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Practical Community Radio Audience Measurement

In: Community Radio in the Twenty-First Century
Janey Gordon (ed.)
Oxford; Bern; Berlin et al.: Peter Lang (2012), pp. 347-366

Signature commbox: 30-Community-E 2012

"For community radio stations, one important gauge of relevance is the Popularity of their programming outputs, as without evidence of this it is difficult to justify providing access to scarce broadcast frequency resources. In part, the popularity ofprogramming outputs can be assessed through variants of the type ofquantitative research carried out for larger stations by the Radio Joint Audience Research Limited (RAJAR). However because such research ‘does not produce listening figures for a particular Programme on a particular day‘ (Lister et al 2010: 67) it cannot provide detailed qualitative data concerning how satisfied individuals are with the speciflc content of Particular programming. More broadly, its generic audience sample is not best suited to surveying niche listening, such as, for example, to minority language outputs. With the above in mind, how might individual community radio stations approach the issue of audience research so that they can obtain cost-effective and reasonably reliable data suitable for their needs? The following case study examines the approach taken by one particular community radio station serving a ‘community of place' that is the city of Norwich in the east of England." (Page 349)