Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks (review)

For over a decade, a growing number of scholars have turned their focus to exploring the unique history of our first broadcast medium, radio. While enriching our understanding of the medium, this work is built on an accepted chronology neatly divided into a pre-network period, the Golden Age of network dominance, and the post-network era. Points on the Dial offers a significant revision of the long-accepted truism that the industry practices of network radio underwent a radical overhaul with the coming of television. Drawing on a range of meticulously detailed archival research, Alexander Russo takes direct aim at many of our central assumptions about radio’s Golden Age, including its presumed national orientation, the primacy of live programming, the dominance of national advertisers, and scheduling practices that were based on discrete, identifiable “programs.”

Russo forcibly demonstrates that counter to promotional discourses of national reach, network coverage was limited in practice by both technological barriers and the interests of advertising agencies who simply did not want to pay to reach certain parts of the nation. Russo examines a range of practices and technologies that filled in the geographic and temporal gaps left by the actual practices of the radio networks and advertisers, including station representatives, regional networks, sound-on-disc transcriptions, spot broadcasting, and DJ-based block programming. Brokering between individual radio stations and advertisers, station representatives identified and took advantage of the gaps in national network coverage by developing new markets for radio and constructing alternative conceptions of the audience as segmented. Between local stations and national networks emerged a flourishing number of regional networks throughout the United States. A case study of New England–based Colonial and Yankee networks offers a fascinating look at the ways that regional networks developed programming types often shunned by the national networks, while at the same time clearly articulating a specifically New England form of identity.

While the networks consistently forwarded “liveness” as the ontological condition of radio, Russo examines how companies like World Broadcasting Service used sound-on-disc transcriptions to create alternative definitions of networking for both stations and advertisers. Of particular interest is how WBS promoted the concept of perceptual fidelity as a marker of quality over and against the major networks’ promotion of “liveness.” Key to the success of WBS was the growing market for “spot ads,” a term which referred to a range of advertising practices that existed alongside the network’s emphasis on national, single sponsorship. Spot ads challenged a whole set of assumptions about the relationship between sponsors and audiences and about the relationship between advertising and modes of listening. Finally, Russo examines the increasing use of car radio during the pre-war years. In reconsidering the spaces of reception and the work of radio stations and advertisers to address mobile listeners, including the development of block-based DJ programming, Russo provocatively suggests that the development of distracted modes of listening usually attributed to post-television radio have firm roots in the network era.

The key strengths of this book include Russo’s rich view of radio specifically and broadcasting more generally. Drawing from SCOT scholars and James Lastra, he examines broadcast radio as an assemblage of practices, institutions, discourses, and technologies. The work therefore nicely balances questions related to radio’s technology with questions related to industrial and cultural practices. Where the book sometimes falters is in the scope of its claims, some of which might have been explored more fully. For example, Russo’s decision to read “against the grain” of the presentism of his sources might have been extended to think about the current state of television historiography. The book largely focuses on the industrial aspects of radio without linking these practices to broader cultural, social, and political changes. There are others times, however, where the claims do not seem quite supported by the evidence. This is especially the case regarding the audience. For example...