AMARC joined the 6th Conference of the Radio Research Section of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), which was held in the lovely setting of the University of Siena (Italy), on September 19-21.

Several interesting keynote speeches and pieces of research have been presented, highlighting the variety and vivacity of the radio sector across and beyond Europe. The first keynote speech was held by David Fernandez Quijada, Manager of the Media Intelligence Service, the market research unit of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). He provided some interesting data about the situation of radio in Europe. In the EBU area, there are more than 12 thousand radio stations. Around the 90% of this group is composed by analogue FM stations, and the digital ones are, at the moment, just about 15 hundred (a significant majority of them are DAB+ stations). Most of the European stations are national, with only 120 international cases.

Passing to the radio consumption habits, Fernandez Quijada stated that in 2018, European citizens listened to the radio, on average, 2 hours and 22 minutes per day: these are 4 minutes less than the previous year and 14 minutes less than 5 years before (2013). People are still using this media, but the time spent on it has been decreasing. This trend is also more evident among the European youth: in 2018 they listened, on average, 1 hour and 26 minutes per day of radio: 5 minutes less than the previous year and 20 minutes less than 5 years ago. The European citizens reached weekly by radio are still a big group, the 84% (which corresponds to 420 million listeners), but also, in this case, there is a reduction (-1.7%) compared to 2013.

It is interesting to know that radio is considered the most trusted medium in the majority of the European countries, with the difference of Hungary, Serbia and Greece that put the Internet at the first place, while Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Turkey chose the television.

Additionally, AMARC Europe presented a paper together with other partners in the context of the Grassroots Radio project. The paper, titled “Fostering Community Radio: the Grassroots Radio project”, discusses the activities and challenges of co-designing community radios in rural areas.

On Thursday 5^th and Friday 6^th of September 2019, the Grassroots Radio consortium celebrated the third general assembly of the project, hosted in the friendly building of 11.11.11. – the coalition of NGOs, unions, movements and various solidarity groups in Flanders (Dutch speaking Northern part of Belgium) – in Brussels. The meeting has seen participation of all the members of the consortium and been arranged by AMARC Europe.

11.11.11 headquarters

The first day updates concerning the activities in the different communities have been shared by local partners. John Walsh from Bere Island Project Club (BIPG) reported about the activities and efforts they put in place in order to foster community engagement with the radio. The community radio has started to broadcast the mass, supported by West Cork FM. The mass has been broadcasted in particular for those who cannot leave the house and for patients hosted in the community hospital. This was a very positive action benefiting Bere Island’s community.

As for the setup of the radio stations in Romania, local partners ActiveWatch and MedAlert have informed about the two radio stations broadcasting 24/7 in the two communities of – Sfantu Gheorghe and Vârvoru de Jos – with a commercial schedule and 25 volunteers involved. 3600 songs have been inputted to be broadcasted. The shows are different and are aimed at specific populations in the community. For example, in the community of Sfantu Gheorghe, there is a show in Ukrainian-Romanian language, with different languages spoken.

The radio community engagement in the Portuguese island of Madeira is also rather lively and in progress, with two communities involved: Curral das Freiras and Estreito. Radio shows have been started in the former, with live interviews from the community and first experimentations with the text-to-speech (TTS) technology set up.

After the updates from the local pilots in Romania, Ireland and Portugal, the meeting went on with some exercises for the consortium members to get familiar with the evaluation framework arranged by the Irish partner University College Cork. Then, updates from the technical partner RootIO have been shared in order to collectively check up and discuss the improvements achieved with the work performed by the RootIO team. After one year from the beginning of the project, Jude and Andreea (the RootIO guys) have constantly gone back and forth and bring the technology to a stable level that the consortium can build from. Some technical issues – e.g. weakness of connectivity in some areas – have been discussed in order to reduce as much as possible the gap between communities’ expectations from the project and the results that a research action such as Grassroots Radio can concretely achieve. Positive news has been shared by CEREPROC about the development of the speech synthesis voices in English, Romanian, and Portuguese. Scenarios about the implementation of TTS technologies have also been discussed in terms of accessibility, in case of audiences lacking connections or literacy.

The second day of the general assembly has been dedicated to discussions around governance, sustainability, and management of community radio. The group has also been involved in evaluation sessions with exercises providing a reflective guide to see whether we are meeting our goals, and also how we might capture our goals.

The last session has been focused on the preparation for the mid-term review the consortium is going to face the next week in Brussels. Given the updates and results shared during the assembly in Brussels, we are quite confident Grassroots Radio will give a positive impression to out evaluators. We will keep you posted! Bye for now, and fingers crossed!

From 4 – 7 June 2019 the team around the SMART Erasmus+ project held its first training of trainer pilot training in Budapest, Hungary. The training workshop hosted 10 participants from Hungary, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland and the Bask country to test and assess the developed training and gain important feedback on the next steps of the development of the training modules. AMARC Europe and CMFE presented a discussion paper on training certification in the context of community media. Here are some impressions from the training course in Budapest. All pictures by Walther Moser (walt@mur.at)

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The proliferation of mass media and new technologies has brought about decisive changes in and challenges to human communication processes and behaviour. The change in the media landscape has also impacted the role and social, professional and ethical responsibilities of journalists. These changes in the role that the media plays in the life of citizens have highlighted the importance of responsible media reporting.

Media communicators and audiences now face the task to separate facts from fiction in media texts. However, it is the responsibility of journalists and broadcasters in traditional and online media to consider the elements that they introduce in the content they are producing, the language that they use and the message they are trying to convene. There have been initiatives spearheaded by journalists and media organisations (BBC, The Guardian…) to go back to the essence of journalism by retaking the task of fact checking, and applying what is consider the five core principles of ethical journalism: truth and accuracy; independence; fairness and impartiality; humanity; and accountability. (see Ethical Journalist Network)

The Ethical Media for Active Citizenship (EMAC) project aims to develop a training course delivering media literacy tools while providing citizens and media activists with valuable competences to face very topical challenges presented to both, media producers and audiences (fake news/alternative facts, infomercials vs. information, freedom of speech and hate speech, diversity and pluralism in media, production values and content placement). The project is coordinated by NEAR FM (Ireland) and the partnership includes Radio Corax (Halle, Germany), Radio Wüste Welle (Tübingen, Germany), Commit (Austria), EMARTV (Andalucia, Spain) and AMARC Europe (Brussels, Belgium).

So far, the partners have put together a Guidelines and Terminology document, selected relevant activities that focus on the reinforcement of a diversity approach to journalistic and production skills. Some of the activities have been already trialled in pilot training workshops in Germany, Austria, Ireland and Spain. We are now facing the final stage of the project, where all the information and activities will be translated into the languages of the partnership (German, Spanish and English and then uploaded to an online training platform that will be accessible to the general public and that could be used as a e-learning tool or as a training resource.

As part of the project, partners will also produce eight radio programmes dealing with the issue of fact accuracy, fake news and ethical and responsible journalism that will be uploaded in the website and that could be used as training resources in each country.

The Grassroot Radio project is piloting solutions for community information platforms and media pluralism, working to lower the barriers to start and sustain a community radio station, create regional and European-wide networks of stations that can pool community-level resources, co-innovate collaborative media services and increase the impact of those stations through a combination of existing digital and nondigital technologies. With partners in Ireland, Romania and Portugal (Madeira), we are experimenting new technologies based on a strong interaction between mobile telephony, traditional radio and Text to Speech (TTS) technologies, through the RootIo platform.

After the first year of the project, we are currently broadcasting in Bere Islands (Ireland). In Madeira, the Grassroots Radio team has been doing a lot of activities in Curral das Freiras, a civil parish of about 2000 inhabitants in the centre of Madeira and location of one of our grassroots radio stations. The most important outcome so far, is the licensing process in Romania, that through our partners (Activewatch and Medialert), reached to obtain a community radio licence for the first time in the country. Two radio stations will be launched soon in the Danube delta, Radio Civic Vârvoru de Jos (Dolj) and Radio Civic Sfântu Gheorghe (Tulcea).

In this framework, we recently attended the high-level policy workshop The road ahead for digital social innovation: How can the EU support tech as a force for empowerment and social impact?, which took place in Brussels on April 26, 2019. The workshop was organized by the global innovation foundation Nesta, as part of the digital social innovation (DSI4EU) project. The workshop explored how the European institutions can support Digital Social Innovation (DSI) and create a future where technology empowers citizens to tackle our biggest social and environmental challenges.

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