Audiences and Community Media Studies: Notes for a Necessary Reencounter

Abstract

This article presents lessons learned and debates about the relationship between academic knowledge and nonprofit communication projects, linked to the results of a hearing research process with four community radios of cooperative management in Greater Córdoba (Córdoba Metropolitan Area). This research aimed to contribute to its sustainability through the production of systematic knowledge about its real and potential audiences. Eight studies were conducted, two for each radio, one of a qualitative nature and one of a quantitative nature. The quantitative one consisted of population surveys on media consumption. especially oriented to radio and local media, as well as to levels of satisfaction with local and regional information. The qualitative ones were developed through in-depth interviews and focus groups, according to each case, and addressed radio listening modalities, different ways of identifying with the radios in question, as well as issues related to the experience of living in the cities where the radios were located.   Among the most important findings, there is a set of data that makes it possible to problematize the notion of convergent consumption, since it is possible to recognize forms of audiovisual consumption that articulate analog and digital media, in which long-term links are articulated with certain media, with strong affective and custom components with new types of consumption. Both the research process and its results enabled recognition that strengthened the media in question, but also updated a relationship between research and community media in which academic knowledge, concerns generated in practice and theoretical methodological approaches were articulated in the that there were learnings that exceeded the research results.