Issue 8 – April 2016
3CMedia
Journal of Community, Citizen's and Third Sector Media and Communication
ISSN 1832-6161
Issue 8 (April) 2016
Funding Community Media: Introduction
Christina Spurgeon
Community broadcasting is animated by collective and individual commitments to social action, self-representation and community formation. It is usually pursued for informational or cultural purposes as a non- or pre-commercial activity, and is distinguishable from commercial and public service media by the reliance on voluntary labour that often sustains it. As community broadcasting has matured it is also characterised as a part of a larger co-creative media system that serves to unlock the creative potential on a population-wide basis (Woodrow et. al. 2015). It has created opportunities for new social enterprises that increase media diversity and expand information and entertainment choices, and is deserving of recognition within contemporary policy discourses of and about ‘innovation’. Yet, as Ben Eltham (2009, 234) notes in the Australian context:
“While diversity does not equal innovation, there is no doubt that community broadcasting is the poor cousin of media policy in Australia, despite the fact that the sector represents a key market for the early commercialisation of cultural products like contemporary music, foreign language services and indigenous education…”
The question of funding remains fraught for a field of activity that falls between the legacy welfarist discourses of arts and public service media, and the new wealth mines of the digital economy. Oscillating between twin endeavours of legitimacy and sustainability, community media broadcasters have been driven to develop and grow revenue streams to cover operational costs, production costs, program supplies and service development. Memberships, subscriptions, fundraisers, sponsorship, advertising, commissioned production, sale of services, and government support all figure in the community media funding mix. Once itself a disruptive influence that fanned the development of niche-targeted media, community broadcasting now grapples with the disruptive impact of rapidly evolving digital technologies and Internet-based economies.
So what are the challenges, opportunities, risks and threats of funding for community broadcasting activity? How are these challenges understood and tackled from academic and practitioner perspectives? How does research help to understand these problems? What approaches, methods, and frames of analysis are helpful to understanding the funding requirements of community media? How does funding impact on the criticality of community media organisations, outputs, processes and publics? What can be learnt from past and present experiences? Contributors to this issue of 3CMedia consider local responses to these questions through a variety of critical media studies perspectives. The cumulative result is an international snapshot of the state of community broadcasting across three continents.
Salvatore Scifo traces the rapid expansion of community radio in Britain associated with the 1997-2004 period of ‘New Labour’. He also locates the more recent contraction in the sector in relation to a range of influences including policy shifts away from public investment in community capacity building and the financial footings of the ‘British model’ of community radio in advertising and government funding. Steve Johnson’s article looks at the fortunes of Welsh community radio within this larger national context and finds two factors are crucial to enabling stations to meet legislated objectives of social gain and economic stability. They are the stimulation and maintenance of conversations with and about communities (including within and through the community of community stations), and a capacity to generate income from advertising. Janey Gordon rounds out British perspectives on community broadcasting with an international survey of the seven most common funding sources for community broadcasting, and makes a case for the importance of diverse revenue sources to sustainability.
Attention then turns to Brian Semujju’s report on Ugandan research into the use of Community Audio Towers to provide local radio services in rural and outer urban areas. This work contributes to a larger discussion about the importance of local dialogue, as well as pre-commercial, fee-for-service revenues, in addition to aid, to the sustainability of development for communication initiatives. Michael Yao Wodui Serwornoo then takes us to Ghana where college radio has been established for some time, but control of which has been wrested away from student and academic control as a result of a series of policy shifts. His account of developments at the University of Cape Coast is situated in a broader historical sweep of university involvement in educational and community radio.
The final article in this issue brings us to Australia. Simon Order looks at the links between funding and non-economic, community value in his review of legacy literature and research.
I hope readers find the insights and descriptions contained in this issue of 3CMedia informative and helpful to deepening their own interest in questions about the sustainability and ongoing development of community broadcasting.
References
Eltham, B. (2009). Australian cultural and innovation policies: Never the twain shall meet? Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice, 11: 230-239.
Woodrow, Nina, Spurgeon, Christina, Rennie, Ellie, Klaebe, Helen, Heck, Elizabeth, Haseman, Brad, et al. (2015) Community uses of co-creative media digital storytelling and co-creative Media: The role of community arts and media in propagating and coordinating population-wide creative practice. Cultural Science, 8(2), pp. 150-243. Available at: http://cultural-science.org/journal/index.php/culturalscience/issue/view/17 (accessed 21 April 2016).