Commercial radio in Colombia. The new digital panorama of communication and journalism

Abstract

Traditional radio stations have found in the Internet a channel where new formats, contents, narratives and languages exist together enabling to reach different publics and, in turn, to open other alternatives for processing, preparing and broadcasting the information. These mainstream media outlets are eager to migrate their contents to the web, either to provide a supplementary service or to create a media convergence symbiosis whereby new models will be created for both the communication and the communicator/journalist's performance. To understand these new media paradigms, this work analyzed the transformation from analogue to digital radio based on the following categories: business, technology, information, web design, and professional/labor audiences and trends. To that end, a theoretical and applied research was conducted in the form of a documentary, descriptive and correlational work including ve commercial radio stations out of the six national radio companies in Colombia with greater audiences and information coverage. In the radio station transformation, it was identied that there are new scenarios to migrate and set up digital channels, which is bringing about a new ecosystem for a more horizontal communication between audiences and media. All this implies to carry out changes in the media panorama, in the delivery formats and in the development of new mediations between users and contents according to each media outlet platform.