Radio (media)
The radio (understood as radiophony or broadcasting, terms not strictly synonymous) is a means of communication that is based on sending of audio signals over radio waves, although the term is also used for other forms of sending audio over distances such as Internet radio.
Radio communication or radio communication
Radio communication is the technology that enables the transmission of signals through the modulation (of their frequency or amplitude) of electromagnetic waves. These waves do not require a physical means of transport, so they can propagate through a vacuum.
A radio wave is created when a charged particle (for example, an electron) spreads out at a frequency in the radio frequency (RF) region of the electromagnetic spectrum. When the radio wave acts on an electrical conductor (the antenna), it induces a movement of electrical charge (electric current) that can be transformed into audio signals or other types of information-carrying signals.
History of radio communication
It is difficult to attribute the invention of the radio to a single person. In different countries, paternity is recognized in a local key: Aleksandr Stepanovich Popov made his first demonstrations in Saint Petersburg, Russia; Nikola Tesla in Saint Louis (Missouri); Guillermo Marconi in the United Kingdom or Commander Julio Cervera in Spain.
In 1873, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell formulated the theory of electromagnetic waves, which are the basis of radio. In 1887, the German physicist Heinrich Hertz confirmed Maxwell's theories, discovering how to produce and detect electromagnetic waves, and in 1894 the Serbian Nikola Tesla made his first public demonstration where he broadcast on the radio. Soon after, in 1895, the Italian Guillermo Marconi built the first radio system, managing in 1901 to send signals to the other side of the Atlantic, through 3,360 km of ocean; but since he did it with Tesla's patents, the work is attributed to the latter.
The Spaniard Julio Cervera, who worked for three months in 1898 in Marconi's private laboratory, is, according to research carried out by a professor at the University of Navarra, the inventor of online radio: Marconi invented wireless telegraphy before Cervera wires, but he did not work on radio until 1913, while Cervera was the one who solved the problems of wireless telephony, what we know today as radio, by transmitting the human voice -and not signals- wirelessly between Alicante and Ibiza in 1902, and came to register the patent in four countries: Spain, England, Germany and Belgium.
The first regular entertainment broadcasts began in 1920 in Argentina. On August 27, from the roof of the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires, the Sociedad Radio Argentina broadcast Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal, thus beginning the programming of the first broadcasting station in the world. Its creator, organizer and the first broadcaster in the world was Dr. Enrique Telémaco Susini. By 1925, there were already twelve radio stations in that city and another ten in the interior of the country.
In the United States, the first station of a regular and informative nature is considered by many authors to be station 8MK (now WWJ), from Detroit (United States), belonging to the newspaper The Detroit News, although many authors believe that it is the KDKA from Pittsburgh that began broadcasting in November 1920, because it obtained a commercial license before that.[citation required]
In the 1920s, thermionic valve amplification revolutionized both radio receivers and radio transmitters.
In Mexico, in 1921 the first transmission of the first Radio Station was made. It happened in Monterrey, Nuevo León, thanks to the engineer Constantino de Tárnava with the temporary name TND which after use of various nominals obtained in 1929 the indicative XEH.
In 1933 Edwin Armstrong described a high quality radio system, less sensitive to radio interference than AM, using frequency modulation (FM). At the end of the decade, this procedure was established commercially, when Armstrong himself set up a station with this system.
In the 1950s, radio technology underwent a large number of improvements that resulted in the widespread use of the transistor.
In 1957, the Regency firm introduced the first transistorized receiver, small enough to be carried in a pocket and powered by a small battery. It was reliable because since it did not have valves it did not heat up. During the next twenty years transistors displaced tubes completely, except for very high powers or frequencies where the transistor was economically unfeasible.
Between the decades of the 1960s and 1980s, radio entered a period of decline due to competition from television and the fact that several stations were abandoning shortwave broadcasting (with global reach) moving to the VHF range (which only has a range of hundreds of kilometers), with more manageable antenna sizes.
In the 1990s, new digital technologies began to be applied to the world of radio. Sound quality increases and tests are made with satellite radio (also called HD radio), this technology allows a resurgence in interest in radio.
In 2007 the digital radio DAB+ was created. DAB+ radio is the most significant advance in radio technology since the introduction of FM and AM stereo.
In addition, the radio played a very important role at certain moments in history, such as the Carnation Revolution, this conflict occurred in Portugal and led to a dictatorship, the independence of certain territories, a factor that took place after the dictatorship. The radio played a song called "Y despues del adiós " in which a verse was sung that said that the people are the ones who order the most in the city. Faced with this and a few long years of dictatorship, the people rose up, occupying the strategic points of the country that were prohibited by the regime. Twenty minutes after the broadcast of this song, the military uprising began, turning this song as a symbol of freedom. The population began to come out to support the rebels, handing over carnations, they were placing them in the muzzles of rifles and cannons to show that they did not want to start a violent revolution. In this way, thanks to the broadcast of the song on the radio and the union of the people, fifty years of dictatorship came to an end. The country was restored by creating a New State that changed democracy in Portugal. Parallel to these conflicts, the radio also plays a very important role in other conflicts such as the Hiroshima Bomb, the arrival of man on the Moon or the Nazi invasion of France. During all these conflicts, it played a very important role in communication and was very useful in putting an end to movements that did not favor the people.
Low Power Radios
In the recent history of radio, low-power radios have appeared, constituted under the idea of free radio or community radio, the idea of opposing the imposition of a commercial monologue of messages and that allow a greater proximity of the radio with the community, in different parts of the world. These types of radio use transmitters whose output power is in the range of ½ 40 watts (watts) and have a physical size similar to a brick. This technology, added to other low-cost equipment (mixers, players, filter, antenna), allows you to put your own voice on the air.
Internet Radio
Today, Internet radio is advancing rapidly. For this reason, many of the big radio stations begin to experiment with Internet broadcasts, the first and easiest is an online broadcast, which reaches a global audience, in fact its rapid development has led to a rivalry with television, which will go hand in hand with the development of broadband Internet. An interesting variant of Internet radio is the podcast, which consists of a broadcast broadcast by anyone, simply using a microphone, a computer and a place to upload audio files.
Digital Radio
To date, there are three known digital broadcasting systems with global impact: DAB (digital audio transmission), IBOC (in-band on-channel) and DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale), but this one refers more to the radio found in mobile phones. Its stations have better quality and more advanced equipment, but to develop this one you need a small antenna that can be headphones.[citation required]
Analog blackout
- 2015-2019 United Kingdom
- 2017 Norway
- 2019 Denmark
- 2022 Sweden
- 2024 Switzerland
- 2025 Germany
Radio language
As a means of communication, it requires a specific form of transmission. The act of speaking reaches its maximum expression, so it is essential for the radio journalist to control his voice, which is his work tool. For Zanabria, "the timbre, the tone, the intensity, the intonation, the accent, the modulation, the speed and the intervals are the nuances that determine the style of the radio".
A good vocalization and reading naturally is necessary to avoid making grammatical errors and to understand the message to be transmitted well.
The radio language is made up of rules that make communication possible. Each one of them contributes a necessary value for the understanding of the message:
- The voice brings the dramatic burden.
- The word, the conceptual image.
- Sound describes the physical context.
- Music conveys the feeling.
- Silence, valuation.
Radio message
The radio transmits its message in the form of sound. According to Mariano Cebrián, professor of journalism, "the technique is so decisive that it is incorporated into the expression as another signifying system". The radio message is produced thanks to technical and human mediation, which expresses an acoustic narrative context. According to Vicente Mateos, "the radio message must comply with certain communicative principles so that it reaches the listener effectively", such as:
- Hearing sounds.
- Understanding the contents.
- Contextualization.
Radio language: radio writing
If timeliness and speed are the most relevant aspects of information, it is clear that simultaneity and immediacy render information a great service. The radio will be the first to supply 'the first news' of an event and this is one of the main characteristics of radio journalism. Radio as an information medium can play a very different role. In addition to conveying current events as quickly as possible, you can increase public understanding through explanation and analysis. This in-depth study of the topics has the advantage of being able to be exposed by those who know it, without going through the sieve of non-experts —in this case, journalists— unless it is to give appropriate communicative forms to the medium. In this reflective sense, it also has the capacity to restore reality through its fragmentary representations conveyed by its acoustic contour. Thus, in front of the enunciative brevity of the radio news stands the report, the interview, the round table, the explanation; in short, the radio in depth.
In this way the radio opposes the theories that place it as incapable of a communication of greater level than the simple transmission of news, when the "incapacity" has always resided in the ignorance of the nature of the radio phenomenon.Faus, 1973
On other occasions, which are the majority, the effort is due much more to perfect knowledge of the environment than to ignorance. In this perspective, reducing it to a medium that supplies 'nervous information by system' It contributes to offering a biased vision of the environment that makes it difficult to understand social phenomena. The importance of radio as an information medium is due to yet another characteristic: its ability to communicate with an audience that does not need specific training to decode the message. This fact is important for a public that does not know how to read, but above all it becomes more important for all those who do not want or do not have time to read. Thus, the radio plays an important informative role in underdeveloped societies with a high percentage of illiterates. This role is even more important in overdeveloped societies in which the organization of time leads information seekers to pick it up on the radio as it allows them to carry out other actions simultaneously. It must be added that, in general, these societies are in full swing of audiovisual culture, which displaces printed culture to a second place.
The same characteristics that make radio the information medium par excellence influence and determine the structure of radio information, which has two essential characteristics: brevity and simplicity. Both based on the enunciative clarity that contributes to the effectiveness of the radio message. When writing a journalistic text for the radio, you have to think that you are going to write a text to be heard, to be told, and not to be read. This attitude will facilitate the difficult task of offering in a few short and simple sentences the same information that in the newspaper will occupy several paragraphs of literary elaboration. In short, a complete change of mentality is needed to write for radio. This change in mentality affects three aspects: punctuation, grammatical structure and language.
Punctuation
It's hard to change punctuation habits that have been cultivated for years, but it's a must. On radio, the punctuation serves to associate the expressed idea with its sound unit and, therefore, to mark phonic and non-grammatical units as is usual in print culture. To mark these phonic units, only two signs of the wide range that writing offers us are needed. These are the comma and the point.
- Coma
In the radio text, it marks a small pause that introduces a variation in the intonation and gives rise to a renewal of air if necessary. This sign should not be used if in oral expression it is not necessary to make that pause, even if its placement in the printed wording is correct. Any alteration of this rule contributes to the fact that the reading of that text is just that, a 'reading'; and not a 'spoken expression' of some ideas.
- Period
It is the signal that indicates the end of a complete phonic unit. The intonation resolution that marks the point can be partial (in the case of points that mark the end of a sentence) and total (in the points that mark the end of a paragraph). The point indicates one more intonation resolution, which is the one corresponding to the point that indicates the end of the speech and that has a culminating character. The end of a sentence indicates a longer pause than the comma and the end of a paragraph indicates a somewhat longer pause. If these signs are correctly applied, breathing will not encounter any difficulty and its performance will not cause any distortion to the intonation.
The rest of the signs are almost completely unnecessary. There is no reason to justify the use of the semicolon (), the colon (:) or the semicolon (.-). With regard to parentheses and hyphens, it must be taken into account that in most cases additional ideas are introduced that could disturb the understanding of the main idea that we are trying to express.
Grammatical structure
It is used in radio to pursue clarity and simplicity of expression. Clarity is going to be the main characteristic of radio writing. A clarity that should be extensible to other journalistic media, since it responds to what Núñez Ladeveze calls "journalistic functions of communication": maximum concentration of information, speed of reading and minimum effort of interpretation.
These characteristics are more important in radio, if possible, since the decoding is done in the present and there is no possibility of revision. There are two more reasons why it is advisable to use a clear and simple expression in radio writing. On the one hand, the diversity of the audience and, secondly, the different audience situations. Added to the heterogeneity are the different situations in which the receiver finds himself at the time of decoding. The radio helps to make the reception of the message compatible with other activities, especially those that are manual in nature. The sentences must be short, and for this it is necessary to resort to the simplest grammatical structure, which is the one made up of subject, verb and complement. The use of subordinate phrases is not recommended, but the coordinated ones are, since they introduce thematic redundancy, a positive category in radio speech.
To avoid the monotony of one short phrase after another, two types of resources are available. On the one hand, the combination of simple sentences with those to which additional material has been added. The other is the intonation links that give continuity to the ideas. It is about writing a colloquial style. Therefore, the principle of the economy of words must be in our mind when writing a radio text.
Radio language
With this denomination we do not refer exclusively to oral language. Music, noise, silence and special effects are also part of the radio language.
This language must use a currently used vocabulary, always opting for the most common acceptance of a term. It is also necessary to use defining terms from the perspective of the economy of words that we have accepted as objective. In this sense, adjectives are almost always unnecessary since they provide little information. Their use in radio is only acceptable when the nuance they provide helps to specify the idea being transmitted. The adverb should also be removed, since its modifying action is generally unnecessary if defining terms are used. The most justifiable are those of time and place.
The verb plays a very important role in radio information. To be more exact, the tense of the verb, since it is one of the elements that denotes the most actuality. In writing the radio news, the verb must be used in the present indicative and in the active voice. The past is not news on the radio. The present denotes immediacy and, therefore, actuality. In case of not being able to use the present, we will resort to the closest past tense, which is the perfect. As a last resort, the indefinite.
As we mentioned before, topicality and immediacy are the main characteristics of radio information. This topicality must be evident in the information services of a station and for this, those resources that highlight said topicality on radio must be taken into account. We can establish three large groups: technical, writing and programming resources.
- Technical resources
We can point out the use of the telephone, the mobile units and the recordings at the scene of the events.
- Cash resources
The use of the verb in the present tense, as well as the use of words and phrases that denote actuality, such as, "in these moments...", "when starting this transmission.... 4;.
- Programme resources
The inclusion of new aspects of the news given in previous information services. It is not enough to change the wording of the news, but it is necessary to offer new data, new angles and repercussions throughout the day.
As for hyphens, it should be noted that the law of the pendulum has been applied to their consideration. It has gone from using the script even to cough to total improvisation. Lately, in radio, indicative scripts or guidelines are used. This type of script contains the essential technical and thematic indications to achieve the coupling of the director and the editor-presenter. The indicative script will contain the timing of each intervention, the person who will carry it out and special attention to all the audio sources involved.
Taking into account all the characteristics of radio writing, it is concluded that a text should not be read on the radio if it is not previously reworked, not only to give it its own style, but mainly because the structure and conception of the message of agency or communications, is structurally that of written expression, and on many occasions it can lead to error or poor reception that the listener has of it.
Radio language: radio identity
Artistic production is a dimension that runs through everything that happens on the air of a station. But it goes beyond the pieces that rotate in a schedule. It is a constitutive dimension of the air, closely linked with what a radio proposes, with the identity and with the orientation it wants to achieve.
Through a sound aesthetic, it accounts for the identity of each project, the profile and the way in which that profile is heard. It is not reduced only to the separators, institutional or curtains that sound on the radio, but it covers a number of conceptual, political and technical decisions of each station.
The challenge of all radio productions is to articulate their programs with a common denominator. Generate a continuity in which content and art are harmoniously and attractively linked, taking into account the diversification of the audience and their levels of attention. For this, the artistic production (institutional, advances, musicalization, publicity) is very important to generate this synthesis.
Types of Art
- Opening: is an edited piece that will serve to open the program. This encompasses different types of nuances that can be used to reach that result: locutions, music, effects, file sounds. The point of this piece is to show a break in the air, that is, in some way, to put an end to something (it can be an advertising soda, a musical theme, an informative one, etc.) and to give rise to the start of a program.
- Cortina: its main function is to generate an atmosphere referring to the type of information that will be handled at that exact moment of the program. There are both instrumental and sung.
- Separator: such his name, aims to “separate” artistically two other resources that cannot go together either by their nature or by a merely aesthetic question. It can also be used to open or close generic blocks, to go and return from a tanda, etc. A separator may belong to the station or to the programs of the same. They usually have curtain and/or some effect, the duration does not exceed 20".
- Pill: is a radio piece that can be several minutes and is longer than a separator. This piece seeks to show or define the identity of the program in an indirect way; artistically counting philosophy, idiosyncrasy, target and with guides to listeners, what the program consists without directly showing the contents.
A good exercise is to listen to and compare various institutional pieces from different radios, to glimpse what meanings are built in them, what purposes are translated into those sounds and what audiences are configured.
Musicalization
The sum of songs that are heard on a radio is part of its identity. Musicalizing is not just playing the songs we like. It also brings research into play: learning about new artists and songs and experimenting with criteria for organizing them. Contemplating the moments of the day and the habits of those who listen to us are aspects to take into account when designing this musical invitation. In each station there is at least one criterion for musicalization: hits, retro songs or music in Spanish are some of the possible profiles.
Advertising
The objective of advertising language is to persuade, to convince the listener that the advertised product is the solution to their problem or that it should be part of their daily life. For this reason, many advertisements aim to generate new consumption habits in those who listen to them.
Advertising is a format that allows all the expressive resources of radio language to be put into play. Like many short pieces, it works by repetition. That is why it is very common to frequently hear the same spot through a strip of programming.
Radio genres
Journalistic genres
Radio is the medium in which some genres of classic journalism reach their maximum expression. An example is the interview, the debate and the social gathering. The adaptation of journalistic genres to the radio is characterized by the expressive richness and the personal character that is incorporated into the message transmitted. The keys to good communication are concise, clear and direct content. In this way, a greater attraction effect will be produced on the audience.
- Radiophonic genres could be classified as follows:
- The report
- Chronicle
- Criticism
- The comment
- The editorial
- The interview
- Tertulia
- The debate
- The wedge
- The summary
Non-journalistic genres
- Radioteatro
- Transmission of music