Promoción y venta del servicio de transporte por carretera

Although access radio provides several advantages to the minority groups, it has its disadvantages. For example, in access radio, even a single individual who has the money to buy airtime can broadcast their own views as a programme. The programme maker is thus simply a community member who has a personal interest to broadcast their voice and views to the community. There is no way of knowing whether the programme maker is presenting a programme that has community interest. Community interest for a programme can be identified through the feedback the radio gets from the community. I believe that if the radio sells airtime to broadcast programmes made by individuals to fulfill their own personal satisfaction, then the radio becomes a tool of the individual who bought airtime instead of being a medium that is there to serve the community.

Brian Pauling however, says, access radio is more importantly, more to do with what is happening in front of the microphone rather than what is being broadcast on air (Jeffrey,

2003). I believe that access radio being a community radio, the community interest should be more important than the person seated behind the microphone. Being a radio of the community, the radio should have a mechanism in place to whether monitor the programme makers actually reach their community with a programme that has community interest. If this is not monitored, the radio is no better than a tool of the programme makers instead of being a medium of the community for the community.

In her study on women’s participation in community radio, Jeffrey (2002) found that a group of women broadcasters who belonged to an ethnic group was heavily criticised by their ethnic group for broadcasting content that was not liked by them. According to Jeffrey, their actions showed that the minority communities had an expectation that the members of their communities doing programmes were in fact representing their communities even though the presenters had not claimed such a role. The resulting conflict between the ethnic community and the programme producers over what should be broadcast and who should be broadcasting for the community often leads to the radio intervening and taking the “offending” programmes off-air (Jeffrey, 2002:51). This shows that the community does not always embrace or is ready to accept the volunteers or with those seated “behind the mic” “representing” their community. Hence, there is a need for the radio management to take into account the interests of the whole community too.

Hence, in order to avoid the ‘empowered’ programme makers from taking control of the station, the radio management needs to monitor the diversity of subjects being discussed; monitor the level of community interest the programmes attract by checking the level of community feedback as well as the level of participatory communication the programme makers have built in to their programmes. During my interview with the community radio manager at NZOA, I discovered that NZOA too, in providing funding for access radio, now requires the stations to show how the radio interacts with the different communities they serve. NZOA is particularly interested in knowing the different types of active roles that radios are playing in order to keep their listening community engaged in the radio programmes (K. Collins, personal communication, November 24, 2009).

As NZOA funding now requires showing the radio’s interactivity, especially its active role played in keeping the community engaged, some access radio stations are already taking a similar approach. According to Nicki Reece, the manager of Christchurch-based community access radio, Plains FM, the station has plans to improve and expand the interactivity with the different communities the radio serves (N. Reece, personal communication, 17 October, 2009).

The radio management also needs to play a more proactive role with the programme makers in addition to simply managing the station administration. For example, the radio management needs to focus on bringing in diverse communities to do programmes. In this regard, instead of staying as a station that individual programme makers come on their own to do radio, the radio management should go out to the community to find un-represented communities within its coverage area and encourage them to come forward to take part in the radio. This is because if volunteers from a particular ethnic group take a lot of airtime, then there will not only be an over-representation of that community but also a tendency for other small communities to be discouraged from coming forward. This could be damaging for a station that identifies as a community access radio. It is not responsible community radio if the radio management sells only airtime and does not proactively work with the volunteers or programme makers to ensure that the volunteers bring community-interest programme content and attract community participation too.

Radio commentators also point out that access radio is required to fund part of its operational costs. Some of this cost is collected from programme makers who are often members of minority groups. Thus, access radio users, more specifically, the programme makers are faced with multiple payments in order to “access their public broadcasting need”. That is, paying through taxation, paying user-charges for the radio and paying to gather resources for programme making. As Brian Pauling points out, “purists” are concerned with these multiple payments because on the other side of the same coin, ‘the white, male, educated, middle- class” New Zealanders can “access all their cultural and information needs” from the already established public media such as Radio New Zealand National and Concert FM which are

fully funded by the tax payer (Pauling and Ayton, 2009).

Access stations are criticised on grounds that a listener would not be able to listen to a harmonised schedule of programme. Instead, they would be listening to a host of different programmes that keep on changing communities and topic as well as language of presentation. As access radio simply sells airtime to interested programme makers who get only unsold airtime slots in the schedule to fit in their programmes, it creates an unrelated programme schedule that does not help listeners from the same community. For example, listeners from the same community might have an unrelated language programme sandwiching between two of their programmes. The break up of their two programmes does not give them a convenient listening time.

Christchurch Plains FM manager acknowledged that programme fragmentation was an issue common to all the access radios. The current style of placing the programmes on the programme schedule brings “little or no relationship vertically or horizontally making it less attractive to listeners”. According to the Plains FM manager, her radio has already circulated a new programming model for discussion among the programme makers. The objective is to revamp the current programme schedule by placing similar programmes in the same zone of the schedule. In other words, by exercising “stripping” that is, placing similar programmes in the same strip across the week on the programme schedule, the radio hopes to create a revamped programme schedule in which programmes in each strip have strong associations with each other and hence would appeal to audiences with similar tastes. By doing this, the radio aims to capture the same listening audience to the same programme zone across the week. The manager, however, notes that some of the programme makers have had the same slot for a very long time and hence a change to their programme times can only be made after the radio had received feedback from all the programme makers (N. Reece, personal communication, October 17, 2009).

However, as programme makers are the people who buy airtime on the radio and being a major source of income to the radio which is required to part-fund some of its costs, no

matter how ambitious a plan the radio has proposed, the ultimate success depends on its full endorsement by the programme makers rather than a unilateral decision by the radio management.