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\title{Long Term Shifts in Radio Content}
\author{Matthew Gray}
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\section*{Introduction}

Radio, over the years has shifted from being an interactive and
experimental medium, to being a broadcast medium.  During the time
which radio has been a primarily broadcast, it has gone through two
substantial phases.  These two stages are the broadcast narrative and
broadcast music stages. This paper will focus on this latter shift.  

\par

Radio's initial broadcast content focused on narrative content.  Radio
shows would tell episodic stories, not too distant in character from
present day television broadcasts.  In fact, it seems clear that the
popularization of television is what brought about this shift in
content.

\section*{Narrative Content}

While in the earlier phase of radio, there was a mix of both musical
and narrative programming, the narrative content was typically awkward
in format, though a variety of clever measures to overcome this
awkwardness were adopted.

\par

It is not surprising that this format was somewhat difficult to adapt
to.  Essentially all narrative forms before had some visual component,
or, in the case of pure text, were random access.  Even simple
traditional oral storytelling came with the features of gesture,
movement, and facial nuance.  Clearly radio lacked these, and more
obviously lacked the even more directly visual features of theatre and
similar narrative forms.

\par

Radio narratives worked around these problems by incorporating
extensive use of verbal description of visual information by the
characters (``Look at that, isn't that a pretty shiny stone in that
gold ring'').  While strained, it served the purpose.  Many narratives
also succeeded by focusing disproportionately on dialog, or other
components that can be effectively expressed almost completely
aurally.

\par

While radio did succeed in telling stories, it lacked much.  One might
try to come to radio's defense as a valuable narrative form, but given
that upon the arrival of television, radio narrative essentially
disappeared entirely from radio, the case would be somewhat weak.
Radio managed as a functional, but inferior narrative form.

\section*{Non-narrative Content}

With the rise of television, radio became entire displaced as a
narrative medium and radio was forced to find other types of content
to focus on.  Capitalizing on its fundamentally aural nature, music
programming became the dominant content of radio.

\par

Radio today continues to be dominated by music programming, but finds
a range of other content that plays to the features and restrictions
of radio.  ``Talk radio'' is well suited to this medium, as the
complete focus is on conversation.  While this format works on
televesion as well, it adds little, and hence radio can compete in
this area.  Other content, often music related, is provided by DJs as
an add on to the music content.

\par

Further, the advent of the car radio, and other portable radios opened
up the demand for news, traffic and weather radio.  In this case the
incompleteness of radio becomes an advantage.  A more complete medium,
like television demands sufficiently more attention that it is not
suitable for use in a car, or other on-the-go activities.

\section*{Speculation}

It is worth considering what the impact of Internet technologies is
likely to have on radio.  It doesn't seem that the Internet is likely
to usurp any substantial amount of radio's current content, the way
television did of radio's narrative content, but there are certainly
possibilities.  Radio style audio broadcasting is now possible over
the Internet, as well as distribution of audio data via other means.
While having many of the same features of radio, Internet audio
capabilities remain sufficiently different in terms of capabilities
and limitations that it is not likely to be an area of transition.

\par

Equally so, news and talk radio content is less likely to be adopted
by the Internet in the same way that radio presents them.  Clearly,
news and weather, and to some extent traffic information is available
on the Internet, but due to the way it is accessed, it is not likely
to compete with radio any time soon.  Equally so, discussion and
``talk'' systems on the Internet are more likely to become their own
media format altogether, rather than displace talk radio.

\section*{Conclusion}

Radio has been around long enough to be considered a mature medium.
One of the important steps in this maturation was the transition from
narrative content, which did not suit the medium well, to radio
specific forms of non-narrative content.

\par

The introduction of ``new media'' doesn't seem likely to substantially
shift radio's current content.  How this new media might affect the
content of television may in fact be more similar to the way
television affected radio.

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