On Saturday July 2 Australia will hold national elections for all 226 members of its Parliament. Supporters of community radio across the country are taking advantage of this attention to demand the restoration of $1.4 million in cuts to the service. Almost 49,000 Australians have added their names to a #keepcommunityradio petition page. The petition reads in […]
Author Archive | Matthew Lasar
KPFA’s Quincy McCoy, witness to the Clear Channel counterrevolution
I dropped by Pacifica station KPFA in Berkeley the other day to be interviewed about my new book on digital/Internet radio. After the conversation, my interlocutor Brian Edwards-Tiekert took me upstairs and I had the pleasure of meeting the operation’s General Manager, Quincy McCoy. I’ve heard nothing but good things about McCoy, and meeting him […]
The case for KUSP-FM of Santa Cruz as a community rock station
When last we left the KUSP-FM in Santa Cruz drama, the struggling public radio station had not succeeded in meeting its fund raising goal: $300k in around a month. And so the signal has laid off most of its staff save its Operations Director, now the General Manager. It has replaced its daily live deejay […]
City of Boston wants feedback from residents on new Low Power FM station
There’s something to be said for a city acquiring a Low Power FM radio signal. Take Boston, for example, which snagged an LPFM license from the Federal Communications Commission in 2015 and has given the task of running the shebang to the Boston Neighborhood Network. To get things started, the municipality is holding no less […]
KUSP falls short of marathon goal, will continue programming through May 7
Beleaguered public/community radio station KUSP-FM of Santa Cruz, California has concluded its “Mayday” fund drive. Unfortunately the operation only raised around a third of the money it needs to keep going over the coming six months. Here’s the bottom line from KUSP’s latest blog post: “We cannot afford our regular broadcast and still tend to the financial obligations that are […]
The joys and perils of outback mining town community radio
Australia’s ABC News service has an nice profile of Moranbah community radio, an outback Queensland station that broadcasts to the mining town of that name. Interestingly, the general manager of station 4RFM called deejaying at the signal a great cure for the blues. “It can change your perspective,” Kayreen Burgum told ABC. ” . . […]
Hey Santa Cruz: you have 7 days to decide about KUSP-FM
It is crunch time for KUSP-FM in Santa Cruz, California. The newly launched Adult Album Alternative non-commercial radio station has challenged itself to raise $300,000 or bust by May 1. Here’s the good news. KUSP has become a really nice contempoary rock/pop signal, with live deejays playing all kinds of cool music I’ve never heard […]
It’s time to make Haiti’s 40+ community radio stations legit
Reading the Miami Herald’s piece on Haiti’s 40 or so community radio stations, I kept wondering to myself, are they legal or not? The article says these signals are “difficult to locate” and have “no official listings and, under Haitian law, the stations do not exist.” So they’re not exactly pirate but they’re not really legitimate […]
Are we at the dawn of the post-iHeart radio era? (And will it be good?)
Medialife ponders the imminent collapse of iHeartMedia, a product of Clear Channel’s famous leveraged buyout, which, apparently, has not rescued the new company from its $21bn mountain of debt. Bankruptcy is what the author of the piece hopes for, which will unleash 850 radio licenses onto the market. Ditto for Cumulus Media, drowning in red […]
More songs about radio: a UK community radio version
I got a nice note the other day about my new book on radio from David Harris, who is a volunteer presenter at The Flash community radio signal, based in the town of Havant, near Portsmouth on the south coast of England. Harris is reviewing my book for Radio User magazine, a United Kingdom journal. The […]