Graciela Orozco (San Francisco State University) believes in the power of community radio to reach a wide audience. For stations serving rural or marginalized populations, how can we better measure their reach and impact?

Undermeasuring Rural Audiences

“Both my Radio Bilingüe project and the Kentucky project are efforts to find out more about who the audiences are for stations located in rural areas. This is important because Arbitron data -- the standard audience-measurement service in the radio industry -- is very limited in these contexts. It’s not cost effective for them to go into these areas. They focus on the larger markets. So you have a lot of community radio stations that are based in rural areas and providing a very important service to their community, but don’t have a way of showing what they’re doing.” 

“Offering an alternative way to go about knowing more about who’s listening and what are their concerns and issues, I think it’s an important service – not only to the community, but also to that particular radio station. Then, they can look at what they need to do to better meet the needs of their audiences. I believe radio is a vehicle to reach marginalized populations. And it’s an excellent vehicle to reach marginalized populations. My research  is one way of knowing more about the needs of those marginalized people.”

(Graciela at the Hillbilly Days Festival 2008)

Going to the Source

“I really believe that you have to go to the community and get their input and get their ideas in order to make any project work. You can’t just come in assuming anything, and you can’t assume that you know people’s situations and what people are hoping to create and to develop. I think that as a researcher, I have to come in from a position of not knowing.” 

In the instance of WMMT: “We had developed the instrument in collaboration with WMMT, the NFCB, and myself, and yet when we took that instrument and we shared it with the people who were going to do the interviews, two of them said, ‘I can’t imagine that people are going to feel very comfortable if we ask them how much money they make.’ So we said, ‘Fine, let’s just throw it out!’ And it wasn’t a big deal because census data will give us that kind of information, so I felt we’re really not compromising the information we want to gain.  But at the same time, I thought it was important for us to respect the culture of the people and to honor that request.”

Communicating to Build Relationships

“The collaboration required a lot of phone calling on my part – of getting in touch with all of these different people and really making that personal connection. Even though I had not met them in person, just talking about the project, why it was important, what their role was going to be, sharing as much as I knew about the project up to that point, and helping them to understand what we were doing. But myself, also getting information about their location, what they knew about these festivals where we were going to be. So it really is relationship building. And it took place by phone!”

“You do have to find a way to build that relationship, and you also have to find a way to bridge cultural differences. They were looking at me to bring my expertise in the field of research and my own experience with community radio, but beyond that… there were a lot of differences that I was aware of and that I knew had to be overcome. I think that, in general, would be a challenge for people who are trying to work collaboratively, realizing that it’s a process of give and take – that sometimes you have to be flexible. My advice there would be to figure that out very early on in the process. Because if those challenges are insurmountable, if people don’t want to compromise, then, don’t have a project!”

“We have to make adjustments, and I think in the long term it will pay off.”

 The interview team in Pike County, KY (photos: Graciela Orozco)

Surprising Findings for WMMT

Based on a sample of 273 interviewees, the research team was able to develop a profile of the WMMT audience. Of the 61% of interviewees who said they were WMMT listeners, 70% of them had listened to the station within the last 24 hours or within the last week. “That was such a strong indication of the value of this radio station in these communities,” Graciela says. 

“But one of big surprises of the study, was when we asked people to identify what was the most important issue in their community, across both listeners and non-listeners, we found out there were two areas.” One was the lack of jobs, the other was prescription drug abuse – “and it came up for both people who listen and people who don’t listen to this station.” 

Graciela describes the epidemic of prescription drug abuse due to a history of doctors prescribing painkillers to the coal miners in this region to keep them working. This practice has lead to self-medication, abuse, and sometimes addiction. In fact, 40% of the people who do not listen to WMMT brought this up as their top issue.

“It’s been interesting because I just had a conversation with one of the producers and a station manager at WMMT last week, and they have really jumped on this. They wrote a small grant to their own endowment, and they got $10,000 to start producing a 22-part series – short segments, short modules with the voices of mountain people talking about this issue.” With WMMT plans to kick off the series soon, in conjunction with a fall pledge drive, “Now, not only are they working to provide information that they realize people in their listening area want, but they’re also going to tie it in with, ‘Okay, we also want you guys to help us, by keeping us going.’ So that’s been one of the practical applications coming out of the study.” 

Developing A Model

“I took that project [Radio Bilingüe] and I presented it in several places… for example, at a conference in Mexico, in the state of Chiapas, and then I presented it also at the NFCB conference. When I presented it in Chiapas, it was so encouraging because there were a few people from the U.S., but most people were from Latin America, and there was such a thirst, such a desire, to know more about it. My presentation was so well received that I was shocked! And then when I took it to NFCB, where I had a U.S. audience, where it was all of these people who were in radio, it generated a discussion and really very thoughtful questions about, well, how will this information be used?”

“You know, when I did that presentation at NFCB, I mentioned that for people who were interested in this kind of work, that maybe they should look at partnering with other university researchers to get some audience data and to look at the Social Science Research Council as one place where they might be able to find money to do that type of research. And I really had no plans on doing a second project. But right after that, the panelist came up to me and he said, ‘I looked at the website… I already went and checked out the Social Science Research Council website and they have a new round of grants! And I’m going to go talk with NFCB and I’m going to tell them that we need to do something!’ And I said, ‘Fine, that’s great!’ I didn’t even know about the round,” Graciela laughs.

With plans to present her report at the upcoming NFCB conference – working together with NFCB to see what pieces will be most useful – Dr. Orozco also looks to other venues and formats for publication of the report. When asked about ideas for her next project, she describes her desire to allow others to replicate the methodology and approach:

“I love this kind of work. I really believe in community radio as a way to reach a lot of people. I can see that this alternative model for measuring radio audiences has a lot of potential. I can see that there are a number of places that would really welcome help doing something like this. So now I'm thinking about how to turn this approach into a tool, so that anybody who wanted to could replicate it on their own.” 

Graciela Orozco’s full report and discussion of findings from the case study of WMMT-FM in Appalachia is available online via the Media Research Hub.   

WMMT-FM “real people radio” is a project of Appalshop, a media collective dedicated to Appalachian culture, traditions, and quality of life. For live broadcasts, visit http://www.appalshop.org/wmmt/.

For live broadcasts of Radio Bilingüe, the only national distributor of Spanish-language programming in public radio: www.radiobilingue.org