Radio Programming Diversity in the Era of Consolidation

Barriers to Establishing Low-Power FM Radio in the United States

“…In many cases the shifting emphasis away from local issues resulted in the downsizing or elimination of news staffs. Seeking to maximize profits, network stations also began focusing their programming to appeal to wealthier listeners, leaving fewer stations offering programming popular among minority listeners (Ofori 1999;Berry and Waldfogel 2001;Chambers 2003;Warf 2003). 3…”

Radio as a Successful Local Storyteller in Los Angeles: A Case Study of KKBT and KPCC

“…Massive consolidation has significantly reduced the number of different owners of radio stations throughout the country, and the majority of stations are owned by only a small group of companies. Although research has shown an increase in the number of formats available to listeners in many markets, it has also shown a significant reduction of direct competition between stations using the same format, resulting in less diversity of programming (Chambers, 2001(Chambers, , 2003Wirth, 2001Wirth, , 2002. Formats that do not attract large audiences and substantial advertising revenue are often altered or eliminated.…”

Provision of Internet privacy and market conditions: An empirical analysis

“…Although a market characteristic was implicitly used in these studies as a conditional variable for the presence of certain website features, numerous market variables were never actually analyzed in predictive models. Empirical studies that explicitly model the relationship between market structure and content are abundant in the broadcasting sector (e.g., Berry & Waldfogel, 2001;Chambers, 2003;Napoli, 2004;Yan & Park, 2009), but few such comparable studies of websites exist. The present study contributes toward filling this area of Internet research by statistically examining how market and business characteristics affected the level of privacy provision in a group of commercial sites sampled in 2008.…”