"This is a book about radio and the relatively new subject of radio studies. In fact, it is the first book to have the words ‘radio studies’ in its title. Radio itself has been the subject of research and writing since it was invented at the beginning of the last century. Much of that published work concerns the technical dimension of radio, but there is also a significant body of work on, for example, radio history, on the nature of speech on radio, on radio drama and so on. This body of writing is fairly puny in comparison with the literature on film and television but it is important nonetheless. Turning to the slightly more introspective aspect of this book, the consideration of radio studies itself, the published literature is almost non-existent. Very few writers have turned their attention to the nature of this subdivision of media or communication studies and I hope that what follows will take a step in that direction [...] The concepts chosen here are derived from two sources. The first source is the business of producing radio itself; this includes the genres and styles of programming (the phone-in, news, comedy and so on) and other central ideas and practices of the radio industry (for example the radio format, the audience, radio journalism). These are terms which are used in the radio industry itself and so have a professional currency. The second source for my list comes from writing about radio from within the academic field of media studies, including radio studies. So, for example, the idea that radio is an ‘intimate’ medium is a recurrent theme in the radio studies literature, as is the ‘liveness’ of radio and the idea of the radio DJ’s ‘persona’. These are not terms, however, often used in the radio industry but belong to the critical discourse about the medium which tries to make sense of it from the outside. In addition there are a few concepts here which are not radio specific; the concept of the ‘imagined community’ was not developed with radio in mind but appears in a number of books on the subject. Other examples in this category are public service broadcasting, propaganda and development [...] (Introduction, page 1-2)