White paper on creativity - ebla center

Chapter 8it has forced smaller companies tochoose between further investments orclosing down. This situation partlyjustifies the wait-and-see attitude bymost operators in the sector, reluctantto make long-term investments, andalso tempted by the possibility ofbroadening their portfolio and winningnew audiences. This situation, in itselffar from clear, has been compoundedby the lack of clarity in the rulesconcerning aggregations of stations:terms such as network, group, syndicate,circuit or more recently consortium andeven franchising are often used as ifthey were interchangeabole. Althoughthe existing laws have tried to makesome distinctions and to regulate eachtype of aggregation in a differentiatedway, in practice they continue tooverlap.Any reflections on radio and televisionas creative enterprises must take thispicture into account.Radio. The fact that radio is the secondmedium in terms of audience in thecountry is now almost self-evident, agenerally recognized trugh. But this hasonly been the case for a relatively shorttime, or rather since some conferencesand news<strong>paper</strong> reports in the early2000s re-focused attention on a mediumfor long neglected by politicians, themedia system in general and alsoadvertisers. One of the mainconsequences, as far as we areconcerned here, has been the growingpressure from advertisers onbroadcasters to cut back audiences andbroadcasting times deemed to be lessappetising (the elderly and especiallyadolescents, a category which until the1990s was a key component of mostradio music audiences) and toconcentrate more on the so-called“young adults”, 20 to 35 year-olds,believed to be more attractive in termsof cash availability and inclination toconsume. This has led to a greater focuson some music formats (such as the socalled“adult contemporary” format)and especially mixed formats combiningmusic and news or even non-music talkshows and news, and to a comeback ofstations based on the popularity of DJsand on spoken entertainment. Ingeneral the language of radio has beenwidening, partly because of thedevelopment of some types ofcommunity broadcasting (e.g. theactivism of catholic radio stations asillustrated by the In blue circuit and theunexpected development of universityradios), although the hopes of a returnto new experimentation of genres of akind now long disappeared, such asradio plays and documentaries, stillappear a little premature.In technological terms radio has alsoreorganised. Not only, and for themeantime not so much, because of theintroduction of digital radio to replaceanalogue radio (digital audiobroadcasting – DAB, or its successors)as because of the spread of mixedforms: radio transmitted via the Internetor web-radios, downloadableprogrammes to be listened to onportable devices (podcasting), and/orcombined with video programmes onthe Internet or on traditional televisionchannels.We are witnessing a kind of growinggap in radio production: on one hand,we have a “top” bracket of broadcasters(no more than ten public, private andWHITE PAPER ON CREATIVITY 203