All platforms considered: Contemporary radio and transmedia engagement

Radioness beyond radio

Writing at the height of radio’s golden years in the mid-1930s, Rudolf Arnheim (1936) said radio was a medium characterised by ‘blindness’. The medium was shaped by the necessity of having to overcome its ‘visual lack’. The other characteristics commonly attributed to radio took shape later, in the decades following the introduction of television. As is so often the case with the arrival of a new medium, television helped radio to define and redefine itself, by forcing it to adapt to a changed domestic entertainment landscape and helping to underscore what was so particular about radio. In the early 1950s, as television became the preferred family entertainment platform, radio was relegated to much more intimate and personal uses (Douglas, 1999: 225). Radios became cheaper, more portable and more numerous (in Britain in the 1960s, there was an average of 2.53 sets per household – quoted in Crisell, 1986: 13). Families no longer clustered around the radio together, instead listening to radio became a solitary activity. This, says Andrew Crisell (1986), is the paradox of radio, ‘although its audiences may be counted in the millions the medium addresses itself very much to the individual’ (p. 13). Radio has repeatedly been characterised as blind, invisible, ephemeral, exploratory, intimate, immediate, interactive, informational, conversational, and therein appearing to be less mediated, more authentic and more trustworthy (see Crisell, 1986; Douglas, 1999; Fleming, 2002; Lewis, 2000; Lewis and Booth, 1989; Tacchi, 1998). Radio was woven into the fabric of daily domestic life, and so it became ubiquitous and taken for granted (turn the radio on and there it is – see Lewis, 2000: 161). Radio has also been characterised by the spontaneous, immediate, collective and performative qualities of (secondary) oral communication (Ong, 1982). Historically, radio is the sound of a disembodied voice speaking, whispering, singing and crooning into the ear of another individual but experienced by many simultaneously. For a broadcast medium – that is, a medium fundamentally defined by the indiscriminate spray of communication from one point to many – radio has a surprisingly strong grip on the intimate.

Following the advent of new audio delivery formats, radio has undergone another period of profound aesthetic reflection. As critics, audiences and radio producers once again re-affirm and re-imagine what makes radio ‘radio’ in a digital age, they continue to depend on aesthetic qualities long associated with radio. In a recent discussion of the emerging typologies of radioness in an era of convergence, Ariana Moscote Freire (2007) observed several recurring themes. ‘Among them, Moscote Freire (2007) says, ‘are the ideas of “liveness”, “human communication” and “intentionality”’ (p. 148). Radio continues to be seen as intimate, personal, trustworthy, exploratory, live and immediate. ¹ And these same characteristics continue to play a vital role in determining how radio producers, audiences and programmes are transitioning to more expansive and interactive forms of content. In other words, old ideas about ‘radioness’ are shaping the future of the radio beyond radio.

Transmedia radio

Blind, invisible, conversational, intimate, private, domestic, everyday – together these qualities contribute to a medium that has been characteristically low profile and low status. Radio is our ‘friend, trusted informant and soundtrack for our living’, says Peter Lewis (2000), it is ‘woven into our lives so closely that it’s like brushing our teeth or locking up at night, is taken for granted’ (p. 167). Radio tends to have been treated as an ‘invisible medium’, not just by cultural scholars but also by other media, governments, policymakers and even radio producers and consumers, all aided by a chronically under-developed critical discourse (Lewis and Booth, 1989). With this in mind, it is no surprise radio has been widely overlooked when it comes to research into transmedia practices.

In 2006, Henry Jenkins defined transmedia storytelling in this way:

A transmedia story unfolds across multiple platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best – so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction.

Focusing on the complex world of The Matrix franchise, Jenkins (2006) argues that transmedia storytelling is an operating strategy in which an entertainment is made up of numerous instalments deliberately dispersed across different platforms, and the more audiences follow these distributed texts, the richer their understanding of the story. Instead of one story contained in a single text, transmedia stories involve large fictional universes that incorporate different genres and formats, as well as serialisation, sequels, prequels and spinoffs, reboots and remakes, long-term fan investment and immersive marketing strategies. Transmedia storytelling, says Jenkins, is storytelling for an era of convergence. In more recent writing, Jenkins et al. (2013) have offered another, broader definition of transmedia engagement. They argue that transmedia engagement is an approach to media production based on a logic of intensifying and prolonging audience engagement – for both creative and commercial reasons (Jenkins et al., 2013: 132–148). Instead of a ‘one-time commodity’ like a standalone TV series or game, transmedia content is ‘a renewable generator of value’ that seeks to sustain audience interest in the brand or the franchise (Jenkins et al., 2013: 133). Transmedia engagement, they argue, is an approach to media production for an era of increasingly active and social audiences.

Although definitions of ‘transmedia storytelling’ or ‘transmedia engagement’ have evolved over the years, what remains consistent is the focus on audio–visual, fiction entertainments. Existing literature has looked at the array of different platforms and genres through which contemporary media stories are now commonly dispersed. Academic and trade publications talk about film, television, games, novels, comic books, web media, as well as theme parks, toys, collectibles, cosplay and alternate reality games. They incorporate official franchise instalments, associated marketing strategies, fan-made media, trailers, behind-the-scenes docos, DVD director’s commentaries and the whole gamut of interrelated paratexts (see Davidson, 2010; Giovagnoli, 2011; Jenkins, 2007, 2010; Jenkins et al., 2013; Phillips, 2012). The emphasis is overwhelmingly on products generated within the commercial entertainment industry, Hollywood in particular. Likewise, the emphasis is overwhelmingly on fictional narrative worlds and their characters: Batman, Lost, Star Wars, Harry Potter and The Matrix. What the literature does not talk about, almost at all, is contemporary radio. Although academics and industry continue to examine the ramifications wrought on radio by media convergence, very little writing has explored creative efforts to expand radio content across multiplying platforms, or what might be considered transmedia radio.

In part, radio has been absent from these conversations because of its historical status as an ‘invisible medium’ within media studies. Another reason is simply because the most successful, most popular and highest profile examples of transmedia franchises – The Batmans and the Harry Potters – rarely incorporate radio as a major element. ² This has started to shift in recent years, as transmedia practices are increasingly adopted by media producers who are interested less in commercial entertainment experiences and more in social change and public-interest agendas, who often come from radio production backgrounds and who incorporate radio broadcast, genres, stations and their listening communities as fundamental parts of a multi-platform media project. These are the projects I want to explore in more detail now, by outlining some of their recurring traits and considering how they fit with broader transmedia trends and theories.

Fiction narratives to non-fiction storytelling

Curious City (broadcast on Chicago station WBEZ in 2013 and 2014) invites Chicago residents to ask questions about their city, which are then culled and put to an online vote to see which will be investigated by the production team. The answers, and the process of getting those answers, are then shared across on- and offline platforms. Some questions are straightforward and serious while others are more light-hearted, but all the answers are factual. Detroit’s Food Economy (broadcast on WDET in February 2013) was a special series exploring issues of food inequality in six inner city neighbourhoods. It combined traditional radio feature journalism with data visualisations and interactive online tools to help demonstrate the problems facing residents. Alongside commentary from experts, there was an emphasis on giving voice to Detroit locals affected by the city’s ‘food deserts’. Planet Money’s special report on the rise of disability welfare in the United States – ‘The Invisible 14 Million’ (broadcast on NPR in March 2013) – was distributed in multiple formats across the web and several radio programmes, and in the form of audio, video, photographs, text and data visualisations. Reinvention Stories (broadcast on Ohio station WYSO in 2013) uses radio, documentary film and an interactive web interface to tell intimate stories of survival from the residents of Dayton, Ohio – which was dubbed one of ‘America’s fastest dying cities’ by Forbes magazine in 2008. Mapping Main Street (broadcast on NPR’s Weekend Edition in 2009) draws on crowd-sourced first-person stories about America’s very diverse and numerous ‘Main Streets’ (in response to the Wall St/Main St rhetoric that had been dominating US political discourse). The Hackney Podcast and Hackney Hear often incorporate fiction works by neighbourhood artists, but most of the stories take the form of audio documentaries, interviews and oral history. Like the other projects mentioned, they prioritise ‘unmediated’ styles of storytelling, encouraging Hackney residents to ‘tell their own stories in their own words’ (The Hackney Podcast: ‘About us’). Finally, the live ‘radio’ events – like ‘Invisible Made Visible’ and Radio with Pictures – feature a mix of genres and performance styles, but as with their on-air equivalents, most of the content draws on first-person storytelling and radio documentary traditions.

Looking over these projects, what’s clear is that – unlike most transmedia content – projects originating with radio place far greater emphasis on non-fiction storytelling than on fictional narratives. Experiments with cross-platform radio drama do exist, but they are much, much less common. Instead, the focus is on representing lived experiences and their real-world contexts. The content relies heavily on first-person stories, observations, anecdotes, conversations and interviews, drawing on forms of journalism, documentary, personal essay, autobiography, oral history and witnessing. Much of the content is audience-generated or crowd-sourced, and often the interviewers have been omitted so that attention is squarely on real people telling their life stories ‘in their own words’. For all the ways, the projects are experimenting with traditional radio conventions; however, they are adhering to many others. In particular, the interest in personal narratives and hearing ‘ordinary voices’ harks back to radio’s talkback heritage or pioneer radio programmes like Ghetto Life 101 (broadcast on NPR in 1993). Meanwhile, live events and listening parties like Radio with Pictures or ‘Invisible Made Visible’ remediate radio’s live broadcast qualities for an era of podcasting and audio on-demand. We may no longer listen simultaneously and en masse to a programme as it goes to air, but at these one-off events, listeners come together in a physical setting to enjoy a similar (even heightened) experience of collective listening. Intimacy, liveness, personal conversation, a sense of direct, ‘unmediated’ and therein ‘more trustworthy’ and ‘more authentic’ communication – these have long been considered the defining aesthetic characteristics of radio and they continue to be a major force in determining the kinds of radio stories being told, and the manner in which they are told, in an era of converged, multi-platform media. Until relatively recently, however, non-fiction genres and the rhetorical devices native to those genres have not been considered in any detail in transmedia theory.

In his writing on convergence culture, Henry Jenkins (2006) argues that expansive contemporary entertainments – like Lost or The Matrix – necessarily demand more active audiences who are willing to do the extra leg work required to navigate these complex, multi-platform story worlds. In exchange for all the extra work, audiences expect a more engaging and immersive experience. ‘Migratory’ media audiences, says Jenkins (2006), ‘will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want’ (p. 2). Likewise, audiences for the radio projects I am discussing are invited to move between platforms in order to have a fuller, richer and more participatory experience of a given story or programme. Traditional broadcast radio is still important, but they also encourage audiences to explore a range of on- and offline extensions – from supplementary visuals and ‘making of’ material, to elaborate interactive websites and major live events. Curious City broadcasts approximately 35 minutes of audio per week, but for those who want to dig deeper, the websites and social media profiles for Curious City and WBEZ also offer access to another 20–30 minutes of produced audio each week, written reports, behind-the-scene material, video, images, data visualisations, audience contributions, as well as opportunities for listeners to ask their own questions and vote for future topics (Jennifer Brandel, 2013, personal communication). Planet Money’s 20-minute piece ‘The Invisible 14 Million’ was greatly expanded on other radio programmes and online. The same is true for many other programmes that bolster their on-air reports with additional online resources. Meanwhile, live radio events and listening parties invite audiences to follow their favourite radio programmes into cinemas, opera houses, theatres and elsewhere, to move, in a very literal sense, to different physical locations. Likewise, Hackney Hear encouraged regular podcast listeners to explore the sounds of Hackney in situ, through a Global Positioning System (GPS)-triggered audio guide. Contemporary radio audiences are willing to do a lot of work to seek out the kind of sociable and engaging media experiences they want, to explore complex networked stories and to support programmes they care about – much like audiences do for commercial transmedia titles. What is different is that these new forms of expanded radio are not ‘entertainment experiences’ (although they might in their own way be entertaining), and the stories being explored are not make-believe. Instead, engaged radio audiences are moving between distributed media platforms in order to learn more about a topic, community or individual; be immersed in processes of research, investigation and exposition; and contribute their own personal insights and experiences to those processes.

To date, most of the literature on transmedia practices – from both academics and industry – has focused on fictional narratives and story worlds, and rightly so; most transmedia content originates with fiction film, television, gaming, comics or novels. ³ In recent years, this has begun to change as extended, interactive storytelling techniques become an increasingly important part of social change and activist movements, journalism, documentary film and television, and – as this article illustrates – public- and community-interest radio. There is now a small but growing body of literature exploring non-fiction and public-interest transmedia, the majority of it looking new forms of documentary (Aston, 2012; Das, 2011; Hudson, 2008; Tyron, 2011). According to Chuck Tyron (2011), transmedia documentaries are essentially remediations of older forms of documentary activism; they aim to mobilise grassroots support for a particular social or political issue. Transmedia techniques – such as peer-to-peer marketing, cross-platform distribution, non-linear narrative databases and audience collaboration – are used to drive engagement in an issue and promote social change. Likewise, many of the transmedia radio projects considered in this essay work to raise awareness about an issue and mobilise publics around a social-change agenda. The Detroit’s Food Economy series, for example, specifically set out to explore ‘the ways Detroit’s Food Economy does, and does not, work for low income families with school age children’. This agenda was supported by various online extensions, such as a quiz with provocative true/false questions such as, ‘More than half of Detroit residents live in areas that are far out-of-balance in terms of day-to-day food availability’ (Answer: True). Each point of extended reporting and interactivity provided opportunities for audiences to learn more, share information, promote the series and ultimately take action. Other examples have social good agendas but are not underpinned by an explicit ‘call to action’. Reinvention Stories is descriptive rather than didactic. It aims to be a ‘a living, breathing chronicle of one city’s struggle and resurgence’, touching on themes of economic recession, crime, education, poverty, race and the changing face of America’s ‘rust belt’, but without calling for direct political action. Transmedia radio projects use expanded storytelling strategies to drive engagement in an issue, much like transmedia documentaries do, but they also use those same techniques to drive a number of other forms of audience participation. They solicit audience contributions to collective and evolving bodies of knowledge, sometimes in the manner of citizen journalism but more often in the form of self-documentation, that is, by encouraging audiences to record and share details of their own life stories and personal experiences. In doing so, emerging forms of expanded radio also encourage audiences to be more personally engaged with their fellow listeners, their local station, its media producers and the specific geographic community serviced by a station.

Worlds to streets

As the name suggests, Mapping Main Street was an ambitious attempt to map America’s many ‘Main Streets’ (10,466 in total, 854 of which have been documented so far). Producers and local citizens contributed photos, audio and video, which were geo-tagged to an interactive map of the United States, which could be explored through the project’s website. Detroit’s Food Economy also used maps as part of its investigation into food inequality between the city’s neighbourhoods. For the series, the producers plotted out 240 ‘food-stamp’ retailers in six Detroit neighbourhoods in two colours, green for those that offered basic nutritional food options and black for the overwhelming majority that did not. The website for Reinvention Stories features an option to explore additional ‘signs of life’ in Dayton, Ohio. Users can watch footage shot through a car windscreen as it drives Dayton’s streets. Elsewhere on the website, stories by and about local residents have been plotted onto an online map of Dayton. The Hackney Podcast and the Hackney Hear app profile hyper-local storytelling, which is by and about the community. One episode, for example, documented the experiences of catching public transport in Hackney, one of the few London boroughs bereft of a tube station. Curious City invites questions from listeners about Chicago, drawing on the memories and curiosities residents have about their home town. ‘Are there actually tunnels Al Capone used underneath Chicago?’ or ‘Just how many bats live in the Loop?’. Not all the examples feature mapping tools. Maps are absent from Planet Money’s ‘The Invisible 14 Million’ report, which looked at a federal, nation-wide issue. They are also absent from the various live listening parties and events like ‘The Invisible Made Visible’ or Radio with Pictures, although these activities do bring people together to assorted physical venues.

In nearly all of the examples, place is paramount. For Reinvention Stories, Curious City, Mapping Main Street, Detroit’s Food Economy, The Hackney Podcast and Hackney Hear, the stories are geo-located and hyper-local. The interviewees are residents of a community; they talk about where they grew up, what issues affect their neighbourhood and how things have changed, for better or worse. The participatory aspects of the projects are directed at local residents rather than a wider audience (they focus on the small, idiosyncrasies of life in a given neighbourhood; things that make it difficult for ‘outsiders’ to engage in). According to its producers, Reinvention Stories is ‘by, for, and about Dayton – only’ (Reichert and Bognar, 2013). So although the projects are available online, they are made for the constituents of the local community to which they are attached. In addition to mapping, geo-tagging and hyper-local storytelling, another recurring trend is the blurring of traditional boundaries between a radio station and its listeners. Audiences are invited into the studio, both physically and through their increased involvement in the editorial, production and reporting processes. Meanwhile, producers make a point of going out into the street, recording stories in situ or taking a live incarnation of a programme out of the studio and into local venues.

Place is also paramount for commercial transmedia content. One of the defining characteristics of cross-media storytelling is the creation of expansive, fictional ‘worlds’ (think of Gotham City, Westeros or the Star Wars universe). As Jenkins (2007) writes,

Most often, transmedia stories are based not on individual characters or specific plots but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories. This process of world-building encourages an encyclopedic impulse in both readers and writers. We are drawn to master what can be known about a world which always expands beyond our grasp.

Instead of a creating a single, linear narrative, transmedia content creates fictional worlds, which are furnished with their own rules and systems, populated by a large cast of characters and embedded with rich, narrative potential. Unlike the self-contained, classical, narrative storytelling techniques of the novel or conventional Hollywood cinema, transmedia entertainments allow for multiple (sometimes conflicting) experiences of the same story world or event. Stories commonly involve a large ensemble cast without a clear hierarchy of importance or spin off instalments that give voice to secondary characters. In doing so, transmedia stories create a space for multiple perspectives, including those of relatively minor characters. ‘One of the powerful things that transmedia stories can do is shift our perspectives’, says Jenkins (2010), ‘showing us what the events look like from the point of view of secondary and sometimes opposing characters’ (pp. 947–948). Finally, these fictional story worlds can become so full of detail and loom so large in the lives of their fans that they spill over into our reality. Transmedia projects try to collapse the traditional physical boundaries that separate fiction worlds and everyday reality. Alternate reality games, tie-in amusement park rides and elaborate viral marketing stunts migrate stories ‘invasively into the social sphere’, says Angela Ndalianis (2012), ‘… characters often escape their media-delivery systems and enter the world that we inhabit, demanding that we interact with their reality while they occupy our reality’ (p. 165).

The radio projects I am discussing function in a similar way, except that fantastic fictional ‘worlds’ and ‘universes’ have been replaced with everyday ‘neighbourhoods’ and ‘streets’. Projects like Reinvention Stories or Curious City do not offer singular, linear narratives. Instead, they offer a complex representation of a real neighbourhood or region. These are places with their own distinct issues and systems, inhabited by an ensemble of heterogeneous subjects and rich sites of story potential. When you spend time with transmedia radio projects, you do not get neat, complete stories, instead you get texture and detail that work cumulatively. Like their commercial entertainment equivalents, the expanded storytelling techniques adopted by these radio projects also allow greater space for multiple, sometimes conflicting, perspectives. In Curious City, anyone can set the station’s reporting agenda. In Reinvention Stories, relatively ‘minor’ voices of Dayton’s residents are allowed to contradict (or at least complicate) the oft-repeated ‘expert’ account of Dayton as a ‘dying city’.

For transmedia radio, physical and mediated spaces increasingly overlap, and the real world has become an important platform to leverage. Sue Schardt (2012), the Chief Executive of the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), described this agenda explicitly in a recent article. She writes that one of the aims of Localore (http://localore.net/ the public media innovation initiative run by AIR which produced Curious City and Reinvention Stories) was to explore ‘full spectrum storytelling’, that is, storytelling that combines broadcast, digital and ‘street platforms’:

The latter – ‘street’ – platform is especially key, since it represents public media makers moving beyond the traditional approach of going out into the community with a microphone or camera to capture a story, edit it into shape, and send it into distribution. This is where producers are providing new, often intimate points of access for public media in the physical space of the community – portable booths, installations, moving onto porches and into backyards and haunts familiar to people living in a neighbourhood – as a way of extending our base of operations beyond broadcast and allowing citizens to become documentarians of their own lives.

Schardt’s (2012) description echoes what Ndalianis (2012) and others have said about the tendency for transmedia stories to ‘escape their media-delivery systems’ and to move into our daily reality. Only this time the scale is much more intimate, working at the level of neighbourhoods, communities, ‘porches’ and ‘backyards’. Of course, as Schardt and others have pointed out, none of this is entirely new for radio. When television displaced radio as the national mass medium, says Susan Douglas (1999), American listeners began to tune into stations on the basis of their local content (p. 220). For many decades, radio has been our ‘soundtrack for living’, intimately woven into our daily, domestic routines (Lewis, 2000: 161). Now, emerging forms of expanded radio are weaving their way into our everyday life, necessarily taking into account the new routines and technologies that have changed how we live our private and community lives. Residents and radio producers use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, web comments, email and so on to build an evolving, community-driven resource about a city and its people. Radio fans and producers come together in city spaces for ‘radio’ events – promoted and documented via social networks – in the process creating live, collective listening experiences for an era of online, on-demand audio. By expanding radio reporting and storytelling into our lived, geographic spaces, these projects are remediating the qualities of intimacy, domesticity, immediacy and community that have long informed radio aesthetics. Similarly, by providing a platform for more ‘minor’ voices and assisting people to become ‘documentarians of their own lives’, they demonstrate a continuation of the communication access and public service agendas that underpin community and local public radio – which brings me to my final point of comparison.

Participation to participation

Curious City invites audiences to help curate which stories get covered from week to week, by proposing their own topics and voting for others. As the questions are investigated, audiences suggest how to approach a topic or where to look for potential clues. They are also asked to contribute to crowd-sourced answers. The questioner with the most votes might be asked to join reporters on site and later on-air when the ‘answer’ is broadcast. The website functions as an evolving database of dozens of stories available in a variety of media formats, giving online audiences a degree of control over the final presentation. Curious City facilitates a wide range of interactions, from liking, sharing and voting to participating in story research. By comparison, Detroit’s Food Economy and the Planet Money report feature additional material that expands the original radio stories and therein helps extend the afterlife of the content. They are open to user sharing and commentary, but unlike Curious City they are closed to new contributions.

For crowd-sourced projects like Mapping Main Street, the bulk of material is user-generated. It is an evolving, scalable project that – in the style of recent transmedia documentaries – offers ‘multiple perspectives of particular situations, emphasizing movements towards collaborative, open-ended knowledge’ (Hudson, 2008: 6). At the same time, the community contributions are discursively framed by professionally produced media. The website for Reinvention Stories features personal life narratives from seven subjects, while the website for the radio station WYSO acts as a database for many additional stories produced through the series. On the main website, the stories are presented in a fairly linear way, but other aspects of the interface are more playful and immersive. The site is reflexive and conversational, inviting viewers (who are addressed as local residents) to ‘Speak Your Mind’ on a series of questions, much like talkback radio does. Moving beyond experiential interface design and user-generated content, the project is participatory in other ways. Namely, the stories produced through the series are the culmination of close community collaboration and consultation.

One-off live radio events like Radio with Pictures or ‘Invisible Made Visible’ are participatory in different ways again. They do not feature direct audience collaboration in content creation (although they do sometimes feature ‘interactive’ moments, such as when audiences at ‘Invisible Made Visible’ used a custom-built phone app to accompany a musical performance by Ok Go). However, in a very fundamental way, performing live to an audience who share a physical space (with performers and with each other) is audience-centric in a way that traditional mass media can almost never be. The Hackney Hear audio app does not allow for audience commentary or contributions, instead it creates an immersive experience for listeners, which is controlled – in part – by how they choose to navigate the streets around London Fields. Finally, all the projects, including the live events, are interactive in the sense that they invite audiences to move between a range of different sites and media platforms.

Emerging forms of transmedia radio embrace more direct and active forms of audience involvement. They call upon audiences to react and interact, to share, promote and curate, and to be commentators, collaborators, contributors and co-producers. This kind of increased audience participation is integral to transmedia practice and theory. Exactly what ‘increased audience participation’ looks like will vary from project to project, but in general, academics and producers agree that transmedia content gives audiences ‘agency’, solicits their ‘input’, ‘participation’ and ‘contribution’, and on occasion might even allow audiences to ‘impact the narrative itself’ (see Davidson, 2010; Giovagnoli, 2011; Jenkins, 2007, 2010; Phillips, 2012). It is content that is more immersive, experiential and social (and therein it is believed to be inherently more participatory than the ‘passive’ spectatorship of conventional linear media). It is content that actively embraces the changes to people’s media habits that have occurred in recent years, changes that Jessica Clark and Patricia Aufderheide (2009) summarise as choice, conversation, curation, creation and collaboration (pp. 6–7). It is a model of media production that solicits sustained audience engagement because ‘having something to do also gives fans something to talk about and encourages them to spread the word to other potential audience members’ (Jenkins et al., 2013: 136). As Jenkins et al. (2013) rightly point out, conceding more control to audiences can serve a creative purpose, but more commonly, it serves commercial ones. Encouraging intense and longer term audience engagement helps to extend the lifespan, reach and profitability of a single piece of intellectual property. It creates new points of entry for different demographics, builds fan loyalty, encourages peer-to-peer marketing and supports a range of other valuable audience interactions (Bordwell, 2009). This applies not only to major Hollywood franchises but also to smaller transmedia documentaries, both of which are trying – in their own ways – to cultivate larger, more committed, more vocal audiences.

The transmedia radio projects I have looked at in this essay are not based on the same overtly commercial business model as Hollywood entertainments or even independent documentaries, but nonetheless they are soliciting increased audience engagement for economic and budgetary reasons. AIR’s Localore and MQ2 initiatives (which spawned Curious City, Reinvention Stories, Mapping Main Street, and many others not discussed in this essay) were developed in order to support cash-strapped public television and radio stations transition to an era of participatory digital culture. The media projects produced through Localore, in particular, are principally audience development experiments. They are exploring how to use participatory media to help grow audiences for local public radio, to engage audiences more deeply, to reach new demographics and to strengthen connections between stations and their communities. Participatory strategies like crowd-sourcing, user-generated content and audience–producer collaborations also extend the lifespan of a media project. Curious City and Reinvention Stories and Mapping Main Street are open-ended projects (with varying degrees of success). Their evolving, mutable structure helps to retain currency for longer, which in turn helps to reach new audiences and encourage return visits to the websites – long after the official producers may have ceased to contribute new material. Likewise, other points of expanded storytelling and interactivity – mobile apps, quizzes, maps and so on – work to maintain interest in a topic, encourage repeat visits and increase the likelihood of peer sharing. Transcripts and blogs, in particular, help to make existing audio content more discoverable via search engines like Google. They also multiply points of access for different audiences and let producers repackage and recycle content (Curious City is even in the process of being ‘franchised’ as it were; licensed to other local public radio stations). Live radio events, especially the large-scale efforts from TAL, represent an effort to diversify potential income streams (adding performance syndication, ticket sales and online purchases to the mix). Finally, creating radio projects that are more social, immersive and engaging fosters a commercially valuable emotional attachment to a story, show, presenter, station and to a community of fellow listeners (what Jenkins, 2006, calls ‘affective economics’).

However contemporary these strategies might seem, they also represent a continuation of established radio practices. According to Rebecca Coyle (2006), interactivity has traditionally been a feature of radio programmes for a variety of reasons, including being economically strategic – ‘such as the relative cheapness of talkback/telephone caller radio or request shows’ (p. 126). Online media, however, enable a much greater range of interactivity. Indeed, social media and other aspects of digital culture seem to directly remediate radio’s intimate-but-mass aesthetics, which cultivate a sense of a highly personal experience that ‘is at once solo and shared’ (Coyle, 2006: 124). Finally, the efforts to increase audience participation that characterise emerging forms of cross-platform radio also represent an extension (and amplification) of the participatory impulses that have long defined public and community broadcasting. Most of the projects discussed were produced by local public radio and community radio. ⁴ They are all shaped, to varying degrees, by the communication rights agendas and public service obligations that underpin public and community radio (this is true of The Hackney Podcast and Hackney Hear as well). Local, community-based broadcasting, in particular, has always been based on a participatory model, motivated as it is by a desire to redress mainstream media’s systemic inequalities (in terms of access, production and representation). In keeping with this agenda, transmedia radio often seeks to overcome traditional audience–producer divides, by engaging audiences more directly in storytelling, as well as in editorial, production, distribution and discursive processes. As per Clarke and Aufderheide’s (2009) description of ‘Public Media 2.0’, many of the radio projects I have discussed

leverage participatory media technologies to allow people from a variety of perspectives to work together to tackle a topic of problem – to share stories and facts, to ask hard questions, and then shape a judgement on which they can act. (p. 11)

As much as the projects I have discussed are concerned with commercial considerations – how to grow audiences, how to enlist audiences to help share and promote content, how to wring more (more eyeballs, more content and more valuable interactions) from a single piece of media – they also enlist participatory digital media tools to achieve older goals of widening access to the means of communication. Pre-existing concepts of ‘participation’, which were based on a communication access agenda, are merging with newer concepts of ‘participation’ as defined by commercial entertainment and digital culture. That is, a participatory model based on facilitating access to the means of communication, and improving visibility and representation for non-commercial or marginal voices, exists alongside a newer participatory model based on concepts of fandom, audience development, affective economics and media branding.

Conclusion

In many ways, the examples I have discussed are illustrative of the now familiar story of legacy media’s transition to an era of digitally enabled participatory culture. Closed, classical narrative modes of storytelling have given way to more reflexive, collaborative and networked modes. Top-down, one-to-many ‘push’ media are replaced with multi-directional media. A rigid audience/producer divide becomes more flexible and porous. The examples are also illustrative of widespread convergence at the level of technologies, platforms, genres, sectors and personnel. Alongside broadcast audio, the projects routinely incorporate websites, text, video, photographs, maps, social media and even live theatre. Another key trend, which has been the focus of this essay, is the appropriation of media strategies most closely associated with commercial entertainment by new forms of cross-platform radio. Like other transmedia content, transmedia radio expands the edges of conventional storytelling. Stories become more dispersed and hybrid, serial and experiential rather than finite and linear. This open-ended structure encourages audience contributions, but it also enables media franchising and content recycling. The projects are responsive to more ‘active’ and ‘engaged’ media audiences, who uncover new content via a range of platforms and who are willing to follow a project’s expansion across many more. Audience participation is recognised as economically strategic, a way to extend the lifespan of a piece of media content, increase traffic, increase peer-to-peer marketing and ultimately increase affective value.

The more hybrid and ‘transmedia’ these projects become, the more removed one imagines they should be from their radio roots. But as I have tried to show, they also demonstrate what I think is a distinctly radio-based approach to new media content and cultures. Variations on first-person storytelling, personal essay, documentary and other genres that prioritise ‘real’ and ‘unmediated’ voices are commonplace. ‘Minor’ and ‘non-professional’ voices are given a platform for self-representation and expression, not just in the form of user-generated content, commentary or crowd-sourcing, but also through facilitated collaboration with professional media producers. Live radio events offer heightened forms of appointment listening, which re-imagine the collective, public-building experience of radio for an era of on-demand audio. Radio is integrated into our daily, domestic routines, partly through the use of pervasive social media but also through an emphasis on place-based, local storytelling. For emerging forms of expanded radio, characteristics routinely associated with the medium of radio – authenticity, intimacy, immediacy, interactivity, domesticity, community – have taken on renewed significance.

Transmedia radio emerges primarily from public and community broadcasting contexts, with limited funding. It is low key and often extremely localised. The stories are small, intimate or personal. Transmedia radio will likely never have the same visibility or longevity as transmedia titles produced by the major entertainment companies, whose audience numbers and box office receipts run into the hundreds of millions. Radio is undergoing a period of profound and fascinating transformation, and the new projects and programme content emerging from radio’s contemporary contexts – whatever you want to call them – deserve our attention, or else we risk once again relegating radio to invisibility.