green Party of Aotearoa/New Zealand for Auckland Central in the 2008 general election.
A wide range of community groups representing a plurality of interests from environmental, cultural, political, and local media organisations exist on the island and often collaborate on community projects. Waiheke Radio for example has collaborated with the local Rotary club to broadcast live from the popular yearly Onetangi Beach Races, and the station has been asked to consider broadcasting local community board meetings. The station has also worked with the adult education organisation to run workshops in the creation of digital audio content; has broadcast content created by the adult literacy group and the local choral society; and is aiming to simplify a system whereby community groups can broadcast their own messages free of charge and with limited technical involvement by radio volunteers. The station is not overtly political and acts more as a facilitator of Habermas' notion of the communication community in which the primary dimension of community is communicative rather than political (Habermas, 1992).
This belief in the island's ability and desire for self-determination in the face of increasing control by
Auckland City are prevalent features of island life and go some way towards explaining the existence of
8 As opposed to a city based ward like the Mt Roskill Community board which is entirely populated by the conservative Citizens & Ratepayers. 73 a plurality of community groups and community based media through which political concerns are aired and discussed. With the almost global discrediting of professionalised, careerist politicians,
Waiheke appears as a locale testing the possibilities of political renewal based on a belief in the potential of the grassroots (including grassroots media); this, after all, is one of the core defining myths of the New Zealand society. The true political test will be whether these types of organisations can gather the strength and develop the organisational capacity to eventually feed back into a reformed politics at the centre. As such, Waiheke is a vibrant public sphere within its own right, and the continuous presence of a local radio broadcaster should come with little surprise.
Brief History of Radio on Waiheke
Radio on Waiheke is a persistent and rhizomatic creature. Serendipitous meetings of technical gurus and broadcasters, tinkerers and music aficionados are often present in the annals of community radio stations (which may often have started out as pirate radio) and on Waiheke at least, the death of one station meant that the equipment was put in storage, or sold to the next attempt. If it hibernated, it was only for a few winters, and it would spring up again before too long in one form or another - new ownership, same volunteers. And it would appear that governance structures, missions, political motivations, funding opportunities and sustainability are all secondary considerations that may, or may not, take place; but only after the technical desire to create a radio broadcast, to see if it can actually be done, is met.
A non-profit community radio station on Waiheke is a relatively new phenomenon. Although there have been numerous radio stations prior to the current broadcaster earlier incarnations were either hobbyist or were commercially motivated. There has been a local radio broadcaster in some shape or form broadcasting to the island (and sometimes beyond) almost continuously for nearly 20 years. The 74 frequencies have been varied and have ranged from full commercial frequencies acquired in the New
Zealand spectrum tender process, to the current community broadcaster transmitting using Low Power
FM and broadcasting under the rules of the GURL.
The first station began in 1989 when Peter Young, a leather worker, and Matthew Green who had a background in student radio started broadcasting from a space above the current library in the local arts complex in Oneroa. They were joined early on by Robert Mansell, who at the time, owned a large record collection which he provided as the music library for the station. In an interview Mansell described Young as an enthusiast, who was also “mad, mad, keen on all the theories of Tesla”
(Mansell, personal communication, 16th July, 2009). The station moved from Oneroa to a house purchased by Young specifically for its ideal location from which to broadcast. The station broadcast hard rock for most of its schedule and had a roster of about seven presenters. Mansell recalls the
“constant battle that he (Young) had with Maurice Williamson … who in those days was the broadcasting minister for the National party” (Mansell, personal communication, 16th July, 2009).
From my research into spectrum allocation during the period9 it would appear that the station was quite possibly broadcasting illegally and Mansell at one point refers to the station as “basically pirate”. The station broadcast to the island as well as reaching well across to Auckland and Mansell suggests that they had a large audience that reached down to Pukekohe and that the station was not well liked by commercial stations in Auckland who accused it of encroaching into their frequencies. This station attempted to run as a commercial entity but, beginning a theme that emerges across the story of most radio on the island, it failed to support itself through its commercial efforts. Mansell commented that
“Like everybody who's tried to make radio on this island everyone's tried to make a commercial one work and it doesn't. It simply does not work” (Mansell, personal communication, 16th July, 2009).
9 The first recorded auction of FM spectrum by the Ministry of Economic Development was in July 1990 and there is no listing of spectrum allocated to Peter Young or any mention of Waiheke Island. 75
This station lasted until around 1996, at which time the owner Young, Mansell suggests, was so heavily involved in the station that “he basically gave himself a heart attack” and that this was the end of it
(Mansell, personal communication, 16th July, 2009).
In 1999 Tony Storey a former Radio New Zealand employer who had worked on radio in Hastings but who was living on Great Barrier Island placed an ad in the Gulf News looking for people to help him begin broadcasting on Waiheke Island. Storey was broadcasting on Great Barrier Island on a commercial frequency and he wanted to create a small network of radio stations to cover the Hauraki
Gulf and the coastal areas of greater Auckland to compete with radio broadcasters in Auckland. His plan required establishing The Beach FM, as it was called, on Waiheke and Kawau Islands. His initial setup of The Beach on Waiheke was actually broadcast from a caravan near the Waiheke airfield, a high point on the island, and had the transmitter attached to the top of the hanger for maximum coverage. Mansell recalls that this station was mostly aimed at playing music and again the transmission reached into Auckland radios along the southern shorelines or even into housing located on the higher points of the North Shore. Storey's commercial attempt though again failed to raise enough money to support any employees or even Storey himself and he eventually sold the station to another Waiheke resident, Charlie Hraske, in 2002.
Hraske managed to garner a small income through advertising to keep The Beach running but still not enough to pay for any permanent staff or any of the presenters. Hraske loved the idea of radio on the island, had regular weekly meetings about station affairs, and had a regular salesperson on board. All the presenters were volunteers and the station started to include more current affairs and local news than previous stations. In August of 2004 Hraske and three station volunteers established the Waiheke
Radio Community Trust to “provide an accessible community based broadcasting service to help fulfil the cultural, educational, and social needs of the residents of Waiheke Island” (Waiheke Community 76
Radio Trust, 2004). This organization lay dormant until the idea was revisited in 2008 as the basis for establishing Waiheke Radio. Hraske eventually sold the station on again later in 2004 to long time
Auckland radio personality Barry Jenkins. At this time The Beach was broadcasting on a commercial frequency, 99.4 FM, that had been gained in the government tender process by Tony Storey.
Jenkins' tenancy at the helm of The Beach began a downward spiral for the station and ultimately resulted in the end of the Beach FM brand. There were few if any advertisers on board and the reputation of the station within the community had diminished with most considering the station as a place where people went to have a good time and indulge in their particular taste of music on-air and not necessarily to make good radio. Apart from the weekend Island Life show that had originated with
Mansell in the caravan days of The Beach, there was little variation in the content which consisted mostly of specialist music shows and the station had minimal community involvement besides irregular appearances at the yearly Christmas parade. As the station was being run as a commercial enterprise
Auckland City charged commercial fees for the rent of the studio in the local arts complex in Oneroa.
This cost eventually caught up with Jenkins and he attempted to relocate the station to his garage, a move that was unpopular with most presenters and which essentially signalled the end of The Beach.
The frequency was auctioned off by the Radio Spectrum Management Group in May of 2008 for the sum of $380,000, an amount well out of reach of Jenkins or any group based on Waiheke Island for that matter.
Waiheke Community Radio
The current radio broadcaster, Waiheke Radio, and the station for which I am also a Trustee, was established from the outset as a community radio station organized upon the principles of a not-for- profit radio trust that had been created, but left dormant for many years, by former Beach owner 77
Charlie Hraske and other interested island residents. The station was essentially begun by former presenters from The Beach, joined by a radio engineer with experience in the technical aspects of radio broadcasting in New Zealand. Waiheke Radio began broadcasting in October of 2008, almost one year after the initial meeting of volunteers. The station broadcasts from the same space vacated by The
Beach, in the local arts complex, but as a not-for-profit enterprise it is charged a considerably lower rent than the prior resident The Beach was charged due to the commercial nature of The Beach's spectrum license. Waiheke Radio broadcasts under the terms of the General User Radio License
(GURL) and utilizes two Low Power FM transmitters, broadcasting on two different frequencies (88.3 and 107.4 FM), to cover most of the western end of Waiheke Island.
The station has from its inception sort the support of the local Waiheke Community Board. This support has come in two forms. The first was in the form of political pressure applied by local community board members on Auckland City building lease administrators. This action was lobbied for by station volunteers at a community board meeting. The request exemplifies a typical disconnection between city based policy decisions and the realities of life of the island. City policy around the leasing of community spaces in the local arts complex was impacted by a complex strategy of redesigning the arts complex and relocating certain residents, like the library, to new buildings.
Waiheke Artworks is a multi-purposed arts and cultural hub developed by the Waiheke community in
1991 as an arts centre for Waiheke Island. Auckland City Council purchased the Artworks site and buildings in 2003, following an approach from the Waiheke Artworks Charitable Trust, to ensure the continuance of the arts and cultural activities on Waiheke (Auckland City Council, 2009). Plans to demolish at an indeterminate time in the future the space that Waiheke Radio was applying for a community lease to occupy, meant that Auckland City was unwilling to enter into their usual arrangement of providing a lease in perpetuity to Waiheke Radio. The station's willingness to enter into a month-to-month lease agreement was rejected by Auckland City lease officers, but questioned by 78
Waiheke community board members who felt it was irresponsible of Auckland City to prefer to leave such premises unoccupied for an unknown length of time, rather than lease on a month-to-month basis to a local community group. This pressure was ultimately successful in establishing a month-to-month lease for Waiheke Radio in the Artworks complex.
The Waiheke Community Board has also provided two small grants to the Waiheke Community Radio
Trust. The first was a matching grant to erect a second transmitter which completed radio coverage of most of the heavily populated regions of the island, and the second was to run a station initiative called the Waiheke Podcasting Project which was established in 2009 and aligned with the New Zealand government's Digital Strategy 2.0 (Ministry of Economic Development, 2008). The Digital Strategy
2.0 aimed at outlining a national strategy and funding regime to articulate and support the government’s role in digital development, and which supported the development of a digitally skilled population who could create digital content (Ministry of Economic Development, 2008). The Waiheke
Podcasting Project purchased equipment and ran a podcasting course at the local adult education centre on the island. It also established a website (http://waihekepodcasting.ning.com) to promote and support the creation of local podcasts and has rebroadcast many of the podcasts created through this project on the radio. The station continues to offer free monthly podcasting workshops for both station volunteers and islanders alike to improve their skills in creating and editing digital audio.
A community radio station in New Zealand that transmits under the terms of the GURL is essentially ineligible for financial support from government funding. Stuart Cunningham (as cited in Rennie, 2006) has noted that policy initiatives which promote cultural diversity as a policy objective have for the most part dismissed community broadcasting, and this is affirmed in the case of New Zealand. As has been stated earlier, government funding for broadcasting is the remit of NZ On Air, a funding body whose criterion for funding relies on an arbitrary and undefined 79 distinction between community and access programming. NZ On Air does not apparently have the desire to audit stations on their accessibility or their compliance to section 36C of the
Broadcasting Act 1989 that outlines the goals of New Zealand access stations and that constitutes the primary policy criterion for justifying funding. Without the possibility of government funding, many local stations broadcasting under the GURL have turned towards a reliance on an advertising supported model with an emphasis on music programming. Large amounts of music programming necessarily reduces the availability of on-air time for local content, and with the majority of music sourced from overseas the amount of local music is minimal at best. Within a commercial model the inclusion of local content is compromised to make way for a greater emphasis on music.
Reliance on music as the primary station content ultimately results in a station's identity being formed by the development of a distinguishable format which helps to construct a musical identity closely aligned to a demographics of taste of the target audience (Berland, 1990). The more restricted the format is the less likely the station is to also accommodate a range of styles or content that may deviate from this format; subsequently, less access, more commercial potential.
Funding and Sponsorship
Waiheke Radio is a not-for-profit organization funded in part by station volunteers and a range of fund- raising activities and grants. Participation in the station means access to the facilities, an allotment of air-time if desired, and a level of training supplied by members and trustees. The station is run as a member organisation with membership consisting of a monthly donation of $10, or $120 per year.
There were at time of this writing 24 paid up members of the station, most of whom are also presenters. As a non-profit enterprise the station does not accept advertising as a means to generate revenue and instead encourages sponsorship arrangements from local businesses to underwrite individual shows or other regularly aired content such as the weather, a what's on guide and the news.
Underwriting associates a sponsors' business or organisation (but can also be an individual) with a 80 show and costs $50 per month. The name of the sponsor is mentioned throughout the show and is also attached to show promotions that play all throughout the day, every day of the week. Sponsors are also listed prominently on the station web site. At the time of writing there were thirteen sponsored shows.
The station also organises two local musical events per year and a record fair to raise money and has also recently began selling t-shirts with its logo as a source of revenue.
There has been some debate between station members over the meaning of sponsorship versus advertising and the value in maintaining independence from the perceived influence of advertising over station content. An example of this debate emerged on the radio's online email group over the possibility of sponsorship by the transport company Fullers who had been approached about sponsoring a “what's on” guide for the island. Fullers owns and operates a monopoly transportation service between downtown Auckland and Waiheke Island. This crucial transportation route is unique within a large city in that it is not subsidized in any way by public money; and, as a wholly privately held company Fullers is not accountable to the residents of the island who make up its primary customers and whom have little choice but to utilise the service. At the time that this sponsorship request was solicited, another island community group the Campaign for Fair Ferry Fares (C4FFF) was delivering a petition to government via the Auckland Central MP Nikki Kaye, that had been signed by more than 1000 people. This petition called for greater accountability on the Waiheke to Auckland ferry route currently operated by Fullers Ferries. Nikki Kaye had agreed to present the petition to parliament on behalf of her constituents, and as part of the discussion on the Public Transport
Management Act. The petition called for a mechanism of accountability to be put in place so that fares could not be raised without consultation with the governing transport authority, and for regulation or fair competition on the Waiheke to Auckland route. The C4FFF spokesperson Dr Cathy Urquhart had commented on the C4FFF blog at the time the petition was going to government that: 81
Our long term future is at stake each time diesel goes up. Our economy is deeply affected by who can afford to commute and live here, and who can afford to visit. Should the future of our ferry link to the CBD be in the hands of an unaccountable monopoly? No! Let’s get some accountability into the equation, before our Waiheke community loses the diversity we treasure so much. (Urquhart, 2009)
The debate online between radio station volunteers began by a request made by myself that we postpone entering into a sponsorship deal with Fullers until some outcome from the petition delivered to the transport authority was returned or at least a comment was made by Fullers in response to this appeal to government by Waiheke islanders. The fact that over 1000 residents (most of them commuters) were concerned enough about the pricing activities of Fullers warranted, in my mind, sufficient grounds (if not almost a mandate) to question whether the radio station should be accepting sponsorship from a company who were currently being accused of taking advantage of a monopoly situation to, what some had considered, price gouge island commuters, and who were not an island based business.
The response to this ranged from:
… there are always going to be money hungry businesses surrounding our community, that's just life, and instead of trying to fight them through this avenue – bugger them, let's fight by taking their money. $900 is not to be sneezed at, it's a large sum and I don't think we're really in the financial position to not take their money. (Anonymous, personal communication, 2009) and:
It's not only about the money. Like it or not, Fullers is a high profile company in our community. To be sponsored by them would give us some credibility. When Fullers decide to put some money on us they somehow acknowledge our role in the community. Without this acknowledgement we remain marginal. Isn't it time we were noticed? I have still yet to hear our station played in a local shop. (Anonymous, personal communication, 2009) 82
to: I do think that this is important and that our decisions should not be made on the basis of its just money. We've seem the long term impact of these kinds of bottom-line cost- benefit decisions on our welfare being made for us by bean-counters in Auckland city recently, and I'd hope that we can model a far more open and transparent decision making process than they can muster.
We are in a unique position of being the only truly independent, community run, communications and media outlet on the island and in a mediascape that is increasingly consolidated and overrun by corporate and commercial interests - that is a special, rare, and powerful place to be in, and we will need to protect it .. because the better we get (and I hope we do continue to get better and better) the more interest we'll attract from people who maybe don't share our belief in an independent media but who have deep pockets and open chequebooks. (Anonymous, personal communication, 2009)
This debate seemed to exemplify a contradiction apparent in Waiheke Radio and possibly present in many community radio stations, that they often find themselves to be caught between the desire to fulfil the imperatives and moral obligations of open access and independence, while at the same time maintaining some semblance of audience-building to safeguard financial resources that may be partly dependent upon the station not being too much of a marginalised media source. Dunaway
(2006) refers to this contradiction as “access vs. audience building” (p. 73), and finds within this dichotomy a fulcrum from which to explore many of the tensions that arise within community media. In the case of the Fullers debate, access to the capacity of radio to endorse and promote business interests was pitted against a community ideal. The neoliberal notion of the market as the ultimate support for media processes was inherent in much of the debate and an appeal to a simple and apolitical economic pragmatism ultimately won the day and the sponsorship was accepted.
Waiheke Radio's Fullers debate was highly informative in terms of forcing the group to begin to 83 consider and question the wider implications of the formation of an independent media organisation in the community. It also touched on another aspect of Dunaway's “commercialism vs. community power” dichotomy, that of station governance and policy which could have provided a pathway to resolve the Fullers debate without the 15 pages of email discussion that subsequently ensued.
The development of Waiheke Radio began as a sort of personal mission amongst a number of presenters stranded without the means to broadcast after the demise of the previous radio station.
The overarching desire was to essentially get back on air as quickly as possible, and the infant organisation was quickly overtaken with establishing the material and technical aspects of broadcasting rather than formulating a philosophical grounding for a volunteer not-for-profit community station. Once broadcasting commenced it was apparent that a more solid mission for the organisation would be required to emerge and the Fullers debate was, in my eyes, part of that process. As a volunteer station without a solidly articulated or widely agreed upon mission statement the station becomes a sort of locus for the expression of participants desires, concerns, interests, and egos. There is currently in the station no substantial structure in place for decision making and the organisational ideology of the station, for better or worse, could be viewed as anarcho-syndicalist: those who contribute the most to the station's workload tended to determine the direction and the policy (Dunaway, 2002).
One presenter expressed the following sentiment in response to the Fullers debate:
I think that we do need to debate these things and realise that whatever decision is made, it's a conscious decision. Consolidation of media ownership is no joke. It's the reason that the real issues of the Supercity aren't reported in the NZ Herald, why a 100 person strong demonstration of Waiheke protesting waste issues is not reported on national television, and why every other Auckland community besides Waiheke has a community newspaper 84
that only shows real estate and prizewinning dogs. Whether we like it or not independent radio has a guardianship role in protecting genuine freedom of expression and citizens' journalism. (Anonymous, personal communication, 2009)
Members of the radio had, as could be expected, varying degrees of media literacy. Some members felt that the station should combat the hegemonic dominance that the tropes of mainstream media have over our own assumptions about what radio broadcasting could be (given the tabula rasa that we began with); and while these ideas were in some respects valuable in a pedagogical sort of way other volunteers quite vocally considered the station's primary goal to in fact reproduce familiar programming styles that would comfort listeners by providing what they were used to, and thereby avoiding the possible threat of alienating them. Complicity with mass media forms competed with an alternative mission of differentiation and education, a subtle desire to neutralize politics versus a desire to create a platform for a more radical expression than was available elsewhere. One former volunteer I interviewed put it like this:
… if you're not playing what they're used to due to their age groups then you're not going to get them, they're just not going to be there. And that's why I said the night of the meeting when I was there, that the playlist is extremely elitist. It is extremely elitist! You haven't got a hope in hell of dragging those people in while you're playing the style of playlist that you're playing at the moment. And to actually comment “we took that attitude 'cause we don't really care about the big boys” ... you just shot yourself in the foot because you want them to turn to you, you want them to come over and listen to you, you want them to be a part of your community radio station. (Anonymous, personal communication, 2009)
Access is often referred to in the literature as one of the principle and defining features of the community radio sector, and while there was a generally unspoken sense that this was also the case at
Waiheke Radio, it was also apparent that over time the station became a kind of cultural subgroup where power was exerted through a variety of channels like the selection of presenters, music programming, sponsorship arrangements, and the selection of trustees. Access to broadcasting time, for 85 example, was both a matter of whether the current trustees were interested enough in a person's initial expression of interest in broadcasting to respond to the request with any urgency or dedication, and were willing to either undertake or co-ordinate training. So while a philosophy of access may be acknowledged by most members, including myself, the reality of the amount of time it takes to train people in the somewhat complex workings of the station can mean that weaker expressions of interest in becoming a presenter are less likely to be followed up on with any vigour. Prior knowledge of the person in the community and sometimes a sense of a person's musical taste or political position are all latent considerations; although egalitarianism may be professed, in reality it is in fact mediated by many considerations. The station was credited by many that I interviewed though as being very open to many types of involvement, but as time slots became less available, and the complexity of running the station increased as membership grew, the selectiveness applied to potential participants increased as well. People who required less technical training, had prior experience and required less support were far more likely to become active members.
The most interesting chimera produced through the frequent conversations that took place on the station's online discussions or in person has been that of the “audience”. This mythical creature was most often conjured up in regards to issues around programming station content, and particularly around the automatic playlist that ran the station in the absence of a live presenter, but also around the scheduling of live shows. As a community station running on a minimal budget Waiheke Radio is not in any position to survey with any useful accuracy audience demographics or perform “market research”. Such exercises would constitute a significant investment for commercial counterparts and be a necessary part of defining a station's format and programming. In the context of Waiheke Radio, the audience became a sort of fictionalized consumer of radio text and sound; described as possessing wildly differing tastes and wants dependent on whose version of this audience one was listening to.
The audience and the community were conflated terms, and constantly over-determined. A commonly 86 quoted phrase amongst some volunteers used to describe one's dissatisfaction with a particular programming choice was that it was “the sound of hundreds of radios being switched off”, even though there was no valuable indicator of just how many people might be listening even during the most likely periods. The thought that people might change channels was viewed as a sort of failure of programming on the radio's part, which I always found somewhat ironic given the almost universal perception that the island residents were of significant diversity. Pleasing everyone, all of the time hardly seems possible given this precondition. The indeterminacy of the audience size or interest was often an issue that could also impact on a presenter's desire to volunteer time and energy into the production of a week-in-week out radio show. Lack of feedback was often a significant driver in demoralizing presenters to the point where some found it difficult to find the motivation to produce weekly shows.
Music programming on commercial radio “mediates and differentiates station and listener identities”
(Berland, 1990, p. 181); it strives to create cultures and communities of identity around particular musical formats and to sell these demographics (which are both the effect and cause of this specialization) to advertisers. The audience is, in effect, the real commodity - produced by radio and sold to advertisers. Commercial programming avoids challenging shifts in tempo or genre in favour of celebrating homogenization and maintaining allegiance through a continuity of aesthetic. The longitudinal impact of commercial radio on community radio stations may be that as amateur producers of radio content many volunteers desire to emulate the commercial or PSB presenters or programme formats that they listen to the most. An early promo created for Waiheke Radio by a volunteer actually stated, “Waiheke Radio: It's just like a proper radio station; its got songs, DJs, and everything!”
While presenters for the most part had free reign over what style of music or content they played the 87 station relies for many hours, particularly during the day, on an automated playlist run by a specialised piece of radio software. Programming this playlist on Waiheke Radio was often perceived to be problematic and challenging due to the varying conceptions by volunteers of what constituted the audience and its desires. There was a constant tension between the desire to differentiate the station's automated musical offerings from that which was on offer via commercial radio from Auckland stations, and the possibility that this might alienate listeners by introducing too alternative and unfamiliar a selection.
Local News and Citizen Journalism
So the radio website became a place where people could go looking for other stuff and maybe then they would see the front page and see the Woolworths fire. So suddenly its a place where you're going to for news which is actually not connected to radio input because he didn't interview someone, that wasn't a radio interview, that was stuff where he spoke to someone on the phone and then he summarized what had been done. And I think for me that was like a real transition point – it becomes bigger than a radio station. I guess that's something that's possible through the internet. (Shirin Brown, personal communication, 2009)
Radio, like community, may be defined partly by its boundaries. The legislation and management of spectrum allocates maximum wattages that may be used in the transmission of radio waves. Increases in power equate to greater distances that signals may be received from the source, effectively creating a boundary beyond which the transmission cannot be received. This limitation of radio technology clearly demarcates a spatial dimension to terrestrial broadcasting and radio has been referred to as a
“space-binding” medium (Berland, 1990, p. 186). Community radio is often limited by frequency allocation and broadcasting policy which may impose maximum wattages (such as the case with the
0.5 watt maximum for New Zealand LPFM operators), and the geographical boundaries of community 88 and audience that are spatially determined yet also define the efficacy of the station's local content.
Commercial providers are economically driven to overcome these boundaries and to maximize economic return by centralizing production and networking the broadcasting of content homogenized for distribution across many markets; yet, as Berland notes, commercial radio still maintains and elaborates a strategic representation of localism in its on-air practice. She states that, “Local relevance becomes the shorthand for radio's competition with television, its dependency on advertising revenue from local sources, and of course, it promotion of music sales at the local level” (p. 189); this is the paradox of commercial radio, that it is “omnisciently 'local' without arising from or contributing to the continuity of local cultures” (p. 186).
Community based media on the other hand can compete with commercial providers on the level of the local, by providing coverage and perspective on local issues as well providing access for local artists and musicians to receive airplay and promotion. It is through the voice, according to Berland, that
the community hears itself constituted, through that voice that radio assumes authorship of that community, woven into itself through its jokes, its personalities, and its advertisements, all of which are recurrently, but often misleadingly, represented as the map of 'local' life. (p. 191)
The local is represented almost any time a community based volunteer presents a show via any number of personal narratives, local references, or jokes. The most highly localized content comes from the reporting of news and events taking place on the island or that affect the island in some way. At an increasing rate Waiheke Radio's website has released significant and newsworthy island events considerably quicker than any of the other local news outlets or Auckland based news agencies. This has led to an increased awareness and interest in the role the station's website can play in terms of reporting local news, as well as its ability to involve the community in the conversation by providing the means to comment on news items. Radio station presenters are frequent visitors to the web site and 89 also belong to an online email group on which breaking news stories may also be discussed. Posts or stories often begin as web based content that may be followed up by presenters with recorded interviews, recordings of meetings, or just in passing conversation on specialist music shows.
Significant recorded content is often podcast on the site and rebroadcast on-air at a later date. The evolution of blogging and an increased familiarity amongst a growing number of people in contributing user generated content to websites has meant that the station has from the outset nurtured considerably more new media functionality than any previous station on the island. This situation has created added pressures on the station to keep on top of these movements technically and financially, but has resulted in a considerably different radio station to any of those that have preceded it.
Terry Flew (2008) points out that the technological developments that make forms of citizen journalism possible have contributed to a questioning of the uniqueness of journalism as a profession.
Journalism, it is argued, is ultimately “an occupational ideology shared amongst those who self- identify as journalists” (Deuze, 2005, cited by Flew, 2008, p. 152). While no presenters that I interviewed in the course of this research identified as journalists or had any formal journalistic background, there was increasing interest among station volunteers to develop the capacity to increase the amount of local news that could be produced.
The timeliness of reporting, its combination with multimedia (audio and video) when situated on the radio station's website, and the ability for listeners or readers to respond via comments on the web site, embed videos, pictures, etc., has enlarged the conception of the station as being solely tied to a traditional terrestrial broadcasting model. In effect I find it slightly unrepresentative to refer to the station as a community radio station, and in conversation prefer to talk of the enterprise as community media, a term which assists in alluding to the aspects of citizen journalism and podcasting in which the station is increasingly involved. Initially, any semblance of news or radio journalism was limited to a 90 weekend local current affairs show called Island Life which relied on the attendance of local people coming into the studio on a Saturday to talk about local issues and events. Vocal Local, a pre-recorded broadcast and podcast which has added another weekly dimension, and draws specific attention to a range of local political issues via interviews with knowledgeable residents and experts.
Island Life has been a show that has straddled two incarnations of radio on Waiheke beginning life on the former Beach FM. The show features a mix of presenter selected music as well as interviews with local residents about events and issues that are taking place on the island. The show also contains a few regular interviews. Steve the Butcher appears almost weekly to talk about subjects from seasonal meat dishes to barbecue maintenance and also acts as a bit of light relief from more serious issues to which the show is often dedicated, although his presence also acts as a signifier of the station's need to establish relationships with local business. The local librarian also makes regular appearance on the show, updating islanders on events taking place at the library and reviewing new releases or book features that the library is running. Interviews from Island Life are recorded and a recap of the show that consists of just the interviews is rebroadcast and podcast later in the week. In less than one year of broadcasting on Waiheke Radio the Island Life show has podcast over 80 interviews, mostly with island residents, but also including interviews with Auckland MP Nikki Kaye. The show varies in its presenters from week to week with a roster of four volunteers sharing responsibilities for presenting the show but often suggestions and connections for interviews are made by any station member via an online mailing group.
A syndicated national and global news report called the Independent Network News plays at the top of the hour for most of the days broadcast and is sourced from an inexpensive provider specializing in the
LPFM market within New Zealand. It consists of a review of the days headlines and includes a sports segment as well. The station has also added a global news report called Free Speech Radio News 91
(FSRN) produced as the daily newscast for Pacifica stations and its affiliates in the US, as well as for other non-Pacifica stations. This half hour program focuses on covering stories that are mostly left out of the U.S. media, often investigating social problems and abuses of power, and is described on the
FRSN web site as being a “a beacon in the global alternative media movement” (Free Speech Radio
News, 2009). The inclusion of Free Speech Radio News was based on a general collective sense amongst the station's volunteers of the island's left-wing political bias, and fulfilled some volunteers' desire to provide an alternative global news source to that of mainstream media.
There was some debate on whether the inclusion of these two news sources was a valuable addition to the station, or whether they detracted from the localness that some argued was a base-line requirement for station content. This debate reveals a possible tension in the goal of community media organisations which may be partly characterised by the desire to create an alternative bulwark against the globalisation of media by emphasizing the local beyond all else, or whether the role of community media should be to contextualize the local within global discourses thus demonstrating how community and local solutions to social, political, economical, and environmental problems, might provide answers to the pressing problems faced by communities worldwide. 92
Conclusion
During the period of this thesis my role and participation in Waiheke Radio has become increasingly influenced by an intellectual engagement with media studies and the literature of community media. To intellectualise community media was to exercise control over the ideas expressed in the literature, and internalise the numerous case studies that make up a substantial amount of this literature with the hope that an element of praxis might result. Steering the station towards a sustainable future informed by filtering our progress through the lens of this literature was an intended outcome. Besides focusing solely on media studies or community media, over the course of this study I was also drawn towards a review of the sociological, anthropological, and political analysis of community. This review seemed a natural and necessary step given that much of the literature of community media assumes that there is a shared understanding of the term itself.
As has been alluded to numerous times already, the term community is highly problematic. Its sociological relevance and meaning is dramatically fluid; dependent on historical circumstances, political desires, or semantic intent. As a signifier used to embody what Waiheke Radio was about, it seemed to me to function on the one hand as a sort of semantic attempt to predetermine the presence of an audience, an audience that shared some intrinsic character or quality that the station could appeal to in its broadcasts and in its mission. On the other hand it also embodied the idea of radio as an open and communal service, providing access to local residents to the means to produce and distribute radio messages – a political and democratic process in contradistinction to commercial or state run media.
Much like its lexical cousin 'communication', community is both an ideal and a symbolic reality. In its ideal the term refers to the notion of radio as a communication community, where reciprocal and just means are available to create and develop interpersonal spaces for the exchange and amplification of 93 messages, to act as Tetsuo Kogawa (2005) has referred to as a “weaving” medium. If community is used to signify the presence of a homogeneous audience interested in consuming local broadcast media, then it may be that new models that champion dialogic and conversational media forms will garner increased attention based on the value of communication communities, even if distributed globally.
The broadcast model is based on a type of Fordist mode of radio production whereby audio artefacts
(shows) are produced as efficiently as possible for as wide a circulation as possible in an attempt to sell an audience in an advertiser's marketplace. A certain capitalistic logic is inscribed in broadcasters' fascination with and reverence for the concept of a willing and passive audience. Deborah Tudor
(2009) has elaborated on audience metrics and measurement, noting how these corporate measurement exercises operate as a phenomenon of neoliberalism associating measurement with a rhetoric of democracy and individualism. The illusion of democratic consumer control over corporate media content whereby consumers “vote” by changing the channel is linked to an alignment of media programming and choice with democracy (Tudor, 2009). Similar notions of the audience still maintain much hold and sway over community media practitioners and a discourse around audience has been an ever-present feature of my experience with Waiheke Radio and in my conversations with listeners and volunteers.
I have referred to the audience as a chimera. From it's Ancient Greek roots the word refers to a monster of hybrid parts - like the monster of Lycea with its lion's head, goat's body, and serpent's tail.
The term is now more commonly used to refer to a kind of wild fantasy. Audience is the fantasy of radio. Much like the psychoanalytic other that is a reflection and projection of the ego, the audience is the counterpart in whom a radio broadcaster perceives his or her own likeness, the one who is on the other end of the microphone. And like Freud famously asked of women, the radio station felt 94 compelled to constantly ask “What does the audience want?” But like Freud's question, it is asked only when the subject will not occupy what is perceived or expected to be its rightful place. Commercial providers of radio go to great lengths to create the fantasy of a cooperative consumer (one in the right place at the right time) to sell to advertisers; the lion's mane is replaced with a mullet, the body sports a heavy metal t-shirt and consumes the energy-drink du jour, and the station concocts a capitalist fantasy of a consumer enamoured by a particular format, or genre, and whose allegiance is maintained by personalities and programming wizardry.
For community radio the fantasy of the audience may be no less fictitious but it is rather more benign given that success is rarely completely dependent upon its ability to create, maintain, measure and report the devotion of this subject. At this particular juncture in the history of broadcast media, and with the distinct opportunity for innovation in the community media space, aged notions of audience should essentially be displaced from their pivotal position in the media equation. Such a displacement might free community radio stations from the constraints of broadcast radio by providing a space to cultivate innovative responses to the problem of audience in a mediascape where the term “users” might provide a more accurate term describing the relationships between all actors. Community radio should dispel any perception of a linear distinction between consumers and producers because it is doubtful whether the audience is any longer such an identifiable entity. Yochai Benkler (2000) has characterised the decentralisation and democratisation attainable through new technologies as
“enabling small groups of constituents and individuals to become users – participants in the production of their information environment” (p. 562) and has suggested that this shift needs to also affect communications policy to ensure the securing of better information services for creative use. Such policy interventions may be more important than assuring the longevity of broadcast networks or ownership rights. Recognising that participation and collaboration are becoming fundamental elements of the mediascape should encourage community media practitioners to both further develop these 95 aspects of their operations, as well as lobby policy makers to review the criterion for how spectrum and funding is allocated and to view participation and collaboration as drivers of innovation and change that are underpinning new media markets and global economies.
There was an almost constant desire from people that I spoke to within the community to provide a figure for the number of people listening to the station; as if as researcher and trustee of the station I could provide a kind of statistical assurance that the enterprise was successful and worthy of an investment of their time and effort. For many volunteers a yardstick that was frequently brought up was whether the station was being played by any of the local shops. The presence of Waiheke Radio in a public space was perceived as being of significant worth and value; as an infant station with substantial amounts of first time presenters it could act as a kind of Mirror Stage signalling the station's development into the truly symbolic milieu of local community. My own response to questions of how many people listened to Waiheke Radio was always a reply of something along the lines of “it is not important how many people are listening, it is important how many people are participating.”
Participation in community radio, as has been argued by Rennie (2006) and Rodriguez (2001), and which my own experience would confirm, transforms individuals to some extent; success is a catalogue of these transformations which are noticeable and supported by the group.
In order to overcome some of the problems of trying to map the tropes of media success onto our community station I began to promote the notion of thinking of the organisation less as a community
“radio” and more of a community “development platform”. This strategy of reconfiguration could be liberating because it could free us to continue with many of the ideal goals that are the basis for much community media while not being constrained by the tropes of radio, and in particular the radio that most knew best, commercial or national radio formats. For example, the station had always considered part of its mission to participate in an educational capacity within the community, an objective spelled 96 out in the original Trust document. Traditionally this role is performed by the national public service broadcaster which occupies a paternalistic position whereby the station programmes content of an elevated status for the educational benefit of listeners and citizens. Waiheke Radio though, as a community development platform, has a much more hands-on approach. Our collaboration with the local adult education provider in running a series of podcasting workshops not only assisted locals in developing an increased understanding of the use of freely available digital technologies to create audio content, it also recruited presenters and crafted content that could be broadcast on the station itself as well as being made available online. This workshop was extended into a monthly open night at the station where assistance was given to members of the public, free of charge, in the creation of podcasts.
The Waiheke Podcasting Project now has 17 members and reflects a desire on the part of some volunteers of Waiheke Radio to act as archivists of heritage audio content sourced from island residents and released into the commons. Heritage strategies like this have more recently been adopted as a valuable feature of PSBs but feature very little in commercial environments. This strategy informs the educational mission of Waiheke Radio in two ways; it helps educate islanders in the creation of audio artefacts which in turn add to the availability of such heritage content for use by future generations of residents, students, or scholars of Waiheke.
The process of becoming a presenter was also considered to be an important educational pathway and a means towards greater “community power” over the local mediascape. The complexity and mystery of broadcasting, which in the case of commercial and public service broadcasting is hidden away inside secure buildings, was demystified by exposing the technologies and training as many people in the community as was possible given the limited resources of volunteers. The development of presenters from a diverse range of ages and backgrounds was seen as a measurement of success and the training of new volunteers was considered to be everyone's obligation. Participants were trained to present, engineer, and promote their own shows, as well as create podcasts and blog posts on the organisations 97 website. The station aimed to promote as much transparency in the process of creating radio as it could and it was important to us that the physical location was easily accessible to island residents being housed in a local community arts complex and the on-air presenters viewable from outside the premises.
Radio though is dead. But much in the same way that early photographers claimed that painting was dead, the proclaimed death of radio only fuels its rebirth. As a strictly terrestrial broadcast medium radio is both a relic of the past and a solid building block for the future. Merril has referred to the rise of digital media and the transformation of the old media into digital form as heralding a post-broadcast era (Merril, 2009). Stations like WFMU-FM, a listener-supported, non-commercial radio station broadcasting in Jersey City in the USA have for some time now counted more listeners to their online streaming and podcast shows than their terrestrial broadcasts and provide an online audio archive of every show they produce. The traditional temporal and scheduled nature of radio listening is forgone in this environment with content available on-demand at any time and via numerous platforms. WFMU's programming is controlled by individual presenters and is not beholden to any type of station-wide playlist or rotation schedule. The research and development wing of the BBC called radiolabs has begun developing design prototypes of innovative and experimental radio hardware dubbed Olinda.
Olinda is a prototype radio that includes features most often associated with social networking websites, like having the ability to notify the user of the online listening habits of friends via an wireless internet connection, and allowing users to listen into the same station as well as supporting conversations between users. The Olinda web site states that it hopes an Olinda style radio might
“provide a sense of community around your radio, harking back to the times when families and friends used to gather around the radio to listen” (BBC, 2008).
David Ronfeldt (2005) argues that there have been four forms of social evolution: tribal, institutional, 98 market, and network; and that each form represents a set of beliefs, structures, and dynamics around which society is organised. He hypothesises that, “To do well in the twenty-first century, an advanced, democratic, information-age society must incorporate all four forms and make them function well together, despite their inherent contradictions” (p. 91). Commercial radio is mostly a result of the institutional and market forms of society. Community radio in its attempts to build community identity and belonging has participated in the tribal and the institutional, while for the most part skipping the market, but it now may be in a good position to take advantage of the networked form of society which
Ronfeldt suggests strengthens the realm of civil society more than any other, the very realm where community radio has carved its niche.
The existence of community radio is now entering into its fifth decade and the distribution and consumption of audio content is now considerably different than it was in the 1970s and for most of the history of radio. The internet and the rise of a networked information economies have emerged as principle components of an evolving platform upon which to imagine how the production, distribution, and consumption of audio content will occur and the function that radio might continue to serve as a shared locus and organisational metaphor for the circulation of culture and information amongst individuals. Waiheke Radio's convergence of traditional broadcasting with new media forms is increasingly becoming a significant aspect of the development of locally generated content. The station has a well trafficked web site10 that includes the capacity for station presenters and members to blog show playlists, report on island events, as well as upload podcasts. The station can also be listened to via a live stream and all live programs are available in a weekly on-demand service. The site is integrated with the microblogging service Twitter, and allows anonymous comments on almost all content on the site. There is a means through a third-party site called Soundcloud.com for artists or individuals to deliver sound files or songs to the station through the internet and the station also maintains email addresses for presenters if they so desire. The station is currently considering how to
10 http://www.waihekeradio.org.nz 99 utilise the social and collaborative tools of Web 2.0 to increase access to community members to create and interact with content without the need to utilise the stations facilities, which can be somewhat more technically advanced than simpler desktop based means of production, and which require training and scheduling mechanisms. There has been discussion around redesigning the stations website towards offering more of an online platform for citizen journalism.
In some ways the outcomes of community media over the past 40 years have been fully embraced now by the participatory culture of the internet and new media. The attributes that characterise mass media, namely the use of large-scale production and distribution techniques, the separation of producers/distributors from the receivers of content and the one-way flow of such communications, the impersonal and commodity nature of this content, and the tendency towards standardisation intended to maximise audiences and market shares, are for the most part not features prevalent in the descriptions and practice of community media. Traditional media formats based around the cornerstones of access and audience participation have also provided opportunities for media literacy, experimentation, and innovation in production. Innovation in the community sector has often been overlooked as has the reality that the community sector may often be an important training ground for the development of future professional media practitioners who may get their first opportunities behind a microphone or production desk at local community stations. Chris Atton (2002) describes such media as being characterised by: de-professionalisation, de-institutionalisation, and de-capitalisation. In stark contrast to mass media, community media can define itself on the mobility and freedoms offered by such descriptions. The potential to broadcast news and ideas not contingent on the acquisition of professional skills, the ability to quickly distribute information into the public realm without the strict gate-keeping and decision making of large scale enterprises, and the desire to distribute media content regardless of market viability for such content are features that apply equally to the local community radio station as to the advent of blogs, wikis, and other participatory forms of media that are prevalent 100 on the internet and new media. Community Radio as a medium for the circulation of localised messages should “abandon the idea of the public sphere as primarily constructed of finished statements uttered by a small set of actors” (Benkler, 2006, p. 180) and aim to advance the social practice of participation in community communication. To do this the privileged position of the broadcast model, of the emphasis on live on-air broadcast, and the notion of a passive audience must be abandoned.
In this sense community radio should be proud of its achievements over the last 40 or so years. At the fringe of broadcast radio, championing openness and transparency, participation and access, community radio has had the significance of its core philosophical features endorsed and renewed by the new media. The most significant contributions and movements of the new media: open source software development, participatory authoring and user generated content, and an increasing plurality of public spheres based around notions of online community, are based upon the same ideals of simple access to the tools and ease of entry to participation, combined with a fundamental desire to communicate ideas openly and freely. The challenge for community radio is a similar challenge to that which is being encountered by its commercial counterparts: how to evolve in a radically shifting mediascape where attentions are being directed towards new platforms, new modes of creation and delivery, and an economic landscape that appears to be reconfiguring itself. By continuing to locate community-based media production in a civil society context, with the goal of improving the communicative and technical capacity of all those involved rather than attempting to solely craft a product for consumption by an audience, then stations can rely on far more tangible and easily observable metrics by which to measure their success. Much like Rennie's assertion that participation in community radio is about the self-reflection and transformation of individuals involved it is my sense that community radio organisations need to be constantly reflecting on and updating their own missions and practices because of the rapidly changing mediascape in which broadcasters and audiences find themselves inhabiting. There are arguably distinct possibilities inherent in the flexibility 101 of such small scale enterprises not solely reliant on markets and the mindsets associated with them to innovate in light of such rapid change.
For Waiheke Radio such possibilities are very much at the forefront of its originator's minds. The station as I have demonstrated is, even at this early stage in its history, experienced at lobbying for policy changes that both directly impact the station and that affect the island community in which it is located. With spectrum allocation for community media still at the whim of political agendas, and funding opportunities decreasing, the ability to participate in the conversation at this level remains crucial. Waiheke Radio's use of technology is constantly developing and currently far surpasses that of any previous radio station on the island. And, perhaps most importantly, the internal conversations that occur are sophisticated and frequent. But, as anecdotal reports of increasing listenership grow and the prevalence of the station's brand in other local media outlets, on bumper stickers and t-shirts, increases, so does the attention that the station draws from a range of motivated interest groups. This attention may ultimately create tensions between the principles that some of us hold for independent community radio, and the views of volunteers and other interest groups who may essentially participate as a sort of personal hobby, or to further business goals.
My personal goal for the station is to continue to push the medium towards providing increased routes for participation by island residents, and to try to realise Bertolt Brecht's 1932 vision, of the two sided radio:
… radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio 102 should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction. (Brecht, 1932) 103
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