"Radio Cultures examines the manifold ways in which radio has influenced the nation's social and cultural environment since its inception nearly a century ago. Written by leading scholars in the field, chapters address a wide range of topics, including how this powerful medium has impacted and affected non-mainstream segments of the population throughout its history and how these repressed and neglected groups have employed radio to counter and overcome discrimination and bias. The use of the audio medium for political, economic, and religious purposes is comprehensively probed and analyzed in this insightful and innovative volume."--Back cover.

In talking about contemporary media, we often use a language of newness, applying words like “revolution” and “disruption.” Yet, the emergence of new sound media technologies and content—from the earliest internet radio broadcasts to the development of algorithmic music services and the origins of podcasting—are not a disruption, but a continuation of the century-long history of radio. Today’s most innovative media makers are reintroducing forms of audio storytelling from radio’s past. Sound Streams is the first book to historicize radio-internet convergence from the early ’90s through the present, demonstrating how so-called new media represent an evolutionary shift that is nevertheless historically consistent with earlier modes of broadcasting. Various iterations of internet radio, from streaming audio to podcasting, are all new radio practices rather than each being a separate new medium: radio is any sound media that is purposefully crafted to be heard by an audience. Rather than a particular set of technologies or textual conventions, web-based broadcasting combines unique practices and features and ideas from radio history. In addition, there exists a distinctive conversationality and reflexivity to radio talk, including a propensity for personal stories and emotional disclosure, that suits networked digital media culture. What media convergence has done is extend and intensify radio’s logics of connectivity and sharing; sonically mediated personal expression intended for public consideration abounds in online media networks. Sound Streams marks a significant contribution to digital media and internet studies. Its mix of cultural history, industry research, and genre and formal analysis, especially of contemporary audio storytelling, will appeal to media scholars, radio and podcast practitioners, audio journalism students, and dedicated podcast fans.

Public radio stands as a valued national institution, one whose fans and listeners actively support it with their time and their money. In this new history of this important aspect of American culture, author Jack W. Mitchell looks at the dreams that inspired those who created it, the all-too- human realities that grew out of those dreams, and the criticism they incurred from both sides of the political spectrum. As National Public Radio's very first employee, and the first producer of its legendary All Things Considered, Mitchell tells the story of public radio from the point of view of an insider, a participant, and a thoughtful observer. He traces its origins in the progressive movement of the 20th century, and analyzes the people, institutions, ideas, political forces, and economic realities that helped it evolve into what we know as public radio today. NPR and its local affiliates have earned their reputation for thoughtful commentary and excellent journalism, and their work is especially notable in light of the unique struggles they have faced over the decades. This comprehensive overview of their mission will fascinate listeners whose enjoyment and support of public radio has made it possible, and made it great.

"The 1920s was a crucial decade for the recording industry. Large record companies existed, but across the nation there were dozens of small, independently owned and regionally-oriented labels like Black Swan, Champion, Paramount, Gennett, Starr, Okeh, and others which catered to specific genres and audiences that were at the time outside the commercial mainstream: jazz, "race records," "old time" or "hillbilly" music, local religious music traditions, and exotica from abroad that the metropolitan record companies did not-yet-see as profitable. Kyle Barnett's book seeks to tell the story of the first big wave of consolidation of the record industry, when larger labels began to take an interest in what the smaller labels were doing, the growing pains that resulted in mainstream companies having to adapt their culture to promoting artists from the margins-poor or working class "hillbillies," African-Americans-and how the coming of the Depression threatened to turn back the clock of the industry's growth. In hindsight, the evolution of the recording industry toward consolidation looks inevitable, but there is no good, synthetic history of this crucial period that gives due credit to the development of the industry, both commercially and culturally"--

This collection interrogates and stimulates deep, cross-disciplinary engagement with the various understandings and interplays of ‘radio modernisms’ from the early decades of the twentieth century through to the 1950s. Academics from a range of different disciplines explore their common interests in the richness and heterogeneity of BBC Radio’s imaginative programming – in terms of sound; as cultural events from specific moments in time; as team creations; as something experienced live in the domestic context; and as cultural works that, in many cases, attracted a certain canonical pedigree. Radio modernisms are, as these chapters demonstrate, a combination of the particular, the contingent, and the contextual. More than a decade after the publication of the first scholarly works to yoke together ‘modernism’ and ‘radio’, this collection emphasises the plurality of ‘modernisms’ as a defining aspect of contemporary BBC historiography. The authors bring multiple lenses to bear – including race, gender, and transnationalism – in order to (re)locate twentieth-century radio programming in broad, expansive contexts. They also underline the dynamic entanglements of radio – and radiogenic feature programmes, in particular – with other kinds of media and cultural forms and formats, reframing radio as a site of and vehicle for remediation and intermediality. In examining the myriad ways in which radio gave shape to new modernities, and both evolved and constituted new forms of modernism, this collection offers fresh perspectives on the interconnected significance of ‘radio modernisms’ within the socio-cultural, literary, and political landscapes of twentieth-century Britain. This book was originally published as a special issue of Media History.

Radio is 'Africa's medium', with an ability to transcend barriers to access, facilitate political debate and shape identities.

Since the rise of television, much radio consists of 'capsule' news and music formats which are heard as background to other activities. However the medium offers a great deal more. This collection of essays shows how in North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and the South Pacific, radio continues to provide distinctive forms of content for the individual listener, yet also enables ethnic and cultural groups to maintain their sense of identity. Ranging from radio among the primordial communities to digital broadcasting and the internet, these essays suggest that the benefits and gratifications which radio confers remain unique and irreplaceable in this multi-media age.

Explores the diverse ways in which community radio negotiates equitable representation of its target communities in the context of material, technological and policy shifts in the community broadcasting sector

Examines the culture of Yiddish radio in the United States during radio's golden age.

Orson Welles’s greatest breakthrough into the popular consciousness occurred in 1938, three years before Citizen Kane, when his War of the Worlds radio broadcast succeeded so spectacularly that terrified listeners believed they were hearing a genuine report of an alien invasion—a landmark in the history of radio’s powerful relationship with its audience. In Radio’s America, Bruce Lenthall documents the enormous impact radio had on the lives of Depression-era Americans and charts the formative years of our modern mass culture. Many Americans became alienated from their government and economy in the twentieth century, and Lenthall explains that radio’s appeal came from its capability to personalize an increasingly impersonal public arena. His depictions of such figures as proto-Fascist Charles Coughlin and medical quack John Brinkley offer penetrating insight into radio’s use as a persuasive tool, and Lenthall’s book is unique in its exploration of how ordinary Americans made radio a part of their lives. Television inherited radio’s cultural role, and as the voting tallies for American Idol attest, broadcasting continues to occupy a powerfully intimate place in American life. Radio’s America reveals how the connections between power and mass media began.