Expanded Medium: National Public Radio and Katrina Web Memorials

Abstract

As commercial news and entertainment media in the United States become increasingly visually oriented— with cable television news and opinion programs taking design cues from the webpage—commercial and public radio broadcasters also have begun to embrace multimedia strategies to deliver news stories, music, and entertainment programming across multiple platforms. Don Imus simulcast his CBS radio show on the cable network MSNBC (before being fired in 2007 for making racist comments on air) and, after a short stint hosting a television show in 1992, Rush Limbaugh made his conservative talk radio show available as a radio show on the Internet through his live “Ditto Cam.” Liberal radio and television talk show counterparts include Rachel Maddow, whose radio show has been broadcast on Air America and whose political commentary show is aired on MSNBC. Although the specific forms of cross-platform programming that will emerge as dominant amidst the corporate consolidation and vertical integration of the U.S. mass media remain to be discovered, the fact that the same news information and entertainment programming will become accessible across television and radio broadcasting and Internet streaming is unquestionable.