Re: <amarc-1> Intro - Steve Ahern, Australia

[steve.ahern@syd.aftrs.edu.au (by way of Bram Dov Abramson <bram@tao.ca>)]

     Hello all,
     
     My name is Steve Ahern. I am a lecturer at Australia's national 
     broadcast training institution, the Australian Film TV & Radio School 
     (AFTRS). 
     
     My background is as a radio reporter/announcer/producer in all radio 
     sectors (community, commercial and public) for over twenty years. 
     During that time I have been involved in training many community 
     broadcasters in Australia and other countries and developing training 
     models. I was manager of several radio stations for the Australian 
     Broadcasting Corporation for over ten years. Since moving to the AFTRS 
     I have been involved in a national broadcasting school consultancy in 
     South Africa and training for the community, commercial and public 
     sectors here in Australia, so my viewpoint encompasses all sectors and 
     many countries.
     
     I am interested in issues of access and sustainability in existing and 
     emerging broadcast technologies and have spoken at various conferences 
     about my findings on volunteerism, access and new media.
     
     I believe that the two issues of access and sustainability are crucial 
     to the continuation of democratic media participation. Some thoughts:
     
     ACCESS & TRAINING:
     Access and the provision of appropriate training go together. 
     Providing access alone is not enough to properly empower people to use 
     the media. Training must be fundamentally linked to access, otherwise 
     broadcasters will not get their messages across and there will be no 
     listeners. Skills training can be separated from ideology if properly 
     taught, so that `training' does not just become 'brainwashing'.  
     
     In Australia (and in other countries) we have volunteer fire fighters 
     and volunteer legal aid lawyers, etc. No one would dream of sending 
     out volunteer fire fighters or legal aid workers without proper 
     training - why would we want to do it for radio?  So, in my view, 
     developing appropriate training that does not stifle views, but does 
     teach people how to communicate via radio, is essential for 
     empowerment in the sector.
     
     
     SUSTAINABILITY:
     
     Sustainability of community media is also an important issue. It is 
     certainly getting cheaper to run radio stations and associated 
     internet broadcasts for much less cost than in the past - thus 
     breaking down the access and ongoing barriers that used to require 
     huge amounts of investment capital - so there are more stations. But 
     are there more volunteers and contributors?   In my view, 
     sustainability of volunteers is also an important issue to consider in 
     conjunction with sustainability of the station as an entity.  In 
     countries like Australia there is a strong volunteer sector because 
     there are social services (like unemployment benefit payments) that 
     allow you to survive (just!) without paid work, but in many other 
     countries there are no such social services so volunteerism and the 
     ability to contribute to community access media is limited, because 
     people have to put first priority on earning money to survive.
     
     So any lobbying for community media funding should, in my view, take 
     into account the ability to sustain volunteers with funding of some 
     kind. Without that, access is not real access, it is just access for 
     people who can afford it. I also think that Government/NGO funding 
     should not be the only source of funding for community media and that 
     there are countries that are developing good models of accessing some 
     commercial funding without compromising their integrity. 
     
     
     I hope those points are of use in the general discussion.
     
     Ciao,
     Steve Ahern
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