Radio Studies

This revised, expanded and corrected edition offers even more coverage of the performers and programming on American radio from its inception to its golden age.

Produced in association with the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago, the Encyclopedia of Radio includes more than 600 entries covering major countries and regions of the world as well as specific programs and people, networks and organizations, regulation and policies, audience research, and radio's technology. This encyclopedic work will be the first broadly conceived reference source on a medium that is now nearly eighty years old, with essays that provide essential information on the subject as well as comment on the significance of the particular person, organization, or topic being examined.

As one of the first scholarly monographs to examine the status of broadcasting on its one hundredth anniversary, Radio's Second Century investigates both vanguard and perennial topics relevant to radio's past, present, and future. As the radio industry enters its second century of existence, it continues to be a dominant mass medium with almost total listenership saturation despite rapid technological advancements that provide alternatives for consumers. ...

“Radio studies” is a relatively recent term used to signal the explosive growth in scholarship on the medium that has developed as part of a larger interest in sound media and audio culture across the arts and humanities since the 2000s. However, scholarly studies of radio are by no means unique to the new millennium, extending back to the very earliest years of the medium. ...

The field of radio studies has undergone something of a resurgence in recent years. More radio is taught at universities and colleges than ever before, and the past three decades have witnessed growing numbers of scholarly works devoted to radio research while more journals now publish articles on radio. The emergence of two journals devoted entirely to radio research, the Journal of Radio Studies in the United States in 1991 and the United Kingdom’s Radio Journal in 2003, is both an indicator and consequence of this renewal. ...

This is the first book to fully document the historical contributions of African Americans to broadcasting in the United States from the beginning of commercial broadcasting in 1925 to the age of television in 1955. This work fills a void that has only been marginally covered by previous books on the history of American broadcasting. This work documents the impact of their unique and popular entertainment styles on network radio programming, describes how racial discrimination and prejudice limited the opportunities of African American performers to receive full financial compensation, unlike many others who gained radio and television fame and fortune by emulating them, ...