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Radio is a resilient medium. As in different countries around the world celebrations are being planned to mark the 100th anniversaries of the first regular domestic radio services, early predictions of its demise have so far been proven wrong. Radio transmission remains overwhelmingly analogue in a world where digital switchover of television currently preoccupies many governments and audiences alike.

AbstractRadio has been variously described as the 'forgotten', 'invisible', 'secondary', 'blind' and even 'Cinderella' medium, and it has been relatively under‐theorised in media studies since the subject first appeared in the classroom in the 1930s. Media educators may have been slow to realise its potential, and radio's survival may have been threatened by the emergence of new media, but thisestablished, rather than old medium has reinvented itself before now and is doing so again in the age of media convergence. Digital migration may be slow because the benefits of new technology over the existing analogue transmission platforms may not be apparent to consumers, but now radio provides given pictures online and on mobile platforms through parallel broadcaster and user‐generated web content. Teaching radio studies can be both enjoyable and cost‐effective, with both academic and vocational outcomes, and radio's place in media education seems assured by its longevity and durability. This article explores essential synergies between the development of radio as an industry that is now situated in a convergent, digital landscape, the state of the art of academic radio studies, and the practice of radio within media education.

China and the United Kingdom are countries which differ greatly, not least in traditional and new media. This paper will consider a number of structural and content issues around the output of mainstream multimedia journalism in these two very different news markets. Through a detailed comparative textual analysis of three major news web sites in each of the two countries, it will examine ways in which contemporary information technology and recently-evolved epistemological, linguistic and aesthetic conventions in communicating news and current affairs narratives affect multimedia reporting on mainstream online news websites. The paper presents the latest results of a detailed content analysis of interactive multimedia reporting in China and the UK on three randomly-chosen days over a period of two months. The data set was derived from a range of different media organisations exhibiting sufficient commonalities of objective and perspective to allow relevant comparisons to be made between practices in multimedia news journalism in the two countries. In China, Xinhua Wang is a state news agency whose main public presence is online, while Nandu Wang and Renming Wang are newspapers with identifiably left-leaning and right-leaning tendencies respectively in their political outlook. In the UK, the BBC is a public service broadcaster operating nonetheless at some distance from government, but which makes extensive use of its online presence to post journalistic content on domestic and international news web sites, while The Guardian and The Telegraph are both newspapers that are situated on the left and right of UK politics respectively.

This paper compares and contrasts the coverage of consumer affairs on radio in the two very different nations of China and the UK. In China, the daily programme Tian Tian 315 regularly achieves some of the highest audiences of the state broadcaster China National Radio. In 2015 it received one of the highest national awards for journalism because of its impact on the developing consumer movement in China, the largest market economy in the world, as well as on individual consumers - its listeners. In the UK one of the main fixed points in the Radio 4 schedule of the public broadcaster the BBC is the programme You and Yours, which champions consumer rights five days a week. Moneybox takes a more specialised approach to issues over personal finance and is broadcast weekly on Radio 4. All of these programmes are broadcast during daytime, in prominent timeslots. The paper uses representative extracts from the two countries to illustrate a quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis of their public broadcasters' output and approach to consumer affairs, as well as some examples of radio having produced tangible results in improving the regulatory or commercial environment for listeners needing support as individual consumers. It also asks to what extent consumer affairs are represented in more general programming, including in news coverage on CNR and the BBC, and what is the appeal of this genre of speech radio when individual items may only be of direct relevance to a minority of those listening. Dr Ying Yu is a Research Fellow and Director of the Consumer Rights in China Programme at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on consumer protection from the international comparative law and private international law perspectives. Her research interests include media representations of consumer protection policy and the law of e-commerce, financial services, tourism, dispute resolution and cross-border transactions between China and the rest of the world. Professor Guy Starkey is Associate Dean, Global Engagement at Bournemouth University. He was Chair of the Radio Research Section of ECREA (2008-14). His academic publications include the books Local Radio, Going Global (2015), Radio in Context, second edition (2014), Radio Journalism (with Professor Andrew Crisell, 2009) and Balance and Bias in Journalism: Representation, Regulation and Democracy (2007). In 2014 he published Radio: The Resilient Medium at the University of Sunderland.