FM Radio’s Response to a Dual Crisis Situation in the Republic of Croatia

Abstract

The paper examines the programming and organisational responses of FM radio to a dual crisis situation in the Republic of Croatia. At the very beginning of the national COVID-19 lockdown, on 22 March 2020, the capital city of Zagreb was struck by the strongest earthquake in the last 140 years. With the purpose of ‘recording’ the situation at the time when the disaster was actually occurring, the research aims to question how the radio stations in the area acted under such unprecedented crisis circumstances. Methodologically, it is a qualitative and descriptive research based on the analysis of questionnaire answers. Open-ended questions are grouped into three main topics: organization and programme changes, sources of information and the role of digital platforms. The results reveal that radio stations tended to retain their formatted programme content regardless of the dual crisis. This finding indicates the necessity to re-examine the overall role of FM radio in a modern democratic society.

Commercial Format FM Radio Stations for the Young in Croatia from the Perspective of the Education of Journalists

“…However, an overall lack of examining the phenomenon of radio programmes formatting is noticed, despite the fact that its success is earlier being actively studied, for instance, in neighbouring countries (Milinkov, 2011;Pralica, 2011;Spaić, 2005, etc.). But new trends in radio studies are visible, in particular regarding changes that have affected radio in Croatia due to the pandemic (Mučalo et al, 2020;Šulentić, 2022), student radio (Vukić, Šulentić 2021), and women in leading positions at Croatian radio stations (Ivanuš, 2021).…”

“…We collected data from respondents by surveying (Ivanuš, 2021;Mučalo, 1998Mučalo, , 1999Mučalo, , 2010Mučalo, Čeč, 2017;Mučalo, Knežević, 2014;Šulentić, 2022) and interviewing (Mučalo, Čeč, 2017;Šago, 2017;Vukić, Šulentić, 2021), traditional qualitative methods and a common practice of radio studies in both Croatia and the rest of the world (Schramm, Cohen, 2017), while for examining curricula a content analysis is applied, a habitual method in researching higher education of journalists (Vukić, 2017).…”