Community radio and participation: listeners as productive publics

Abstract

Some local radio station programmes still work today as a kind of cafe where people meet together to chat. Talking to the host by telephone, listeners actually talk to each other, feeding into a sense of community that exists in the majority of radio projects. The idea of community is usually associated with radio today in the context of what Bart Cammaerts classifies as a 'third type of broadcast, namely participatory radio, complementary to both commercial and public media'. Unlike the well-known experiences across many countries such as Brazil, United Kingdom, France, Spain and Ireland, where community radio is very common, the Portuguese radio landscape almost ignores the existence of this kind of project. The Web radio station worked as a kind of sound-hub where productions coming from various origins combined to devise a singular composition of resonances in different Portuguese accents.