Joy 94.9

Joy 94.9 is Australia's first and only gay and lesbian community radio station. Owned by JOY Melbourne Inc, it first aired in December 1993 and is based in Melbourne but got its permanent full-time broadcasting license in January 2002. Licensed by AMCA, it specialises in dance, techno and electronica music and also focuses a lot on community stories. The station is staffed by around 250 volunteers.

The programming of the station focuses on talkback, music, capitalist culture and lifestyle programs. The lifestyle programs are perhaps one of the most important sections to the station talking about local LGBT community events, counselling, mental health, support services and key networks supporting the LGBT community too. This station would really help provide a voice to the LGBT community who feel they haven't found their's yet or maybe don't know how to deal with rejection or coming out for example so having radio stations like this are so, so important. (Shingler & Wieringa 1998) state that "Speech is a crucial part of a radio station's branding, its construction of a particular image. Speech can be (and is) used to articulate a stations identity, helping it to attract specific types of audience (in terms of class, age, regionality, gender, ethnicity, etc)." This is so evident on this station and speech really is the heart of the station. The day time content is mainly chat-based and then from 7pm to midnight it focuses on more specialist speech content such as current affairs and lifestyle. The schedule is updated every 4 months adding more and more new show ideas to the schedule to create a really wide spread of topics across the station. JOY airs a news network called Q-mmunity Network News (QNN) and this is syndicated to several community radio stations across Australia and it covers weekdays and weekends in the morning, lunchtime and drive.

The presenters are really bubbly spreading positivity to their listeners and I feel like this station has a target audience of a really wide age range of people as the speech and music they play would appeal to and draw in a lot of listeners so I would say the target audience was around 16-40. I think the speech is the most important part to this station over the music as its the speech and local talking points that the viewers are most interested in hearing. The links are rarely crunch and rolls and usually longer lengths of speech to talk about important LGBT talking points which I think works really well for the station. The only slight downside to the station is I think their online presence could be stronger such as social media and online streaming and uploaded videos. The website they have is really good, articles are interesting, the information on the shows and schedules are easy to find too.

Overall the station is presented really well and the presenters do an amazing job in portraying all that essential information to the listeners and presenting it in a really smooth, bubbly way too. The way the shows are divided into breakfast, daytime, drive and specialist is a really great, simple format too and it allows room for many vital specialist speech shows on the evening too. I think the genre of music this station has fits perfectly in relation to the speech and the station really is important to the listener to have as a voice too. It is a great idea for a station theme and I can't believe it is the only station of its kind in the whole of Australia.

https://joy.org.au/

References

• Shingler, M. & Wieringa, C. (1998) On Air. Methods and Meanings of Radio. London: Hodder Headline Group