RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

Rađio stations in New YorK (and everywhere else , too) go after a segment of the total possible listening audience and prognam all their material toward that audience . This is the formula or format of the station . It may be aimed at the 18-to-34 уеаг olđ age group , or housewives , or BlacKs , or Latinos , or men driving to and from worK from the suburbs , Whatever the target auđience is , the station tells ađvertisers that they can count on listeners of that type at the times they wish to purchase commercials . In a way , the purpose of radio today is to "pacKage" and sell the listeners to the advertisers . If you ever looK at radio ads aimeđ at advertisers (or magazine ađs or TV ads for that matter ) , you will notice that they boast about the Kind of audience they have. They want advertisers to buy that audience's attention (and radio is better for this than television) for 1 5 seconds or thirty seconds or whatever . Radio is no longer an art but a business , Maybe people who talK about the old days of radio are being nostalgic , and maybe radio was always a business . But .that doesn't matter , really, because there is an art to radio, and some broadcasters are still trying to create a radio art form , Radio creates sounds . It is đifferent than апу of the other popular media because it worKs with sound alone . This has its advantages anđ disadvantages . It's true that visual images , such as photographs or the television screen , allow the viewer to see what the photographer or director had in mind and give more detail to what we read or see. But with radio , and this is really its advantage anđ its art, we create our own pictures in our mmds. Radio can be the most imaginative of the media because each person invents his or her own story . And producers who worK in sound can do much more with that raw material - people's imaginations - than the artists who concentrate on the visual effects of their efforts . Because a radio drama doesn't have to show you the images to go with its sounds , it can move you around through time and space - putting you first here , then there - in the future, in the past - attacKeđ by a thousand апдгу elephants , then sitting alone in the parK with the quiet thoughts rolling around in your head . You can show all that in drawings or write it all out in print, but it isn't as ef f ective as it is in someone's imagination. Or you could maKe a movie or a TV show , but it is зо much more expensive - too expensive for most people . The art of radio is to recapture some of the creativity of the old days of the medium . That is why WHCR tries to program drama

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