Università degli Studi di Salerno, Salerno, Italy Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, Sociali e della Comunicazione

Felice Addeo Assistant Professor - Researcher faddeo@unisa.it Paolo Diana Assistant Professor - Researcher diana@unisa.it Viola Grasso – Radio Speaker grassoviola@gmail.com Maria Esposito - PhD Student maria.esposito86@gmail.com

Italian Academic Web-Radio:

A Workshop For New Media Professions

The Radio is one of the oldest mass media and it has often been considered at the end of the road as every new medium entered the social sphere. However, radio is still there and it seems to well adapt to the social and technological changes caused by new media (Cavicchia Scalamonti, Pecchinedda, 2001; Flichy, 2004; Jeanneney 1996; Menduni, 2001).

Radio staffs have been capable of shaping their programming and their professional figures according to languages of new media.

Radio has also found a new life online thanks to new broadcasting opportunities: podcasting and web-radios above all.

The hybridization between radio and new media technologies is coherent with the Convergent Culture paradigm, in which traditional media and new media tend to hybrid, at the same time giving to users a central role never played before (Jenkins 2008; Wu Ming, 2007).

Introduction

The web ensures the possibility to produce and broadcast contents easily and at lower cost. The limited production costs and the low equipment requirements favored a great proliferation of Academic web-radios nationwide.

Academic web-radios introduced innovative processes in the content production and consumptions (Ghiardo, 2011).

Production Consumption

The web-radios provide a more participatory and customized way of consumption. Most of the academic web-radios have Podcast, thanks to which the radio products can be downloaded and listened by user when and where they want.

The web-radios

The web-radios are radio stations that use the Web as unique tool for the content diffusion; they take advantage of the interactive dynamics and social networks viral mechanisms to gain notoriety and to establish a stricter and more direct connection with their audience (Menduni, 2001).

The web-radios are particularly widespread among young people. Web-radios success is confirmed by the pervading diffusion of these hybrid media forms within the Universities (Ghiardo, 2011).

The Academic web-radios arise mainly with a bottom-up process, as the result of the students’ initiatives and efforts.

The web-radios

First Italian Web-radio was developed by University of Siena in 1999, within the "Facoltà di Frequenza” project. Since 1999, there were a real widespread dissemination of Academic web-radios in Italy. The web-radios diffusion recorded its greater increase between 2005 and 2010, culminating in the establishment of more than 30 web-radios

History

Purpose of the research Identify and investigate the possibilities of training and professionalization due to the Academic web-radios network presence across the country. The research is aimed, in particular, at studying a new profession developed in the context of the Italian Academic web-radios: the station manager.

Methodology The research goal has been pursued through the use of a combined research approach (mixed method), based on the joint use of quantitative and qualitative techniques in the data collection and analysis. In particular: analysis of the statutes of the main Italian Academic web-

radios; in-depth interviews to 15 “privileged witnesses” .

Research Design

Methodology

Interviews were conducted online, through the Skype software. The use of Skype allowed us to reach easily all the interviewees, providing us with a lot of advantages: the reduction of costs and time and the removal of geographical barriers, that allowed us to interview, during the same day, station managers coming from different Italian regions.

Interviews analysis

Interpretative criteria

Conformity between narration and referents

Congruence between interpretations

Adequacy referents-narration- transcriptions

Relevancy (Diana, Montesperelli, 2005)

Despite the informal and frequently voluntary nature of the commitment, the Academic web-radios are very structured and well-organized.

The web-radio human resources can be divided into two main

categories: 1) Employees, people who have the responsibility of organizing

and managing the structure, receiving a fee for the work performed;

2) Volunteers, people who make their contribution to the project as volunteers. They are mostly students moved by passion who work without receiving any financial reward.

Web-radios organization

An important role is performed by the station manager, an innovative professional, typical of the Academic web-radios, even if it is not clearly defined yet. A station manager has to coordinating and supervising the collective activities. A station manager must:

make executive the decisions established by the editor;

coordinate the staff, overseeing and supervising all the radio activities;

monitor the objectives and ensure the goals achievement;

verify (in partnership with the web manager) that the programs archive is constantly updated;

design and develop new programs.

The station manager

“I have very different responsibilities: for example, every week I have to design the radio show schedule. A very important task is to understand how the web-radio could improve its communication strategy, both inside the and outside the University (internal and external communication) [..] Then I have to organize events: also in this case, I have to follow an event from its beginning to its end”.

“I have a representative role. I represent the radio within the University, but also outside, when I have relationships with our sponsors and clients. I’m like a company manager”.

“The most important thing with a station manager have to deal are people [...] I work as ‘tutor’ for people who start working in the web-radio, giving them support and motivation”.

The access to the station manager role does not provide a standard and crystallized career path. In some cases, the role is the result of a real career advancement by people who are already part of the structure and who, thanks to their experience and to the skills acquired, are passed to an higher position. In other cases, the station manager corresponds to the person who started the web-radio project within the University.

The station manager role

“I have achieved this position dedicating myself to this work. I have been rewarded, above all, for my passion and my hard work”.

“I designed and developed the web-radio project…so, after the project being approved, I became its responsible”.

“I am part of the project from its start. At the beginning, I was responsible for music programming [..] over the time, from a student, volunteer I became the artistic director and then the station manager”.

The absence of a canonical career path is also expressed by the different academic curricula of the interviewees. Asked about the essential requirements for accessing to the station manager role, respondents, heterogeneous for training and cultural background, are in agreement with the importance of having informal skills such as flexibility and multitasking.

The station manager requirements

“First of all, it is important to have skills that can be defined as multidisciplinary or multitasking, because every day you have to deal with different tasks and activities”.

“You can acquire this type of experience just on field, learning by doing, getting your hands dirty”.

The professionalization aspects

Despite the informal and voluntary nature of the commitment, the station manager experience, gained within a University environment, favors the development of different skills and abilities: technical skills like designing and developing a radio program, organizing cultural events, managing relationships with institutional authority. Moreover, this type of experience favors the development of interpersonal skills such as problem solving, leadership attitude and decision making under stress and critical conditions.

“If an Academic radio is well structured, it allows you to capture a method. This method, especially if it is a serious and rigorous method, can be transferred in other working situations”.

“Playing a coordination role within this type of Academic structure is very difficult and requires multitasking skills. First of all, technical and practical skills: for example, filling out a budget or organizing events”.

“Working with other people and combining the individual needs [...] I think it's a way of working that can help you in every situation”.

Accessibility, interactivity and flexibility are the success key factors of the academic web-radios nationwide. They act as concrete and effective workshops for testing effective and innovative communication formulas, developing creativity and, above all, rising new professionals that are able at managing the ongoing changes with flexibility and expertise.

The station manager can be included among new professions born after the technological revolution and the advent of Web 2.0. In particular, the hybridization between radio and new technologies and the spread of this mixed media forms within the University led to the introduction of an innovative professional, able to manage changes with flexibility and expertise.

Being a new and very innovative professional, Station manager role is not clearly and institutionally defined yet within the different academic web-radios experiences. However, data analysis underlines an important common feature: the acquisition of the fundamental skills of managing, with flexibility and adaptability, different tasks and responsibilities.

Conclusions

The Academic web-radios are effective field of training and professionalization for young people. The station manager experience, in fact, favors the development of various abilities and skills, making young people engaging in this role real professionals. Those people, thanks to the experience gained in an Academic context, can acquire core and transversal skills, becoming more competitive on the labor market.

Conclusions

“Developing team leading abilities, the station manager is able at solving problems, at organizing the human resources, at developing new strategies. He is like a manager and he can transfer his skills in other working contexts”.

“Thanks to station manager experience, I find a job, becoming a communication manager for my University”.