I’m awed by all the radio enthusiasts, collectors, historians, and scholars out there; so I’m going to try to feature some of my favorites on Radio Survivor in a new feature called Radio Obsessives. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my interview with Garrett Wollman about his fascination with radio towers is what […]
I just learned about a soon-to-be-launched online radio station in Taiwan called Oh! Zone that will be programmed entirely with foreign content from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. What’s cool to me is that the station is picking and choosing specific programs from college radio stations in an attempt to […]
When I was a kid we had a large old-fashioned radio that had stations listed on it from all over the country and globe. I can’t remember if we ever had any luck tuning in to far-away stations, but it seemed like such a magical concept. Certainly in the early days of radio that was […]
It’s time for my annual rant about the Princeton Review college survey! Every year they survey college students from all over the land (at 371 colleges this time around) in order to learn more about campus life for their “Best Colleges” guide that they market to high school students. 300ish students on average are surveyed […]
I love reading stories about radio and every time I run across a college radio mention in a book, my interest in piqued. In the months to come I’m going to work on compiling a list of college radio “must reads,” from the academic to the autobiographic. My first pick: Kill the Music. Kill the […]
Did you know about Vatican Radio? Around since 1931, it’s the official voice of the Pope and the Catholic Church. All these years it’s been broadcasting the Pope’s musings commercial free. Starting on July 6th, the station began airing ads in order to help defray some of the mounting costs associated with their global broadcasts […]
There’s been some chatter this week about whether or not the youth of today are listening to radio. The standard cliche is that youth have abandoned radio and Monday’s Boston Globe article “Young Listeners Tune Out Radio in Search of New Music” repeats that refrain, quoting teens and folks in their 20s who report that […]
The San Francisco Bay Area has been home to a wide range of radio pioneers and renegades, from the very early days of broadcasting with Doc Herrold’s experiments 100 years ago to freeform radio in the early days of FM in the 1960s to pirate radio advocates like Stephen Dunifer of Free Radio Berkeley. And […]
Every day I learn something new about radio and today I was really surprised to discover that there’s an entire radio service called BusRadio that is piped in to school buses and reaches a million kids. They tout themselves as “a superior, age-appropriate alternative to AM/FM radio programming.” According to an article in the Denver […]
In his post about Pandora yesterday, Matthew mentioned that he’d like to see a different model of radio on the Internet, where both listeners and DJs have some sort of control over the music selections. Well, we’re definitely in an era full of user-generated content and of success stories like American Idol, where fans vote […]
