Feeding ‘the beast.’ What it means to be a community radio presenter in the UK

Abstract

The experience of being a radio presenter is under-explored in academic literature, the tendency being to focus on audiences and content (Wolfenden 2014: 7). For popular consumption there are ‘numerous biographies [and] autobiographies’ but little or no critical analysis (Killmeier 2001: 353). This chapter will go some way to redress the situation, taking as its subjects not the glamorous, high profile, celebrity household names that publishers invest in, but the unpaid radio broadcasters in more mundane contexts. There is a rich seam of research on these practitioners in a small number of doctoral theses on community and ethnic minority radio. These participants whose stories and opinions are being sought include a growing number of presenters involved in non-mainstream broadcasting in the UK, at a time when the professional radio industry, impacted by market and audience expectations, is seeing continued staffing cuts and resource centralization leading to a dramatic fall-off in employment: to 13,000 at the last count (Statista 2021). The author’s research, conducted between 2014 and 2021 (Coleman 2021: 90–1), indicates that there could be up to twice as many volunteers in the licensed local community radio sector alone, regulated by the government’s Office for Communications (Ofcom). At the time of writing there are 315 of these not-for-profit stations listed (Ofcom 2022), and the roll-out of new small-scale digital audio broadcasting licences has begun. In addition, but beyond this study’s remit, any internet search will reveal a proliferation of unlicensed online stations, licensed webcasters and short-term broadcasters, not to mention the explosion of podcasts. How these are monetized is also beyond the scope of this chapter, but in the licensed local community sector, thousands of practitioners are routinely spending multiple hours each week at home or in studio hubs sourcing, shaping and sharing media content and serving their target communities. Since it is rare for these presenters to be paid, their commitment is worth studying for what it might reveal about the allure of radio presenting more generally....