Audiences like it local and vocal

The Community Broadcasting Association of Australia (CBAA) reports:

Community radio and TV stations are hugely important to the vitality of local communities, say the authors of a groundbreaking study being launched today.

In the largest project of its kind in the world, researchers from Griffith University have spent two years interviewing audiences across the country, including listeners of Indigenous stations, ethnic language programs, metropolitan, suburban, regional, rural and remote radio, as well as TV audiences in the emerging community TV sector.

The resulting report, Community Media Matters – an audience study of the Australian community broadcasting sector, reveals the integral role played by community broadcasting as described by some of its more than seven and a half million listeners.

The Hon. Helen Coonan, Minister for Communication, Information Technology and the Arts is launching the report at the Melbourne studios of 3RRR-FM, today, Friday August 17. [more]

Read more about the launch via the CBF.

wikipedia.org/wiki/3ZZZ

I’ve update some sections of the 3ZZZ page on Wikipedia

Funding, Training and Community Support

The radio station is financed by membership fees and listener donations during the annual ‘Radiothon’, company sponsorship and by grants from Community Broadcasting Foundation [CBF]. 3ZZZ offers free training to broadcasters. One training program, called ‘Starting Out’ is specifically targeted a asylum seekers and refugees. Dinka (southern Sudan) and Ghanaian trainees commenced broadcasting as part of Starting Out in early 2007. Starting Out commenced in 2006, and receives financial support from the City of Yarra.