Joseph Sekiku of Tanzania’s

FADECO Community Radio is a local radio in NW Tanzania. Its programming is characterised with a strong focus on rural development (65%) with the rest of the air time distributed among 25% news and general information and entertainment (culture, history, arts) at 10%. Agriculture takes the lions share of our programming.

The main challenges for a rural community radio are related to information/ content generation, repackaging, dissemination and feedback (monitoring to see if the message are making any meaningful impact on the listeners). In order to address this challenge, FRC  100.8 FM has sought to use the available ICTs both for content generation and for getting a feed back from the farmers or listeners. And here is how it works at FADECO:

Information gathering/ content generation

Farmers walk to FADECO to ask questions and report agriculture related problems or other concerns facing them. As a one stop centre for information, the staff at FRC 100.8 FM receive the questions, and pass them onto competent staff (who can respond or refer the questions to other experts or identify experts who can respond to the questions). Referrals to experts is normally done via email. Sometime internet searches are made. Sometimes searches are made in our offline resource base (compendia, books, cd-rom libraries).

Sometimes farmers send text messages to our office mobile number. In the past months, FRC 100.8 FM has signed a contract with a SMS management company in Dar es salaam and has been allocated 2 short code numbers. What the farmer does is to use his/ her mobile phone:

Go to write new Message: Write FR.. leave one space, write a question and then send to 15551 or Write EFR .. leave one space, write question and send to 15522.

The question is delivered directly to our computer via a web managed system. We are therefore able to print it off, respond directly or email the question to our experts.

The farmer receives a received note on his/ her mobile phone immediately to confirm the message is received at FADECO.

After the question/ request is processed, we make a radio program with the response. Unfortunately, we cannot call nor text individual farmers who send questions… we do not have the money. So when we have the answer, in a radio program, we just broadcast on radio to the benefit of the individual farmers that asked the question and of many other farmers who may be listening.

Use of ICT infrastructure by journalists

At FADECO COMMUNITY RADIO, the facility is making it possible, not only to provide the traditional telecentres services (internet and library services) but now in a big way, we are able to package, re-package and develop information into radio programs that are broadcast via FADECO RADIO. This is a big achievement.

This therefore also now underscores the involvement of journalists with FADECO TELECENTRE. To start with, fadeco radio has teamed with a number of journalists who provide news to the station; while at the same time, taking news to from the station. But specifically how do the journalists use the telecentre:

1. Accessing news stories from the internet: Journalists use our internet facilities to search news stories from the internet. Some of the stories are used on our radio station.
2. Also they use the internet to communicate with other journalist to send stories or news via email. I have seen also journalists use SKYPE to communicate and provide live reporting to their bureaus in Dar es salaam.
3. One thing at FADECO TELECENTRE is the integration of the different ICTS: we have in place VSAT for internet access, Fax, telephone services (landline and mobile). These ICTS are used integrally for content generation (esp. news) and for communication with others.
4. Journalists come to use the telecentre to send faxes or receive faxes, check their emails as mentioned above, but also most important, they use our facilities for interviewing, recording, and editing. The telecdntre is laos used as a meeting place for journalists in the area. Some of them prefer to use the centre also for their meetings and;
5. One other use has been with ONLINE study. I have seen 2-4 journalists coming to the telecentre, just because they are doing online journalist or media studies.
6. And lastly, journalists use our telecentre for secretarial purposes like to write their stories or to print them or to photocopy documents. A few have borrowed our recorders, after which they download content on the computers, edit them and go away with content edited and stored on CDs.

This is a rather fragmented narration of the general benefits of FADECO RADIO/ TELECENTRE to the general public and on how we are integrating different ICTs.

Regards,

Joseph Sekiku
FADECO Community Radio

Mobiles in-a-box doesn’t specifically address the use of mobile phones by local and community radio, but many of the tools and ideas it presents will nevertheless be useful. The toolkit is organised around a series of tactics, tools, tutorials and case studies. The tactics and the case studies are a source of ideas, and the tools and tutorials provide support for putting the ideas into action.

Tactics are organised in 4 categories, all of which have relevance for local and community radio stations. They are People’s Media, Outreach and Participation, Fundraising and Resource Mobilisation, and Coordinating and Mobilising.

I was immediately attracted to the People’s Media category as potentially the most interesting and directly relevant to combining radio and ICTs. The bad news is the category isn’t as well-developed as it might be, and it says nothing about combining ICTs with traditional media. The good news is that mobil media is set to be the subject of an upcoming toolkit, Message in-a-box. There have been some experiments with SMS messages and traditional media, for example the local news SMS project in Grahamstown, South Africa and other projects discussed in a survey of community media and SMS text messages that I posted a couple months ago. The short length of an SMS message is a challenge for reporting news, but encouraging listeners to become community correspondents by sending in their 160 character observations of meetings, conflicts, concerts or other events that a radio station is covering is a good way of getting fresh eye-witness accounts.

While novels have been written by SMS, there is no need to restrict use 160 character messages since many phones have audio and video recording capacity in addition to a still camera. This can be used by reporters or listeners to send information back to the station. While you can only play the audio on the air, the videos and stills can be described by on-air staff and placed on a the station’s website, even a mobile friendly website.

The outreach and participation category includes ideas for information services via simple SMS messages, interactive SMS messages and interactive voice response (IVR). The examples provided include monitoring elections and emergency situations, but interactive SMS services can also be used to provide information about schedules, to run surverys, etc.

Fundraising and resource mobilisation also offers some possibilities. Premium SMS numbers cost more for users to send a message to but the owner of the number keeps the extra charge. They are often used by services that reply to your message by sending you your horoscope or a joke, and charge 5 or 10 times the cost of a normal SMS message. A radio station can use a premium SMS number to receive announcements, music dedications or classified ads from listeners, automatically receiving a certain amount from the listeners pre-paid calling credit.

An enterprising radio station with a bit of technology can even make money by producing and selling its own ringtones or by making custom ringtones for advertisters or to support campaigns.

Finally, the toolkit has a category on coordination and mobilisation that explores how mobiles can help with coordinating station or public meetings or mobilising support for campaigns. Emergency communications also fit into this category, for example when an important public event occurs or an emergency happens an SMS message can alert them to turn on the radio for more information.

The boom in mobile telephones offers a vast array of possibilities for local and community radio stations looking for new ways to engage their listeners and to enable participation. Unfortunately, few stations have begun to exploit the possibilities. If the reason is a lack of ideas, know-how and tools, this toolkit might inspire them to start acting. And if it doesn’t, we can hope the new Message in-a-box toolkit will. According to the Tactical Tech website this was supposed to be released in September 2008, so we can expect it soon.

Click here to read and download the Mobiles in-a-box from Tactical Tech’s website

Download a Spanish-language version of this article

When the GSM mobile telephone standard was developed engineers included the ability to send short text messages, up to 160 characters, between phones. Operators were sceptical about the service’s ability to interest customers or to generate revenue, but consumers massively took it up as a convenient and inexpensive alternative to voice calls.  With time applications and services were developed enabling, for example, broadcast messages, mobile payments, polling and information services. In 2007 global revenue from SMS messages was more than $50 billion with more than 1 trillion messages sent.(1)

As mobile phones become increasingly common, SMS messages are being used by community media in a variety of ways.

At its simplest, announcers and journalists announce their phone mumbers over the air and invite listeners to send messages with comments on the news, questions, greetings, song requests… Some of these are then used on-air. In some cases, stations have devised ways of generating feedback via mobiles without the listeners having to pay even the cost of an SMS message. For example, Xtreme FM, a community-oriented pirate station in the UK, has a mobile permanently in the studio:

“It vibrates every few seconds like a faulty alarm clock, as listeners call and text. Scrolling through its inbox, I notice scores of “missed calls”. Big N explains that this is how pirates gauge a record’s popularity. If listeners like a tune, they call in and then ring off, so the studio mobile registers a “missed call”. This costs callers nothing. If Xtreme receives over 20 missed calls from different numbers before a track ends, the DJs play it again. This is why teenagers listen to pirate radio: it’s interactive in ways legal stations can’t match.”(2)

Another example is Interactive Radio for Justice, a radio programme in Ituri, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that answers listeners’ questions about justice issues sent by SMS. Ethan Zuckerman points out that sending questions via SMS allows for anonymity, an important point when your question is: “Are soldiers allowed to stay at my house and eat my food without paying for it?”

Desktop software and web-based services allow stations to do more. International broadcasters such as the BBC make extensive use of these tools as do some commercial stations. However, there are few examples of local and community radio using them, even though they offer a low-cost and relatively simple way of stimulating participation and interaction.

There are various software and service packages available. Among them is FrontlineSMS(3), a programme that runs on a computer connected by a cable to an ordinary mobile phone. Unlike most other programs and services, FrontlineSMS does not require a connection to the internet – messages are composed, stored and processed on the computer and sent and received on the mobile. There are a variety of tools available with different capabilities and pricing.(4) Basic services useful for community media include:

• - Broadcast messages to dozens or even thousands of mobiles advising them of a special programme or an important community activity

• - Keyword response – when a listener sends the word “ocio” the station replies with a text message listing activities while “noticias” is answered with current headlines and “Colectivo a Lima” is answered with the departure times of the next six buses to the capital

Experiencies combining SMS services and broadcast radio can be found in moments of political crisis and natural disasters. For example, SMS and radio were used to help monitor the 2000 presidential elections in Ghana:

[V]oters who were prevented from voting used mobile phones to report their experience to call-in shows on local radio stations. The stations broadcast the reports, prompting police to respond to the accusations of voter intimidation. Had voters called the police directly, it’s possible that authorities might not have responded — by making reports public through the radio, voters eliminated the possibility of police announcing that there had been no reports of voter intimidation. Similar techniques have been used in Sierra Leone, Senegal, and even in the United States — American voters used mobile phone cameras and Websites to record reports of voting irregularities during the 2006 congressional elections.(5)

The ongoing political crisis in Zimbabwe provides another example of the complementarity of radio and SMS. Faced with one of the most repressive media environments in the world, Gerry Jackson founded SW Radio Africa located in the UK and broadcasting to Zimbabwe on shortwave. The signal is jammed in urban areas (thanks to Chinese technology, according to Jackson), but gets through to rural zones. The station also streams it programming on the internet and podcasts ara available to the very few connected to the internet from Zimbabwe, but increasingly important are the headlines sent to phones in Zimbabwe using SMS. According to Jackson:

Currently we’re most excited about our latest endeavour – sending SMS news headlines into Zimbabwe, via mobile phones. We generate news headlines on a daily basis anyway – so this is just another way of using what already exists.

It’s nice and cost effective… because there is only the one cost, actually sending the texts. In two months we’ve built up an address database of about 2,000 mobile phone numbers.

Like many, Zimbabweans truly love their mobile phones and of course what we’re banking on is the virus effect. We also get up to 100 requests a day to be added to the service so it’s growing rapidly.(6)

During natural disasters SMS and radio have been used to provide emergency communication, for example an earthquake Yogyakarta and Central Java in Indonesia  killed more than 5,000 people and displaced 1.6 million in May 2006. With support from Internews, a U.S.-based NGO, a radio station and SMS text messaging provided news about relief efforts.

The service was run through an emergency AM radio station, Radio Punokawan, established by the Indonesian Press and Broadcast Society, with support from Internews. In addition to radio broadcasts, important information was sent and received from the newsroom via text messaging. Outgoing messages warned of aftershocks and identified communities that had not yet received government assistance. More than 180 Indonesian journalists distributed and received information through the service.(7)

Some stations have incorporated SMS polling into their programming. During Kenya’s 2007 elections a local radio and television stations and newspapers used SMS to poll listeners on a number of questions. While the  results of the polls were posted on a website and discussed in the local media, the questions were designed to provoke debate about democracy rather than to measure public opinion. Examples included: “Have politicians done enough to fight corruption and mismanagment of public resources?”, “Do you think special seats should be created for women in parliament?”, “Does party politics foster national unity?” and “Do you feel your vote has the power to make a difference?”.

A new project in Grahamstown, South Africa proposes to use SMS to create a network of citizen journalists for a local newspaper. Eighty high school journalists trained as citizen journalists will send their news and views via SMS messages. A selection of the messages will be printed in the newspaper while others will be redistributed via SMS to community members. The project coordinator admits that it will be difficult to fit the news into the 160 characters that an SMS message can have, but they are already thinking of how to overcome the problem.

In the future, Berger hopes that the program will expand and possibly include other technologies like MMS (multimedia) messages. “We want to interface with the newspaper website, and we’re developing open source software to link the two,” he said. Berger said that there would also be research into the effectiveness of the project. “Then we’re also going to research next year the significance of this whole project,” he said. “Is it making a difference? What does it mean for democracy to have a lot of citizen journalism and to have young people contributing to the public opinion?”(8)

Projects combining SMS and radio have been enabled by the rapid takeup of mobile phones. Globally there is one mobile phone for every two people and in many countries of Latin America the majority of poor people now have access to a mobile telephone.(9) Internet connections and fixed line telephones are still out of reach for much of the world’s population, but mobile telephones have spread faster than any other communication technology in history.

“The only technology that compares to the mobile phone in terms of pervasiveness and accessibility in the developing world is the radio. Indeed, considered together, radios and mobile phones can serve as a broad-distribution, participatory media network with some of the same citizen-media dynamics of the Internet, but accessible to a much wider, and non-literate audience.”(10)

A study of mobile telephone use by people from low-income households in seven Latin American and Caribbean countries indicates high level of SMS by the region’s poor, apparently attracted to the technology because of its low-cost.(11)

Lessons learned?

We have not independently evaluated the experiences presented here, relying instead on accounts gathered from various media accounts and websites. As a result we are unable to clearly identify many of the enabling aspects or problems encountered. Certainly the rapid expansion of mobile telephony, the low cost of SMS messages and the aspirations of community radio stations to be accessible and participatory are important factors for enabling SMS messages for encouraging community participation and feedback.

The real question is not what has enabled the projects described here, but why are more community radio stations not making active use of SMS to communicate with their listeners? Certainly the very rapid take up of mobile telephony is one reason. In many countries the number of users has doubled over the past two years or so and it is understanable that radio stations will take some time to devise strategies for using the technology. Other reasons could include the limitations of 160 characters per message and users who do not know how to use SMS.(12)

While there has been some spontaneous use of SMS messages as a way of facilitiating communication with listeners and community members, more complex projects using SMS servers and applications have generally emerged as a response to political crises or natural disasters. There are few, if any, experiences of complex uses of SMS without external funding and technical support, even though the financial and technical resources required are minimal.

A joint research project of AMARC’s Latin America and Caribbean region and ALER, will establish “labs” to experiment with the use of various ICTs in community radio stations in Latin America. Including advanced SMS servers and services in the package of options offered by the labs should provide some information about the appropriateness and potential of this technology for the region’s community media.

Bruce Girard
July 2008
If you know about or are involved in an SMS/community media project, please tell us about it as a reply to this post or by email.  blog2[at]comunica[dot]org

Footnotes

1. http://www.portioresearch.com/Mob_Mess_Fut_brochure.pdf
2. http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0309/msg00107.html
3. http://frontlinesms.com
4. MobileActive has evaluated some of these tools and their use in campaigns http://mobileactive.org/wiki/Desktop_SMS_Campaign_Tools. Also see their comparison of various tools at http://mobileactive.org/wiki/SMS_Tool_Comparison_Matrix
5. Ethan Zukerman, Mobile Phones and Social Activism: Why cell phones may be the most important technical innovation of the decade” http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/index.php?s=vastly+exceeds+internet+usage
6. Texting news to bypass censors, http://www.mediahelpingmedia.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=142&Itemid=1
7. Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in Mobile Use by NGOs http://mobileactive.org/files/MobilizingSocialChange_full.pdf
8. Local news with SMS http://mobileactive.org/spreading-news-sms-0
9. A study of 7,000 low income households in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago found that in every country except Mexico a majority of respondents had used a mobile phone in the past 3 months. In 4 of the 7 countries a majority of respondents owned their own mobile phones. http://www.dirsi.net/espanol/content/view/197/71/
10. Ethan Zuckerman http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/index.php?s=%22vastly+exceeds+internet+usage%22
11. A DIRSI study of 7,000 low income households in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago found that in every country except Mexico a majority of respondents had used a mobile phone in the past 3 months. In 4 of the 7 countries a majority of respondents owned their own mobile phones. http://www.dirsi.net/espanol/content/view/197/71/
12. The DIRSI study cited lack of knowledge as the main reason given by people when asked why they did not use SMS. According to the study, this is “not surprising given that most respondents are relatively new users (two years or less). In fact, our results suggest that adoption of services beyond voice increases over time, as users advance along the technical learning curve.”

Guy Berger, the project coordinator and head of the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, admits that it will be difficult to fit the news into the 160 characters that an SMS message can have, but they are already thinking of how to overcome the problem.

In the future, Berger hopes that the program will expand and possibly include other technologies like MMS (multimedia) messages. “We want to interface with the newspaper website, and we’re developing open source software to link the two,” he said. Berger said that there would also be research into the effectiveness of the project. “Then we’re also going to research next year the significance of this whole project,” he said. “Is it making a difference? What does it mean for democracy to have a lot of citizen journalism and to have young people contributing to the public opinion?”

Local News with SMS at mobileactive.org

I haven’t tried the software (although I have requested it and we want to test it at a community radio station somewhere in Latin America) but Sanjana Hattotuwa gave it a pretty good grade in a blog post on mobileactive.org, although she questions whether it might be too complicated for some grassroots organisations and complained about compatibility problems with her Nokia 3110 (one that FrontlineSMS does NOT claim to support fully).

Fronline SMS is one of a number of packages for managing SMS from your computer. Mobileactive.org compares FronlineSMS with some other Desktop SMS Campaign Tools.

More than 5,000 people died and 1.6 million were displaced as a result of the May 2006 earthquake in Yogyakarta and Central Java in Indonesia. During the days and weeks following the disaster, ordinary citizens received valuable news via text message. The text messaging service was put in place by Internews, a U.S.- based NGO that works to improve people’s access to information around the world.

The service was run through an emergency AM radio station, Radio Punokawan, established by the Indonesian Press and Broadcast Society, with support from Internews. In addition to radio broadcasts, important information was sent and received from the newsroom via text messaging. Outgoing messages warned of aftershocks and identified communities that had not yet received government assistance. More than 180 Indonesian journalists distributed and received information through the service.

A show is in progress, the DJs taking turns to mix records together and exchange banter in a cockney pirate patois. The music veers from chunky hip hop to saccharine R&B – like most contemporary pirates, Xtreme champions “urban” sounds, a term that originated as a euphemism for black music. When not DJ-ing, they fiddle with their mobile phones: texting, reading texts, taking calls. Everyone has a top-of-the-range handset.

There is a studio mobile too. It vibrates every few seconds like a faulty alarm clock, as listeners call and text. Scrolling through its inbox, I notice scores of “missed calls”. Big N explains that this is how pirates gauge a record’s popularity. If listeners like a tune, they call in and then ring off, so the studio mobile registers a “missed call”. This costs callers nothing. If Xtreme receives over 20 missed calls from different numbers before a track ends, the DJs play it again. This is why teenagers listen to pirate radio: it’s interactive in ways legal stations can’t match.

Below is the full article, found at http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0309/msg00107.html

7th September 2003 – Sunday Times Magazine
Criminal Records
Report by Matt Munday

Pirate radio is illegal, dangerous – and taking over the airwaves of Britain. But without it, stars like Ms Dynamite might never have been heard

So here I am, lost and blindfolded, being hurried along a north London street by my captor. Subtle pressure from a hand on my shoulder helps me weave a trajectory around lampposts, past oncoming pedestrians. The man’s other hand propels a photographer, who, like me, has had a baseball cap jammed onto his head, the peak yanked below eye level.

We met our “guide” 20 minutes earlier in the West End. He calls himself “Big N” and his appearance fits his name – built like a pocket Tyson, in a hooded top and baggy jeans. I wonder how passers-by are reacting to our plight; it must look as if we are being kidnapped.

Fortunately, we aren’t. Of the three of us, only Big N is on edge. He runs an unlicensed radio station, Xtreme FM, and, if caught, could face a two-year sentence for contravening the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949. Big N remembers the fate of another pirate station, Freek FM, featured in a national newspaper two years ago and, days later, raided by police. Hence the makeshift blindfolds, ensuring that Xtreme’s location remains secret.

We’re ushered through a doorway, up some stairs. We’re in a large old house, possibly a squat. Through another door, and – caps off – welcome to Xtreme FM’s studio. This turns out to be a spartan room, not much bigger than a student bedsit, and only slightly less grotty. A sheet is pinned across the window, the room lit by a bare bulb. The walls are peeling, there is a torn carpet underfoot and, in one corner, some rickety chairs.

In another corner, six sportswear-clad youths cluster around some basic sound equipment: turntables, a mixer, a microphone and, on the floor nearby, a hi-fi and a small black custom-made “link box”. The link box sends Xtreme’s signal, via a cable, through a tiny hole in the wall and up onto the roof. From here, a microwave “LNB” link – a hand-sized transmitter, “liberated” from a satellite TV dish – beams it to the main transmitter, “the rig” in pirate parlance, which is located on some high point, usually a tower-block roof, and could be anything up to five miles away. The rig is connected to an aerial that beams Xtreme onto the FM dial.

A show is in progress, the DJs taking turns to mix records together and exchange banter in a cockney pirate patois. The music veers from chunky hip hop to saccharine R&B – like most contemporary pirates, Xtreme champions “urban” sounds, a term that originated as a euphemism for black music. When not DJ-ing, they fiddle with their mobile phones: texting, reading texts, taking calls. Everyone has a top-of-the-range handset.

There is a studio mobile too. It vibrates every few seconds like a faulty alarm clock, as listeners call and text. Scrolling through its inbox, I notice scores of “missed calls”. Big N explains that this is how pirates gauge a record’s popularity. If listeners like a tune, they call in and then ring off, so the studio mobile registers a “missed call”. This costs callers nothing. If Xtreme receives over 20 missed calls from different numbers before a track ends, the DJs play it again. This is why teenagers listen to pirate radio: it’s interactive in ways legal stations can’t match. Some tune in on their mobiles – on the bus, in the high street, even at school.

Pirate stations like Xtreme are proliferating. According to the Radio Communications Agency, the government organisation that polices the airwaves, there are 209 UK pirates, 181 of which are in London. They have more than doubled in the past 15 years. It’s an increasingly lucrative game. Advertisers pay around £120 a week each, and stations can gross up to £3,000 a week. But the rewards don’t stop there: everyone at Xtreme knows that if you’re good enough, and play your cards right, this is a stepping stone to a champagne lifestyle, a media career, a No 1 record, fame and fortune. This is Pop Idol, ghetto-style.

“This is the best way to make a name for yourself,” says Big N, scrolling through his texts. Now 28, Big N has been a DJ since he was 14. “I couldn’t get a gig, but I knew that if I could get onto a pirate, clubs would eventually try me out. You’re aware it’s illegal, but you’re equally aware that once you start getting gigs, things can snowball.”

Ms Dynamite is the best-known beneficiary of this “snowball” effect. Currently the nation’s favourite female pop star and the £1m face of Pepsi-Cola, Dynamite was risking arrest every week on the ill-fated Freek FM barely three years ago. It was a calculated gamble. Her slots MC-ing on pirate radio helped establish a substantial teen fan base. Her debut single, Booo!, gatecrashed the top 40 on the back of heavy pirate rotation, which led to an album deal with Polydor and the coveted Mercury music prize; from there, her career went supernova.

Pirate DJs played a fundamental role in creating UK garage – the hybrid of house music and Jamaican dancehall from which Ms Dynamite, and several other chart stars, such as Craig David and Daniel Bedingfield, have emerged. There were pirate stations whose entire musical oeuvre was devoted to garage long before national radio woke up to it – but the pirates’ musical agenda moves at such a velocity that garage is already old hat.

What keeps the kids tuning in is the DJs’ ability to stay one step ahead. So garage is undergoing a transitional phase as DJs create a bewildering rash of new subgenres: bashy, 8-bar, tech-step – each, possibly, the next big thing. At Xtreme, a new style is in the offing. “But we don’t have a proper name for it yet,” says one of the DJs, Caspa C. “We just call it ‘bass’.”

Major labels know that if they sign an artist that is big on pirate radio, they also acquire a guaranteed fan base. BMG, whose roster includes the urban superstars the Neptunes and Whitney Houston, has courted pirate stations for 10 years. “We were among the first to set up ‘street teams’, whose job is to find out what is going on on pirate radio,” explains Mervyn Lyn, BMG vice-president of European marketing and promotion. “Now all the majors do the same. Pirates are simply too influential to ignore.”

The music industry isn’t the only business sector after a slice of the action. Blue-chip brands are becoming involved too – where kids with disposable income go, advertising will follow.

“These pirate kids are early adopters and they’re trendsetters,” says Rooney Carruthers, a partner at the advertising agency VCCP, whose clients include Coca-Cola and the mobile network O2. “They spend virtually all their disposable income on clothes, mobiles and text-messaging; they’ve got this must-have-the-right-label attitude, and if a brand can tap into that, it could be worth millions.”

“Brands are having to be more savvy, and understand that this world exists,” agrees Yusuf Chuku, a strategist at Naked Communications, a consultancy for brands such as Honda and MTV. “It’s getting harder to reach cool kids through conventional media channels. Kids rarely watch TV or read magazines en masse – the things that are cool in their world start closer to home. They listen to pirates where the DJs are friends of friends; they can text them and almost feel as if they have part-ownership of the station.”

There are, of course, manifest problems with this, not least the question of legality. And how do brands and agencies more used to dining at the Ivy than stumbling around north London wearing blindfolds make the necessary inroads?

In the Xtreme studio is a tall, calmly spoken, bald-headed man who says he has the answer. His name is Steve Gordon, and his club, Twice As Nice, has itself evolved into a global brand – from its London base, it now entertains over 25,000 people a week in summer months at venues across Europe.

Gordon is well connected in this world. The DJs he uses all come from pirate backgrounds. When called upon, he acts as a consultant to brands wishing to target the urban market. He claims to have helped at least three advertise directly on pirate radio – though, of course, he won’t say which. However, he does admit to helping brands including PlayStation, O2 and Warner Bros permeate the culture virally, in ways that stop short of breaking the law.

“In the case of Warners, we’ve collaborated on compilation albums,” he says, “while PlayStation and O2 sponsor our events.”

And although said companies haven’t paid to advertise directly on pirate stations, the chances of a Twice As Nice club night or album being plugged on air by pirate DJs are all but assured.

Our time at Xtreme is up. Four more DJs have arrived and it’s getting crowded. Before we leave, one of the DJs saunters over and unwittingly illustrates how little time today’s pirate generation devotes to conventional media channels. “So you’re from The Sunday Times?” he inquires. “I don’t think I’ve seen that. Is it anything like The Sun?”

Pirate DJs know that aside from lucrative nightclub work – where top earners charge £200 to £400 an hour – they can also be scouted by legal stations, a tradition dating back to the advent of Radio 1. In the 1960s, the first generation of sea-based pirates such as Radio Caroline attracted audiences of millions with their rock’n'roll programming. In response, the government outlawed marine broadcasting in 1967 and formed Radio 1 as a sop to pop fans, poaching the pirates’ most prolific presenters, such as Tony Blackburn and John Peel.

In the 1980s, growing demand for soul and rap led to a new wave of pirates springing up in big UK cities. Unlike their marine forebears, who could reach large swathes of the UK by broadcasting on medium wave from converted fishing boats, second-generation pirates such as London’s LWR and JFM broadcast on the FM dial; their audience wanted to hear the music in stereo, and FM transmitters have a smaller range. This forced the pirates inland, where they hid within council estates and derelict buildings. Several presenters from these stations, including Pete Tong and Tim Westwood, are now Radio 1 mainstays.

In 1990, Kiss FM rolled up its skull and crossbones, having won a licence to broadcast to London legally. With over 30 specialist music shows a week, it was able to showcase the myriad new genres of dance music spiralling out of rave culture faster than mainstream radio could cope with. Radio 1, worried it was no longer down with the kids, began ditching greying ex-Caroline presenters and poaching Kiss’s rising stars, who were replaced at Kiss, itself desperate to retain street credibility, by up-and-coming pirate DJs.

According to one of Kiss FM’s founders, Jazzie B – who won a Grammy in 1989 with his band, Soul II Soul – the rise of the land-based pirates is synonymous with black self-empowerment.

“We switch on and we hear the nucleus of what black Britain has to offer,” he says. “And it will remain that way until we are properly included. It will end when the BBC has black people in positions of power and when record companies and mainstream organisations have enough black people in place. Until then, there will always be pirate radio.”

Whenever they broadcast, pirates know that the Radio Communications Agency is monitoring them. The agency’s radio specialists stake out stations from inside unmarked vehicles, moving in to seize transmitters and enlisting the police for raids. A few days after visiting Xtreme, I join a pair of radio specialists driving up Brixton Hill in a Ford saloon. Like their pirate nemeses, neither gives his real name. Most pirates acknowledge they are just doing their job, they say, but on occasion things have turned nasty. Their car’s tyres have been slashed and its windscreen shattered. One of the pair has been threatened with violence.

Their car’s glove compartment contains a small rectangular box with two dials, which lock onto whatever frequency the radio is tuned into. A flickering needle on the first dial monitors the signal strength; the second has a circular, compass-like face, on which a vacillating red blob indicates the signal’s direction. We’re on the trail of a local pirate radio station, Bassline FM. Halfway up Brixton Hill, the blob veers left, and we turn off the main road into a council estate. Bassline instantly cuts out. One minute we’re listening to a reggae breakfast show; the next, there’s just a dull crackle. Somewhere, in one of the blocks looming above us, someone has recognised our car and pulled the plug.

Coincidentally, we trace another signal, Lightning FM, to a block just two streets away. Lightning’s aerial is housed inside a 40ft scaffold pole, clearly, almost brazenly, visible from ground level. Also on the roof is a small, horn-like microwave link that receives the studio’s signal and is connected to the biscuit-tin-sized rig. The specialists are after the rig. When they remove it, the station will be off air.

As we park, however, Lightning’s signal also cuts out. The specialists decide to head for the roof anyway, up eight flights of stairs. A padlocked hatch leads onto the roof from one corner of the highest walkway. As we arrive, a man in blue workman’s overalls is halfway along the walkway, strolling towards the stairs at the other end. He carries a sports bag. As he disappears down the opposite set of stairs, he sneaks a look back at us. There’s no point giving chase: the radio specialists have no powers of arrest. Sure enough, when we ascend to the roof, the rig is gone.

The cat-and-mouse game continues. Two more specialists arrive with a microwave tracer – a bulky, typewriter-sized machine that one of the men straps to his chest, before slowly rotating on the spot, holding aloft a funnel-like receiver. If the station is still broadcasting from its studio, the tracer will pinpoint the signal’s direction, narrowing the hunt down to two or three blocks of flats, which will then be placed under surveillance. This morning, however, the specialists are out of luck: their tracer remains silent.

Two hours later we arrive in Plumstead, southeast London, hot on the trail of another station, Flava FM, whose signal is blocking Ministry of Defence radio transmissions. It’s a common problem: pirate rigs are home-made, and sometimes signals “leak” onto other frequencies, scrambling broadcasts by emergency services and air-traffic controllers (who, fortunately, are able to switch frequencies). The worst-affected are tower-block residents: pirate aerials are sometimes anchored in rooftop drains, causing leakage into flats below, and the transmitters can scramble TV reception.

We trace Flava’s signal to another block, and this time the station remains on air – although our progress through the roof hatch is slowed by gloopy anti-climbing paint, courtesy of Flava’s management. One of the team then dons the tracer, and as he swings the funnel round, it crackles to life, a tinny UK-garage rhythm filling the air. The funnel points north across the Thames, at two blocks a couple of miles away. The specialists note the location. Then one saws the rig loose from a bicycle lock holding it in place. Flava vanishes from the FM dial – for now.

In 2002 the Radio Communications Agency completed 1,046 raids against pirate stations, but only a handful were studio raids – the rest were mostly rig seizures. Forty-nine people were prosecuted, though most received fines of around £700, and nobody went to jail. Against 209 pirate stations across the UK, the agency seems like a big-game hunter armed with a fly swatter – although it claims its latest tactic of targeting advertisers, thus hitting pirate revenues, is finally starting to reduce the number of stations.

Pirates know that when a rig vanishes, the culprit is more likely to be a rival station. “All the two-bob stations steal,” grumbles Tony T, manager of the south London pirate Flash FM. “These days every youngster is either a DJ or an MC. They all want to play on the big stations, and they can’t – so they find out how to put a station on, and get out there. But it takes around £5,000 to £6,000 to set up and they haven’t got that much, so they see a short cut and nick the rigs. It’s a big problem.”

A former pirate DJ on a now-defunct station called Upfront reveals how things can escalate. “Our rig was on the roof of some flats in south London, and another station smashed it up,” he says. “They were broadcasting on the same frequency as us. We replaced it, but got word that they were coming again. We waited for them, and it turned into a massive fight. It got out of hand. We didn’t get into pirate radio to spend our time fighting – but people’s livelihoods were at stake.”

In January, things turned nastier still. A 24-year-old man was shot in the leg and beaten with baseball bats at Oldfields Trading Estate in Sutton, south London. Four men were reported fleeing the scene. Police believe that a conflict between the pirate station Flight FM, which broadcast from a rented unit on the estate, and a rival station may have sparked the assault.

With competition turning ugly, some have turned to other, safer and potentially more lucrative methods of broadcasting. I travelled to Brighton to meet Patrick, a pirate operator with a difference: his station, InterFace, exists entirely on the internet. This is entirely legal, although it began life as an illegal pirate, Face FM.

Patrick now runs InterFace from his bedroom, surrounded by computer screens, each monitoring something different: servers, a chat room, listener data.

“Our DJs are based all around the world,” Patrick explains. “They simply upload their shows from wherever they are, and I stream them onto the site.”

Six years ago, Face FM teamed up with the internet security company AL Digital and became InterFace, an online dance-music station with a global audience. At the height of the dotcom boom, Patrick claims InterFace almost hit pay dirt. “A Japanese company offered us £100m for the station,” he says. “They wanted to set up an internet disco. We laughed it away, but they flew over to visit us. They were serious! We also had a similar offer from an American venture capitalist.” InterFace turned down both offers.

“If these money men had come aboard, our freedom would have been completely ruined. They would have turned us into Radio 1.” For £100m, I argue, most people wouldn’t have cared if they’d been turned into Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men – but Patrick remains unimpressed.

It’s no little irony that back in London, Radio 1 is busy running a pirate-style station of its own. A year ago, it launched a digital radio station, 1Xtra, whose DJ roster is almost entirely ex-pirate. And although take-up of digital radio sets has been sluggish, when car manufacturers begin installing them as standard, 1Xtra’s audience is set to rocket.

And so the game continues. For the winners – on both sides of the law – untold riches may be just around the corner; for the losers, a bullet from a rival. Meanwhile, the kids in the middle get on with making and consuming beats, rhymes and “bass” – the soundtrack of inner-city ambition

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Frontline SMS is a text messaging system “conceived, designed and written firmly with the needs of the non-profit sector in mind”. Basically it is an SMS management and broadcast system that runs on a computer connected to a mobile phone with a data cable. All you need to do is insert a SIM card and you broadcast SMS messages to your listeners and classify and process messages received from them.

Being able to send SMS messages to your listeners informing them of programme updates, events, etc. is great (only to listeners who have requested your info of course. Don’t send SMS spam!), but better yet is being able to receive, classify and process messages.

Frontline SMS uses a custom database to automatically store and classify incoming and outgoing messages, so a message received in the afternoon with a question or comment for the next day’s morning programme will be flagged for the morning programme’s attention instead of getting lost among dozens of messages on a mobile handset.

The database also keeps track of phone numbers and owners and allows messages to be sent to customised groups.The system also includes a ‘Survey Manager’ module that allows the running of surveys, an unscientific but seful way of taking the pulse of your community on an issue. You can also use its ‘Reply Manager’ to provide text-based information services in which a keyword sent in by a listener sends back a message about bus schedules, cultural events, or programme highlights.

Frontline SMS got a high profile when it was used in February 2007 to help coordinate monitoring of Nigeria’s elections and it is being used this week to provide support for a campaign against General Musharaff’s imposition of martial law in Pakistan.

I haven’t heard of Frontline or any other SMS management system being used by rural stations yet, but I would be interested in hearing about any trials or even plans.

The only technology that compares to the mobile phone in terms of pervasiveness and accessibility in the developing world is the radio. Indeed, considered together, radios and mobile phones can serve as a broad-distribution, participatory media network with some of the same citizen-media dynamics of the Internet, but accessible to a much wider, and non-literate audience.

Among the examples he cites are Interactive Radio for Justice / Radio Interactive Pour la Justice, a radio programme in Ituri, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that answers listeners’ questions about justice issues sent by SMS. (The Christian Science Monitor also wrote about IRFJ here). Zuckerman points out that sending questions via SMS allows for anonymity, an important point when your question is: “Are soldiers allowed to stay at my house and eat my food without paying for it?”

He offers another anecdote about the use of mobiles and radio stations to monitor elections in Ghana:

A dispersed group with mobile phones — especially mobile phones equipped with cameras — becomes a powerful force for “sousveillance.” Coined by Dr. Steve Mann, “sousveillance” refers to the monitoring of authority figures by grassroots groups, using the technologies and techniques of surveillance. The use of mobile phones to monitor the 2000 presidential election in Ghana is a good example of sousveillance — voters who were prevented from voting used mobile phones to report their experience to call-in shows on local radio stations. The stations broadcast the reports, prompting police to respond to the accusations of voter intimidation. Had voters called the police directly, it’s possible that authorities might not have responded — by making reports public through the radio, voters eliminated the possibility of police announcing that there had been no reports of voter intimidation. Similar techniques have been used in Sierra Leone, Senegal, and even in the United States — American voters used mobile phone cameras and Websites to record reports of voting irregularities during the 2006 congressional elections.

From an article Texting news to bypass censors

When we started, we had set up our website to stream and archive broadcasts, specifically for the four to five million Zimbabweans who have fled and are living outside the footprint of the broadcast signal.

We also send transcripts of key interviews to an extensive email address list and these get picked up by various organisations and circulated even further.

But currently we’re most excited about our latest endeavour – sending SMS news headlines into Zimbabwe, via mobile phones.

We generate news headlines on a daily basis anyway – so this is just another way of using what already exists.

It’s nice and cost effective for any additional donor because there is only the one cost, actually sending the texts. In two months we’ve built up an address database of about 2,000 mobile phone numbers.

Like many, Zimbabweans truly love their mobile phones and of course what we’re banking on is the virus effect.

We also get up to 100 requests a day to be added to the service so it’s growing rapidly. What becomes interesting is what business model to use?