Small scale radio

O Ofcom disponibiliza um relatório muito interessante sobre o cenário das "small scale radio" no Reino Unido.

Do documento sublinho as seguintes passagens:

The remaining 350 or so stations can be described as small local stations. They fall into two main categories, according to the way they are licensed.
• Around 140 of them are commercial stations, whose primary aim is to make profits for their shareholders, which they do by selling advertising. They are governed by licence conditions which require them to provide a certain amount of local programming. They also use this local programming to differentiate themselves from their commercial competitors that cover larger areas.
(...)
The remaining 200 or so are community stations. This is a relatively new type of station and almost all have been broadcasting for less than five years. These must be not for profit and must be funded by a diversity of funding sources: there is a limit of 50% on the proportion of their funding that can come from on-air advertising and sponsorship, and many receive funding in the form of grants from public and other bodies.

Sobre a Informação:

Micro-local information was considered unique to small-scale services. It was the kind of information that larger, less local, radio stations could not provide, but which kept small-scale listeners informed and up-to-date about what was going on in their local areas.

News – if there was a news event in their area, listeners would tune in to their small-scale station to find out the details about it and if there were any consequences for themselves as a result.
Listeners of GTFM in Pontypridd described how there had been a fire there during the day which has caused massive traffic jams, and the only place where they could find out what had happened was by tuning it to GTFM.