Local radio communication policies: the case of Catalunya

Abstract

The major Spanish stations, SER, RNE, Onda Cero and COPE, devote a very small percentage of their programming to local communication needs. This policy of disdain reinforces the "mere repeater" nature of most of the wide range of stations with limited coverage that make up the aforementioned channels. Moreover, this reality coincides in Catalonia with a bad moment for municipal networks, immersed in an infrastructural and programmatic stagnation. The evolution of the Spanish radio system has been marked by business concentration, chain broadcasting and such programmatic homogenization.

Greater media competitiveness, the need for economic profitability, the fight for audiences and the incorporation of new technologies are many of the reasons that allow us to understand the aforementioned transformations. Local radio stations have ended up being repeaters of the network, not only for reasons of economic profitability, but also because this idiosyncrasy allows them to exploit a corporate image useful for attracting advertising, for audience ratings and for the penetration of the local media in the territory. An exhaustive analysis of the off-air programming of Spanish generalist channels reveals that local programs are located in time slots in which radio audiences are falling sharply.

It has also been found that off-air programming is subsidiary to the channel and maintains a high degree of homogeneity. The case of Catalonia is paradigmatic, since the use of Catalan has gone beyond the purely linguistic limit to become a question of cultural identity. However, Spanish generalist channels use this language to a limited extent in their territorial programming. This circumstance is not only specific to Catalonia, since in other bilingual communities, such as Galicia, for example, the use of Galician is lower than in the Catalan case.