The Digital Age: The Press, Radio, Radio Critics and the Public

Abstract

This chapter covers the period from the early 1990s until now, corresponding to a period when new forms of digital communication and the internet arrived. For radio, this is a period of huge change, with the development of DAB, podcasts and radio streaming, but also for the newspapers, as younger readers started to desert them for online news. Initially, however, the 1990s was a period when radio criticism experiences, what could be called, a mini resurgence in the popular press, with the appearance of weekly Radio and TV Guides, though this coverage soon declined again later in the decade. The internet started to allow new forms of competition to the newspapers to appear, such as from new online only media companies and from the public itself using blogs and new forms of social media. Radio criticism, while still found in traditional newspapers, now also moved online, onto the newspapers’ website, onto the sites of new forms of online media and onto the areas populated by the public, such as Twitter and Facebook. I end by reflecting on whether such developments might mean the end of the radio critic and radio criticism, or just that of the media-based critic with the appearance of new public critics.