Guide Offers Tips to Strengthen Local Media
FrontLines - April 2009
Community media, especially local radio stations, are playing an increasingly vital role in the daily lives of citizens in rural areas, small towns, and urban neighborhoods on all continents. The local outlets provide daily forums for citizens at the grassroots level to discuss important issues of the day, receive educational materials, and participate in local governance and policy discussions.
Donors like USAID have helped community radio stations and networks—numbering over 4,000 globally—not only to empower democratic discourse, but to strengthen communication about key development areas such as health, education, agriculture, vocational education, and local governance.
USAID [Office of Democracy and Governance (DG)] has released the “Community Media Sustainability Guide: The Business of Changing Lives,” an online publication that “lives” by inviting community media activists and observers to make comments and suggestions.
The guide—co-produced with Internews and Pact, and available at www.internews.org/pubs/pdfs/InternewsCommunityMediaGuide2009.pdf (pdf, 2.89mb)—is linked to a Facebook site where people can post their comments.
The interactivity is designed to include radio, Web, video, and print media.
The publication addresses ways to sustain the growing community
media phenomenon including how to increase revenue sources, cut costs, inspire volunteers, and control energy costs. Case studies from South Africa, the United States, Mali, Haiti, and Peru provide examples.
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