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

In Points on the Dial, Alexander Russo significantly revises and enriches our understanding of radio history during the medium's peak pre-television years of 1926-1951. While network rhetoric and popular memory have promoted a uniform image of radio in American life of the time, one in which families around the nation were united as they sat together around the radio attentively listening to live broadcasts, Russo provides some of the best evidence yet that such national radio communities were, in fact, much more imagined than actual. Russo argues that broadcast radio content, delivery, marketing, and reception varied considerably from station to station and region to region. Rarely did all audiences hear exactly the same content at the same time delivered in the same way across the country; likewise, audience listening practices and contexts were fluid and diverse; many households owned multiple sets to which their individual members listened with varying degrees of attention.

Russo's work has absorbed and builds on that of a generation of radio, audio, and sound scholars led by Michele Hilmes, Susan Douglas, Jonathan Sterne and James Lastra. Like them, Russo takes an interdisciplinary approach to his subject and is interested in the way in which audio technologies are socially constructed and made meaningful through industrial and social discourse and practice. Here, he focuses specifically on debunking network claims to national unity and democratic access through a detailed examination of radio industry marketing strategies, which reveal how radio station managers (network or not) depended on niche marketing and localized content to sell products. All markets were not equally weighted; Russo provides documentation showing how the networks divided the country into its most valuable retail markets, concentrating their stations in Northeast, Mid-Atlantic Coast and industrial Midwest, while under-serving or ignoring great swaths of the rural, Southern and Western U.S.

Russo offers several case studies that outline specific ways in which network uniformity and dominance was challenged and localized during this era. Regional broadcasting both supplemented network programming and threatened its hold. In addition, individual station managers tailored their programming to fit local tastes, drawing on a variety of transcribed (rather than live) programming and specially-tailored niche "spot" programming and advertising to fill the time before, after, and between the network's prime-time programs. Russo convincingly demonstrates how the content of one NBC station, for example, might have been substantially different from another.

Russo makes many such important interventions here, and his reconceptualization of the 'radio nation' provides a valuable model for scholars. In so doing, he offers a wealth of original research from the production side of radio, which he has mined from trade magazines such as Radio News and Broadcasting as well as the personal archives of key industry personnel. Although Russo's depth of detail makes more suitable reading for advanced undergraduates and graduate students than for freshmen classes, broadcasting scholars will treasure and build upon the many doors he opens; for example, Russo identifies several marketing practices that actually pre-date their assumed development during the television era (radio DJs, magazine advertising) and warrant further investigation. For teachers and scholars of broadcasting, Points on the Dial is essential reading.