In these days of world wide reach I like the idea of a local radio station. This is exactly what it is since any radio transmission is only able to reach a target audience within a certain area.
This makes it a community radio station which is great since I’m interested in local matters.
I don’t know if this counts for much these days…
I think that local news, emergencies, gossip is now pretty much on whatsapp and Facebook. Where I live there are multiple FB sites for the suburb (though only one official one run by the residents association) and two whatsapp groups per street (one for security, one for other stuff).
If you look at another definition of “community”, EG Afrikaans speakers, Roman Catholics, Jewish folks, white males 50+ with a mid-life crisis and kids out of the house, then the geographic reach changes and there are stations that serve some of the communities I’ve mentioned. But even then it’s tricky as those groups are not as monolithic as we think.
Where I see quite a lot of stations (on youtube, internet radio, podcasts etc etc) carefully targetted is music - especially “classic rock”, but more generally for older folks who yearn for the music of their teens and 20s which mainstream stations avoid like the plague because that’s not where their money is.
But almost anything you want to hear is being said online somewhere.
There is a problem these days, encapsulated in a song I recently heard (which was really having a go at politicians, but I suspect that the news and even a lot of entertainment has the same problems these days):" they tell you what you want but never what you need."
I’d like a show that surprises me a bit. Like Bruce Millar’s show that I mentioned a few posts back. You knew you were going to get a mix of humour, music, chat and expert opinion, but you just vaguely knew that and you never knew EXACTLY what you were going to hear.
Which, for me, was the attraction. But it may have had other folks reaching for the dial.
In Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical there is a song, which he basically copied verbatim from a poem by T.Ss Elliot, about the magical Mr. Mistoffelees. There is a particular line I always misheard, which to me so clearly describes a lot of modern information. The misheard lyrics: At least we all heard, that somebody heard, which is incontestable proof!
(The actual line is “At least we all heard someone who purred, which is incontestable proof of his singular magical powers”).