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no.2

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CONTENTSPAGE

5 A digital archive for a discreet collection – The NEAR Archiving Project in Ireland by Paul Loughran

8 Ten propositions on the practice of archiving community radio by Dagmar Brunow

12 A question of archiving quality Conversation between Joost van Beek (Central European University) and Michael Nicolai (RADIO CORAX)

livingarchives.eu

R A D I O A R C H I V E S I N E U R O P E A N

C O M M U N IT Y M E D I A

C A P T C H A

In October 2014 Near Media Co-Op was awarded funding by the Broadcast-ing Authority of Ireland to build a dedicated digital archive for a discreet collection of content broadcast by the radio station between the years 2011 and 2015. The total number of segments in this collection will be in the region of 1100.

The content is to be taken from the Northside Dublin Community Radio station’s flagship programme Northside Today, and will reflect upon themes of Irish Culture, Life and experience.

The Near Archive will be built in three stages and with the input of expert partners including the Digital Repository of Ireland and Dublin City Council Library and Archive.

Consultation – Digitalisation – Training: the Project Stages

In stage 1 Near Media Co-Op will begin consultation with professional archivist Joan Murphy of the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) to estab-lish a partnership for the project and confirm specific work and consulta-tion to be undertaken by DRI. The consultation will include expert advice on the selection of material to be archived and the training of staff on archiving programme material using the Dublin Core Meta data process. Segments will be selected in consultation with the DRI, with technical and editorial content taken into consideration. Additional training will be given for the implementation of archiving workflows for the Northside Today pro-duction team and eventually the wider Near Media Co-Op community.

Parallel to this training and consultation; the Near Media Co-Op technical team of Gavin Byrne, Vincent Teeling and Gay Graham will commence the building of a dedicated website for the Near Archive. The website will house all the content

The selection and categorisation team of Alan Weldon and Aoife Nic Cana have already begun the work of going through 4 years worth of Northside Today running orders to select segments which fit the themes of the project. Once a selection is made, the team then access the file through an Aircheck digital file saving & sharing system. These files are

A digital archive for a discreet collection – The NEAR Archiving Project in Ireland by Paul Loughran

6

in one hour blocks and form this one hour block the team will edit out the necessary segment usually 10 – 15 minutes in length.

Selection and Categorisation technician Alan Weldon says: I live in a world where we increasingly create more and more media

on an individual level, where the man on the street has access to equipment capable of capturing today’s news for a worldwide audience. Today’s media is almost entirely documented in a digital format and unlike times past where analog formats granted immediate medium term preservation, today, it’s far too easy for material to be lost to the void in an alarmingly short space of time.

Meaning, more than ever, that preservation is of huge importance not only »for the long term« but »in the short term« too. The archive work that we are currently carrying out will hopefully not only sustain the material we capture at this time but set a precedent for how we preserve and document our media for the future.

In stage 2 we will continue to digitise selected segments by a dedicated digitisation and categorisation team who will have received training and guidance from the DRI. There will be continued training with staff to up skill studio duty personnel and Northside Today production personnel to be able to digitise material using the Dublin Core Meta Date process. This work will eventually be mainstreamed into day to day Near FM training for staff and will be a sustainable training element after the initial archive project is complete.

In stage 3 Near Media Co-Op will partner with Dublin City Council Library and Archive to locate our Near Archive on dedicated computers in local libraries such as Coolock and Raheny. Training will be provided to library staff on how to access the archive, and in turn library staff will be able to assist library users. Consultation and parameters of partnership with Dub-lin City Libraries will be established including timeline for delivery of work-shops to librarians on how to access the Near Archive on their computers.

A launch of the Near Archive in partnership with the DRI and Dublin City Council Libraries will also take place after the training period is complete.

Why is an Archive needed for Community radio?

Up to now the majority of mainstream archives from RTE 1 to the Irish Times tend to be the voices of those in power and authority in our society, and the general public also has to pay a fee to access these archives. Community Radio archives will ensure the voice of the »ordinary« people will be recorded and available for future generations, free of charge. This proposal broadens the broadcast heritage to be archived in the state. There is material contained within Community radio which is not available under any other media, we were literally the only media around to record many events and interviews important to our listeners. This is all new material which has not been archived before.

In a recent Sound & Vision project that was produced by Near FM, called Frank Harte 2: A Life in Song we initially budgeted for RTE Archive material of Frank Harte speaking and/or being interviewed by the state broadcaster, as we thought with Frank being deceased since 2005 that this would be the only of featuring his voice in the series. However when we did some investigation among our own volunteer base we discovered we had access to high quality Near FM recordings of Frank Harte speaking & singing in Coolock library in 1998. The shear depth, relevance and high technical quality of these recordings were beyond our expectations and we are sure that nothing that RTE could have provided would have equalled them. This re-enforced our belief in the value of the material we capture every day in community radio and the importance of building an archive.

Paul Loughran is Overall Coordinator of the Near Archive of Near Media

Co-op in Dublin. He is also Near’s Production and Training Coordinator.

1 RTE or Raidió

Teilifís Éireann

[3] (Irish pronun-

ciation: Radio

[and] Television of

Ireland; abbreviated

as RTÉ) is a semi-

state company and

the national public

service broad-

caster of Ireland.

2 The late Frank

Harte is a celebrated

traditional singer

and song collector

from Dublin. Frank

travelled the length

and breadth of

Ireland collecting

songs by recording

them by memory

and hand or later

with a small record-

ing device. It is

estimated in his life-

time he assembled

a database of over

15,500 recordings. A

three part documen-

tary series produced

by Near FM, on

Frank Harte and

the Festival which

is held every year

in his honor since

his death, can be

downloaded for free

from www.nearfm.

ie/podcast/?cat=19

8

0. Reminder: Not all independent radios are community radiosAs a longstanding member of the Freies Sender Kombinat (FSK)

in Hamburg my perspective might differ somewhat from those engaged in community radio practice. FSK does not define itself as a community radio, but as an independent radio (Freies Radio), free from advertising and state subsidies, deliberately situating itself within a left-wing context. As such it tries to follow emancipatory ideals to grant agency to those otherwise lacking access to hegemonic media production. (I use the word »ideals« because in reality even left-wing radios run the risk of reproducing current power relations, especially in terms of race, gender, class, sexuality and ability) 1. However, the following thoughts are relevant for both com-munity radios and independent radios alike.

1. The archive reloaded: from the archive as a storehouse to the practice of archiving

A good way to reflect upon practices of archiving is to move the focus from the archive as a storehouse to methods of archiving. These include modes of selection, storage, the use of metadata (data about data), indexing and tagging. In short: we need to think about ways of grant-ing access to the archival stock – and of making sure it can be found!

2. Archiving is a process of forgettingArchiving is often understood as a process of remembering. The

archive is perceived as a way to prevent radio content from vanishing into oblivion. However, not all content is archived. Tapes have been lost, overwritten or erased; files have been deleted. Tapes, such as audio-tapes, cassettes or digital audio tapes (DAT), cannot be played any longer because the hardware has not been maintained. Collective radio practice also implies the loss of access to radio content after individuals have left the collective for whatever reasons. How can this imbalance in terms of access to sources be countered or compensated?

1 See also

Christine Achinger;

Dagmar Brunow,

Janina Jentz and

Regina Mühlhäuser:

»Engendering

Airwaves. Zur Kon-

struktion von Ges-

chlecht im Radio.«

In: Radio-Kultur

und Hör-Kunst, ed.

Andreas Stuhl-

mann. Würzburg:

Königshausen &

Neumann 2001:

24 – 38. Although the

study is 15 years

old, the diagno-

sis is still valid.

In fact, for FSK a

severe backlash

has occured in

terms of gender

awareness during

the last 10 years.

Feminist politics are

highly absent from

editorial work and

broadcast alike.

Ten propositions on the practice of archiving community radio by Dagmar Brunow

3. The many places of the archive Most archive(s) of community radio are decentral. Their content

is scattered as the shows are archived (or not) individually by the various broadcasters in their homes, in a drawer, in the attic. Can those multiple locations be utilized for the radio’s archival practice?

4. The materiality of the archive Independent or community radio archives come in various forms

and shapes: the content is archived on magnetic tape, audio tape, mini-disc, DAT, as ogg or MP3 file, on disks, USB sticks, CDs, external or internal hard disks. While the state of the sound carrier is crucial, we should not overlook the importance of the hardware. Access can be limited depending on the materiality of the archive, as some of the devices or formats can no longer be used. Tape recorders, DAT recorders, MD players need to be constantly maintained, unless the material is migrated to new formats. In short: the materiality of the archive contributes to the forgetting or (possi-ble) remembrance of the radio content.

5. The archivist as a curatorFar from being a neutral, objective space, the archive is an agent

in its own right. It selects content, preserves or discards it and makes it (in)accessible through indexing and metadata. The archivists play an important role in this process. Their decisions determine what content will be accessible to whom under which conditions. Therefore the role of the archivist as a possible gatekeeper, censor or curator of material deserves special attention.

6. The archive as an instrument of powerArchives are instruments of power. In their theorizations of the

archive, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida draw on state archives and their role of limiting access to material, for instance through censorship. However, even community and independent radios do not exist outside social power relations. Hegemonic power relations can (involuntarily or not)

10

be reproduced through the radio’s practices of broadcasting and archiving. For example, archival practice might run the risk of highlighting content provided by white male »auteurs«, neglecting collaborative work or content in languages the archivist(s) do not understand. The crucial issue here is how to implement a mode of archival selection which tries to acknowledge the diversity within independent or community radio practice.

7. Online access at every cost?Due to the possibilities of digitization and online publication,

archiving today is often understood in terms of online access alone. It is highly doubtful that online access is the only (and best) solution. First, it might not be sustainable. The data needs to be constantly migrated to new formats which requires the means both to finance the server costs and to supply (wo)manpower. Second, in most European countries online access is currently limited by legal impediments such as copyrights, prop-erty rights, intellectual copyrights or the right of personality. For instance, copyright issues limit the circulation of music content, and anti-racist or queer content can (or should) be scrutinized in terms of the right of per-sonality. Therefore, alternative forms of archiving need to be considered.

8. The content needs to be contextualised Without contextualising the content, the preservation of archival

stock might be useless. This goes especially for content which has been inspired by radio practice as a political intervention into ongoing political debates. Without contextualising these broadcasts, archival practice runs the risk to dehistoricise political content. Moreover, independent radio stations like FSK have always favoured the context of broadcasting over the specific broadcast itself. For example, rather than focusing on the specific broadcast as a means in itself, the specific situation in the studio or the political debates evolving during the preparation of the broadcast have always been considered vital. However, the problem is how to archive these ephemeral moments. In most cases, editorial meetings have not been documented. Rough cuts of the later broadcast have most likely been

erased or deleted. Reconstructing the political debate from contemporary media sources will be a difficult task as left-wing debates have hardly been published in mainstream media. Instead, independent publications, pamphlets or protocols form ephemeral archives which might be difficult to access. In short, an endless editorial effort will be necessary to retrieve written documentation, press articles etc., or to find other ways of recon-structing the political and/or subcultural context.

9. Archiving can be a self-reflexive process. The practice of archiving can occur behind closed doors or it can

be brought before the public. Archiving can be a self-reflexive process through which its strategies, concepts and ideas are foregrounded. For instance, the Hamburg-based video archive bildwechsel deliberately exhibits its archival practice via a mobile videotent pitched up at various art spaces. The audience sits outside the tent, watching the process of digitisation in real time while the video-to-be-digitized is screened onto the walls of the tent. This is but one example which could inspire a self-reflex-ive approach to archiving practice.

10. Archiving as a rat race Archival practice is a time-consuming and often costly process

which is never finalized. The question remains how radio content can be archived in a responsible and sustainable manner. How can archives and archivists reflect upon their role as agents in the process of preservation, storage, selection, discarding and forgetting? These issues need to be kept in mind in the everyday practice of the archives.

Dagmar Brunow has held the post of editor at the independent radio

station FSK in Hamburg since 1996 (Lorettas Leselampe, Camera

osbcura, Spiffy News. Morgenradio der female machos [Female macho

morning]). She has taught film sciences and gender studies at various

universities in Sweden (Halmstad, Lund Vaxjö, Södertörn) since 1998.

12

Researcher Joost van Beek conducted an inspiring interview with Michael Nicolai about the archiving strategies and practices at RADIO CORAX when they met at the Zukunftswerkstatt Community Media in Potsdam in November 2014. You can listen to part of that interview in CAPTCHA - Radio Show #8 at www.cba.fro.at, and below we publish some excerpts.

Joost van Beek (JvB) I already know that you have a range of »satellite sites,« as I call them: there’s the »Wendefokus« site [wendefokus.de], the students website [studis.radiocorax.de], the Local site [lokal.radiocorax.de], the »Interaudio« site [interaudio.org]; which other ones are there still?

Michael Nicolai (MN) We have a website for content which children are producing in the framework of projects we do with pupils or just children out-side the school-context [hier-bin-ich.net and kira.radiocorax.de]. This is not really an archive, it is much more an attempt to get the youngest generation into podcasting so they have the chance to show their productions to their parents, friends and others on the internet. It is meant to activate them, so they do it on their own, and decide on their own what is worth uploading. But this is in the very beginning stage to be honest. We didn’t get it to a well-functioning level yet, it’s still in development. We’re still doing research on how to activate them, what competences do they need and all those things.

JvB The »Wendefokus« site is thematically organised, about a specific time; are the other subsites tied to to a specific programme? Is the content that you can find on the »local« website specifically the content from a radio programme on local news or is it pooled from different radio programmes that are broadcast on RADIO CORAX?

MN Most of the things we’re uploading there is content we are producing for our daily news/current affairs programme, the so called »Tagesaktuelle Redaktion«. We don’t publish whole programmes or shows. We just publish the single »pieces,« with new introduction texts so as to address them more to the

A question of archiving quality Conversation between Joost van Beek (Central European University) and Michael Nicolai (RADIO CORAX)

podcast listeners, and less of this »on-air-style«. So we change the presenta-tion in a way. The range in topics is very wide, it is not only local, it’s regional, and it covers cultural, political, social aspects, with the task of creating a pool of podcasts for the region. RADIO CORAX is called a non-commercial local radio, but in fact it isn’t. We ourselves wouldn’t call us like that, because what

is local? OK, we’re located in Halle, but we’re transmitting in a huge area from Magdeburg to Leipzig. That’s why we’re not only focusing on topics about Halle, nor focusing only on national topics. Every piece of content produced by RADIO CORAX derives from the interest of the radio makers. My position in the staff of RADIO CORAX would, in usual media terms, be the »chief editor« - but I don’t do that, I’m not telling the people what the next topic is they have to do. They have to do find their own topics, and that’s why it can’t be said: »OK, now it’s the local week« or something like that.

JvB Within the local news or background coverage, you mentioned that you don’t upload whole programmes, but the individual sections. How does the decision get made which ones get uploaded? Does it depend on whether the programme makers are motivated to do it, or is it an editorial decision about what the most important part is – how does the process work?

MN Usually it’s the interviews and pre-produced issues. The decision about which part of the show or programme is to be republished or cross-media published is really easy: it’s everything except the music. It’s the self-produced content. And then the question is only a matter of quality: was this really a good interview? This choice depends on two decision makers: the person who made the interview, who says »yes, this was OK« or who says »I don’t want to publish it, because I didn’t get to the point«. And sometimes it’s me as a coordi-nator who decides.

JvB Does that ever lead to any tension?

14

MN Usually not. These quality aspects are quite transparent. Everybody knows when he or she was not that good. That’s not the problem. The question is more about who is taking on the process of uploading? And that is not so easy at RADIO CORAX sometimes. We’re divided in two teams, in a way, there’s the technical part and in the editorial part. We used to have the structure that

everything from our live shows is afterwards re-published by the technicians working in the background. They are the ones editing the interviews, they take care of the tagging …

JvB So not by the programme makers themselves but the technicians…

MN Yes, because we thought it is more efficient if you do it that way.

JvB Are the technicians also volunteers or are they staff?

MN Normally they are volunteers or in an internship or something like that. Anyway, sometimes it was very complicated, because the turnover of people is really high, and sometimes it’s a rookie is sitting there at the desk and it is not easy for them to decide what is important. So this work structure broke up a bit. Now it is more the producers of the content themselves, or the editorial team, who are doing the uploading.

JvB Also, when it comes to adding categories or subjects, so an item becomes searchable afterwards, and writing a description that emphasizes the main point – the programme maker will know exactly what the crucial elements are, whereas the technician might not.

MN Yes, that was really hard sometimes. Some of the technicians were really interested in the programme’s contents and then it was really easy. In the best case, you came out of the studio and got feedback from a technician who was listening the whole time … and he was also really good at editing the things. But that doesn’t work that well at the moment. And it’s really a good

The question is: who is taking on the process of uploading?

point to address, if it’s a good idea to split these tasks or not.. there are argu-ments for and against it.

JvB When it comes to the editing process – part of the reason why you edit content is the copyright issue, to cut out any music content – is this an element to keep in mind even from the point of where you start planning the programming? Because several people here at the conference have said that the process of cutting the music content out of their programmes in their cases often harmed the quality of the content so much, that they didn’t really make sense as a program anymore. And a solution for that, I suppose, would be to make sure from even before you start broadcasting that your programme is organized in such a way that you can easily edit it afterwards. Is that some-thing that you think about or that the programme makers keep in mind? Like, »I shouldn’t use background music while I’m talking,« or … ?

MN To be honest, if you produce issues with foreign content, like music or sound clips from movies or something like that, until now we still don’t care about copyright. We say, »OK, let’s publish it, if there is someone who wants to fight against this, let them come«. Actually this was a recommendation of a law-

yer from Berlin, who is really deeply involved into copyright questions. He said he didn’t know about any examples of non-commercial publishing moments that were punished or repressed because of such copyright questions. So he said, »go on with it and wait for the first case«.

JvB Go with the flow for as long as it lasts … So you cut out the parts where you explicitly play records, but otherwise you upload …

MN Yeah. And I would go on with that. There’s also a trick for this on the transnational website freie-radios.net, which has an internal part as well. If there is a lot of foreign content in our productions, sometimes we decide to upload them to the internal part, which you only can access with a password – so only other radio makers can use it.

We say »OK, let’s publish it, if there is someone who wants to fight against this, let them come«.

16

JvB Does that mean that you then upload two separate versions of the same show?

MN Sometimes we do. Copyright issues regarding music are the most important reason for us to not publish complete shows. Because in the programme itself you’ll have some sequence like: news, music, first issue, music, second issue, etc. – and approximately twenty minutes of a one hour programme is music.

JvB Are there other important reasons for you to decide to upload smaller parts of the programme instead of the whole programme – in terms of share-ability, or to make it easier to attract visitors, or …?

MN What I do with interviews after a show is to edit them in a way that’s more catchy than 25 minutes of live recording. Sometimes only twelve minutes of the piece are really to the point, and then I publish only that part and not the whole thing. Because it’s not the same situa-tion when listeners come to the podcast as when you’re broadcasting live on air, and that’s why I’m going to edit the content in a shorter and more pointed way.

JvB Yes. When it comes to the future of online content – not so much when it comes to livestreams but when it comes to sharing audio content online – what matters is that people rarely go to a website directly anymore

and instead everything is social, much of the website traffic is social. And that means you have to also adopt the format of your content. Create smaller pieces on a single subject. So if somebody is interested in the latest news on Argentina, they can find that item on Argentina and don’t have to browse through an hour-long programme. But this involves a lot of extra work of course.

Sometimes only twelve minutes of the piece are really to »the point« and then I publish only that part, because it’s not the same situation when you’re addressing pod-cast listeners as when you’re broadcasting live on air.

MN Yes, you can also see on freie-radios.net that our really long pieces, like interviews of 30 minutes, are often not used by other stations, because they don’t have programme slots where that could be fitted in. Whether it’s qualitatively good or not, ‘if it would take up half of their whole programme they don’t use it. Sometimes when I edit an interview, I really think about this – that Radio Blau in Leipzig, for example, could use a ten-minute piece of it for their one hour of daily current affairs programming, but not the full 25 minutes. Because I know that they don’t have the resources to go into this thing and edit it in such a way that it fits in their programme. So I’ think about it on that level as well.

JvB But that brings us back to the earlier point about who does what, and how is it organized internally. Because it sounds like you personally do a lot of the editing and work on the material that is uploaded. What division of tasks is there between the programme makers and technicians who upload programs and what the staff then still has to do, before a programme is published online?

MN It is an ongoing learning moment. It is not me deciding on my own or only me uploading. I’m always showing the people why I’m doing things like that, and what are my reasons to do it like that, so they can decide if this way of working could be theirs as well. But to be honest, in a situation where you have volunteers, and rookies are working in the staff and doing everything for the first or second time, sometimes it’s just that it’s a hundred times faster to do it yourself. So for me it is easier to decide than for them, when they are just beginning their work, how to edit an interview – what is a good sentence, what is important? It can be really hard and they have to learn step by step to distinguish an important sentence from rubbish.

JvB … experience counts in assessing content …

MN That’s true, but I’m not ruling it all, I’m really relaxed – but giving feed-back is important. It’s a way of learning and guiding them. […]

18

JvB As someone from a children’s radio station said at the conference, there has to be a sense of urgency about [creating online content] – he pointed to this new survey of listening behaviour among youth audiences showing that listening to radio, as radio, is down 20 %. If we don’t switch to online and social (media) as an inherent part of broadcasting, then there is no future …

MN On the other hand I’m a bit sceptical, because there is this huge tera-tera-tera-terabyte of stuff somewhere on the internet, and who gets access to that? Who will find it, and who’s going through all that stuff at the end? That’s the next big question. It’s not only about how our content

has to be on the internet because everyone is listening to it on their i-Phones or whatever, but also about the question, how do they get to know that this content is there for them?

JvB Yes, absolutely – in order to survive with an online audience. Not in terms of »we have to get a much bigger audience« – that’s not what community media is about; but your own core audience is going to shift slowly to online, and to reach them there is not just about uploading your content, because there is a lot of content being uploaded and vegetating away. Cross-media publishing is as much about accessibility and reaching your audience. Social media policy and uploading policy cannot be separated. It’s maybe not what we would have liked the internet to look like, ten years ago – the way much of people’s navigating behaviour has become concentrated on a dozen or so websites where people spend most of their time – from Facebook to Google to YouTube – instead of browsing a much broader variety of websites of inde-pendent organizations, the way that we were hoping the internet to look like … It’s not what we wanted, but it is the way it is, so we have to adapt.

MN Yeah … it’s true. […]

Who gets access to that stuff? Who will find it, and who’s going through all that stuff at the end?

JvB Apart from the editors of the student programs and the local news program, who have their own subsites, how many of your programme makers are uploading their content?

MN I think a lot of them do. They use Soundcloud and other platforms, they are running their own blogs. The whole DJ and electronic music scene are Soundcloud users, those covering political topics more often use blog struc-tures, they have individual ideas of republishing.

JvB And regarding freie-radios.net, do you have an idea how many program makers, outside of the teams that have their own CORAX sites, upload their materials there?

MN I would say there are 30 – 40 people with an access to this website who are using it. There is no rule, it’s up to their own decision. There is also this CORAX idea that not everyone who makes things for CORAX has to do it from Halle. There are people in Berlin, there is one in Frankfurt – the USA, wherever – they are producing broadcasts for CORAX, and sometimes we share the programme via freie-radios.net.

JvB Is this something you actively encourage?

MN Yes.

JvB And when it comes to what you mentioned about how many volunteers use Soundcloud or other commercial third-party external sites? What is your approach to that? Is it something that you encourage or discourage, or some-thing you provide information about, like about what the pros and cons are? […]

MN I would say the best solution would be if there could be a kind of CORAX interface, a »Schnittstelle«, where everything that people who are creating

20

content or programmes for RADIO CORAX are presenting on sites like that, or their own website, is presented in one spot. A point where everything comes together. Whether it’s in the form of information about that, or links, or what-ever. I think that would be nice, because that could show the CORAX universe as it is, a self developing universe in a way, growing and pulsing … Because now it’s sometimes the case that somebody tells us: »Did you know that this person has a great website, and he’s always pointing out that he’s from RADIO CORAX?« and nobody knew. It is really all very individual.

JvB It’s quite rare to find something like that. Of course it’s very logical that program makers create their own websites, especially if the radio station itself doesn’t have a central archive yet, and also have their own social media channels, their own Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, which sometimes have more followers than those of the station itself. But it’s quite rare to see a station’s website bringing all this information together. Which is partly under-standable, because you would have to revise such lists every month. I would still be a little worried though. I can totally see that, as a community media station with volunteers, it is not something you can actually do much about – or should even want to do something about – but I’d still be worried about this reliance on third-party commercial websites for people building their own archives. I’ve come across websites where people did their archiving on MySpace, and that’s all gone now, all those links are dead, and nobody would have expected that one or two years before the old MySpace ended. And of course sites like Soundcloud could change their standards, the kind of cate-gorizations they allow, or they could suddenly make you pay for functions you could use for free before – you don’t have the control over your own content.

MN But I don’t think the digital generation, the young people, are really facing this. Because they don’t care. Many things they do are for the moment. And that’s something I, as a radio maker, really love. Because, to be honest, I love to do things just one time, it’s an exciting element of radio. You have to be there, and then you get it – otherwise you’ve missed it. For me that’s really a nice aspect of the nature of radio. This thing about always archiving

everything as some kind of confirmation of my existence, or of the things I’ve done – sometimes I don’t care about this vain part of it. So for me the archiving and republishing is really something I do for my job, from a conviction that the content we are producing is really an invitation to people to think about society and any general public interest topics. That’s the reason I do it, it has nothing to do with myself, it’s really just the idea that it could be important for as many people as possible to hear about this idea and think about it.

Joost van Beek has been a researcher with the Center for Media, Data

and Society (CMDS) of the Central European University in Budapest

since 2009, and previously worked at the Open Society Institute.

Michael Nicolai works as Radio Trainer and Editorial Coordinator at

RADIO CORAX. Beside of this he is executive board of AMARC.