The Road Ahead: Community Radio and the Digital Milieu—Challenges and Opportunities for the Next Century of South Africa’s Radio Landscape

This volume adds to a growing corpus of research on radio in South Africa. To our knowledge, this volume forms the first comprehensive work that tackles the issue of radio in South Africa focusing exclusively on community radio and the digital milieu, highlighting the undercurrents of community radio and some of the evolving trends necessitated by technology. As with the first volume, 100 Years of Radio in South Africa: South African Radio Stations and Broadcasters Then & Now the current volume consists of contributions from media scholars and practitioners. These contributions cover multiple aspects ranging from the history of community radio in the country to the espousal of technologies that resulted in new forms of radio such as podcasts and various streaming technologies. Thus, the volume highlights key developments in community media and the evolution of online radios as well as some of the key guideposts they use to attract their audience. In the final analysis, the chapters represented in this volume seek to forecast the place and character of South African radio in the coming years, drawing on multiple theories and approaches.