I am following Ferndale Radio’s campaign to raise enough funds to launch a Low Power FM station in and around the Rust Belt Market zone of Metro Detroit. The group has a nice promotional Vimeo on its indiegogo page. It confirms what I already knew but haven’t really wanted to face. Lots of young people really, truly do […]
Are you working abroad? Do you now live in some wonderful city that is fascinating and different, but also pretty difficult to navigate through, socially speaking? Well, one solution is to do what Michael Egerton, now an expat resident of Hong Kong did: start an Internet radio station. Egerton hails from the Netherlands. He lives […]
It looks like the staff of South Africa community radio station Madibeng FM 105.3 thought an on air dialogue with activists critical about a cash-for-mining-access deal would go smoothly. Unfortunately they were wrong. On Thursday beneficiaries of the controversial arrangement with the Lonmin platinum metals consortium surrounded the building and forced management to shut the program […]
The United Kingdom’s broadcast regulator (Ofcom) has authorized six more community radio licenses, all in southeast England. The radio project that will serve the Brighton area seems especially interesting. It calls itself Platform B. I quote from the group’s Facebook page: “Working like a pirate station, Platform B will challenge the formal infrastructure of traditional radio – […]
As scientists anticipate more hurricanes in a warming world, the Federal Communications Commission has authorized three new Emergency Alert System event codes. They are: “Extreme Wind Warning” (EWW), “Storm Surge Watch” (SWW), and “Storm Surge Warning” (SSW). The EAS allows state and local emergency networks to issue warnings about tornados and hurricanes directly over the radio airwaves. […]
Composer Kevin Volans gave a talk at Ireland’s Contemporary Music Center the other month. During the speech Volans ID’d the United Kingdom’s Classic FM radio service as a key moment in Good Culture’s never ending declension narrative. First came The Three Tenors (gah), and if that wasn’t enough: “Then came Classic FM in 1992, set up by […]
A first rate classical smartphone application program: King-FM’s fantasy concert series.
I am so looking forward to Penny Lane’s new documentary on John Romulus Brinkley, coming here to San Francisco in early July. Titled Nuts! it chronicles “Doctor” Brinkley’s rise as the Depression era midwestern mega-quack who championed the grafting of goat glands into the gonads of his patients. To promulgate this astoundingly bad cure for male sexual […]
My friend Ian Scheller has released volume two of his Hollywood Strips comics series. This panel (below) hit home for me, and perhaps for you as well. I don’t mean to single out podcasting here. Basically, this is my experience with spontaneously getting into almost any media project these days, from learning a new computer programming language […]
I own a lot of books about the history of radio. Unique among them is Louis M. Bloch Jr.’s charming and strange volume titled The Gas Pipe Networks: A History of College Radio, 1936-1946. Every now and then I open its pages and am transported to a distant world of struggling collegiate stations. The tome chronicles lads and […]
