Dear Shane,
apologies for not having replied to you earlier and many thanks for you
comments!
I am finalizing my PhD thesis in these weeks, but will be happy to come
back to you with a more detailed feedback within a couple of weeks....
All the best,
Salvo
On 01/12/2011 12:49, Shane Elson wrote:
>
> Dear Salvatore,
>
> thank you for sending through the executive summary.
>
> I am currently on vacation so dont have ready access to Australian
> figures but I would like to make some general observations based on
> the material you sent through.
>
> ----------------------------
> 1.5 The legislation also requires that Ofcom sets licence conditions
> limiting the amount of income that individual stations can generate
> from on-air advertising and sponsorship. For the majority of stations
> this limit is 50%. However, two stations have lower limits (25% and
> 10%) and a further 18 stations cannot take income from on-air
> advertising and sponsorship at all. These additional restrictions have
> been put in place to protect existing small commercial services whose
> coverage areas overlap with the community services.
>
> This is the most disturbing point in the report. Not for profit
> organisations (as the report classes CRs as) should never be seen as a
> 'threat' that the commercial operators need "protection" from. If this
> logic was carried over to other not for profits then hospitals,
> schools, recycled clothing stores and many other communicty services
> run by not for profit foundations or organisations would have to cease
> income generating operations as many of them perform services along
> side commercial operators.
>
> I do hope the various CR organistions are making lots of noise about
> this restriction.
>
> Furthermore, this seems to contradict not only the OFCOM's stated
> recognition of CR as not for profit but to also limit the ability of
> these stations to "deliver community benefits, known as 'social gain'"
> to the communities they serve. Could this be a 'restriction on trade'
> as its known here in Australia and therefore be challengable in the
> courts?
>
> ----------------------------
> 1.15 Public sources of funding accounted for 25% of the total sector
> income. Local authorities accounted for around 13% of the sector's
> total income. 8% of income came from other public bodies such as the
> Arts Council, health providers, educational establishments and various
> national lottery award schemes.
>
> In Australia CR's income is roughly 30%, 30%, 30% - 30% self funded
> (memberships, fundraising drives and so on), 30% from funding sources
> such as government grants and about 30% sponsorship.
>
> Some stations are more skewed to one of these sources than the other
> but across the whole sector this has been the trend for many years.
> Meltropolitan stations tend to rely less on grants (overall) and more
> on fund raising and sponsorship and memberships while regional / rural
> stations tend to have less (if any paid staff) and have a higher
> reliance on grants. As I said, these are general comments and there
> are (as always) exceptions to this.
> ----------------------------
>
> 1.16 The Community Radio Fund, which is administered by Ofcom on
> behalf of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, accounted for
> £321,500 (around 3% of the sector's total reported income). The
> Community Radio Fund continues to be the largest single source of
> income for the sector.
>
> In Australia the Community Broadcasting Foundation (CBF) administers
> federal funding grants. The bulk of these are for indigenous and
> ethnic language services.
>
> Over the last few years there has been funding for metropolitan wide
> stations to go digital. Sub metro (in other words low power) and
> regional / rural stations cannot access these grants.
>
> The CBF administers small grants which can be for training, equipment
> upgrades, administration costs and sundry expenses that may be 'out of
> the ordinary'. They do not seek funds from philanthropic bodies.
> ----------------------------
>
> 1.21 Community radio stations broadcast live for around 82 hours per
> week on average, and, in general, broadcast a further 12 hours per
> week of original pre-recorded material. On average around 32% of
> daytime output is speech which can feature a wide range of local
> organisations and community initiatives.
>
> This equates to about 12 hours a day of 'live to air' programming
> which is on par with our sector. I am not sure what the "12 hours per
> week of original pre-recorded material" refers to so I cant compare that.
>
> The 32% of spoken word content is interesting. Does this take into
> account all spoken word (ie news, sponsorship scripts, sports
> commentary and so on) or is it material that could be classed as
> 'editorial'. In other words, is it substantial commentary on social,
> political and other civil society concerns?
>
> If it is the latter, then I and very impressed. I dont think we have
> any stats in Australia that would reveal 'spoken word content'.
> ----------------------------
>
> 1.23 The average station reports the involvement of around 78
> volunteers annually, although there is a wide variation. Together
> these volunteers give on average of around 295 hours a week of their
> time in total. Time given by volunteers can vary considerably from an
> hour or two to over 1,000 hours per week.
>
> This is a very impressive stat. I would be interested to know what the
> demographic breakdown is (M / F, age, income, roles etc).
> ----------------------------
>
> I look forward to reading the full report at some stage and do
> encourage you and the rest of the team to keep up the good work in
> your lobbying and efforts to continuen to build the CR sector in your
> region
>
> Warm Regards
> Shane Elson
> Treasurer, AMARC-AP
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
--
============================================================================
Salvatore Scifo
----------------------------------------------------------
Ph.D Candidate, Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI)
University of Westminster
www.westminster.ac.uk/camri
TÜBITAK Visiting Research Fellow (2011/2012), Turkey
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