Community Radio Toolkit, Ally Fogg, Phil Korbel and Cathy Brooks, Radio Regen 2006, £20.00 large format, spiral bound book, 212 pp ISBN 0955170702 (order from www.radioregen.org)

It is something of a truism in media education that radio is the ‘poor relation’ in terms of both theory and production work. I think this is changing slowly and it is gratifying to read the exchanges on OCR’s email list about new centres getting started.

The truth is that there has never been a better time to start thinking about radio work. The possibilities of digital sound recording, and in particular podcasting are being widely discussed. New community radio stations are being set up across the country and as more centres investigate radio, more students are recognising that radio is an enjoyable medium in which to work.

Now, along comes a resource from Radio Regen that offers anyone interested in community radio a range of materials and support. Radio Regen, based in Manchester have had long experience working with community groups and setting up radio stations and that experience is distilled and packaged to provide the basis of the Toolkit.

It’s important to get clear what the Toolkit offers -- and what it doesn’t. It offers to support you in the enterprise of starting a community radio station or a trial project (which could be a school radio with a Restricted Service Licence (RSL)). It isn’t a technical manual on how to operate a studio desk or record an interview and it isn’t a history of radio. Instead it offers practical advice on the important organisational and institutional issues in starting to broadcast.

I can see that it would be very useful if you want to run a ‘real’ radio station in a school or college, even for a short period of three or four days (which you should before trying anything more ambitious). It would also be useful for students researching community radio and for anyone studying the alternatives to mainstream media.

I urge you to go to the website at www.radioregen.org where you can read the first two chapters of the book and check the contents of the rest. The book is attractively produced and engagingly written and I’m sure it will help both would-be community broadcasters and radio students generally.

Roy Stafford