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CHAPTER 7 Measuring Community Radio’s Impact Lessons in Collaboration graciela león orozco Community radio stations are mission driven. For WMMT-FM, a community radio station in Whitesburg, Kentucky, the mission is to document, disseminate, and revitalize the lasting traditions and contemporary creativity of Appalachia by providing local people with the means to tell their own stories, and to hear each other’s stories—stories the commercial industries do not tell. WMMT challenges common Appalachian stereotypes of ignorance and backwardness with the real voices of Appalachian people, whose culturally rich history remains alive in songs, stories, and other arts. WMMT accomplishes this through programming traditional Appalachian music and its descendant, bluegrass, other forms of music, as well as call-in talk shows, candidate forums, and local news. Although the racial demographics of WMMT listeners mirror the dominant U.S. demographics in relation to White northern European ancestry, they share other traits more in common with ethnic minority communities, such as persistent poverty, unemployment, lower levels of education than those in the larger society, and feelings of social marginalization. At Radio Bilingüe, a bilingual (Spanish/English) Latino community radio network headquartered in Fresno, California, the mission is to reach poor and working-class individuals, particularly farm workers and Latinos, with culturally relevant programming. The station was founded in 1976 by young Mexican-Americans from the agricultural fields and urban barrios of the San Joaquin Valley who believed in the power of community radio for reaching underserved populations. Radio Bilingüe produces and airs a daily Spanish-language national newscast, Noticiero Latino; a weekend edition, 139 140 g r ac i e la l e ón o r oz c o Edición Semanaria; and a daily national news analysis and commentary program , Lı́nea Abierta. Radio Bilingüe fosters Latino civic participation through its coverage of Democratic and Republican Conventions, presidential elections, and Latino voting patterns (Occena 2005, 5). In contrast to the more educated and affluent listeners of National Public Radio (NPR), 31 percent of Radio Bilingüe listeners have a high school education or less and 32 percent earn $25,000 or less per year (Cohen 2006); and 60 percent of Radio Bilingüe listeners identify Spanish as their primary language (Occena 2005). In striving to serve their audiences, the challenge for Radio Bilingüe and WMMT lies in knowing more accurately how many people are listening, who they are, what in particular they are listening to, what makes them tune in, and what makes them tune out. This is vital information for any media outlet to have. It is especially vital for noncommercial mission-driven public service radio stations seeking to give voice and visibility to marginalized communities whose popular culture and cultural diversity might otherwise be lost. Like most rural community radio stations, Radio Bilingüe and WMMT struggle to know more about their audiences and the impact of their programming. Reliable data would help their decision-making processes with respect to programming, scheduling, and outreach. Radio managers and producers seek to know whether specific programs make a difference in the lives of listeners and whether there is a demand for programs that are currently not being broadcast. With better data, community radio can make informed decisions about keeping or adapting its present programming in ways that will benefit its audiences. In addition, audience research matters when it comes to securing funding from foundations and government agencies. Public radio generally has two ways to measure impact. First, stations use Arbitron ratings to measure audience size and demographics. The ratings are further analyzed to provide critical information about the value of individual programs and types of programming. However, a limitation of ratings is that they measure exposure to a program, but not necessarily consumer satisfaction with that program (Stavitsky 2000). The Arbitron methodology, considered archaic by many (Bachman 2007), still uses the diary method to ascertain listening in rural areas; that is, a number of diaries are sent to a small sample of adults—with telephones. Recipients are asked to keep track of their radio listening for a week, enter the information in the diary, and return it to Arbitron. Arbitron distributes two million diaries across the United States, a very small sample considering the 240 million adults in this country, and obtains a return rate of roughly one million diaries (Sonderman 2007). Additionally, costs related to Arbitron’s new [3.135.183.187] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 16:41 GMT...

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