Late night has always been a special time for radio, ever since station owners decided not to turn off the transmitter at midnight. Now that it’s no longer necessary to have a live human being operating the station during all the hours it’s on air, commercial late night radio is mostly a bland mash of […]
As a proud thirty-eight year-old member of Generation X, I have become just a little disturbed by a trend I’ve noticed in the last few years. One might call this trend the “indie-rockification” of public radio. As my fellow grunge-survivors and I, raised on the so-called “first wave” of alternative rock and derided by boomers […]
For as much as I love radio I have to admit that there’s very few programs that I might consider appointment listening. Sure, I tune in to NPR daily to catch up on the news with Morning Edition and All Things Considered, but they’re pretty interchangeable to me. If, for some reason, the BBC News […]
Conservative commentators may be cackling about the failure of Air America radio, trying to make it into an indicator for both the inherent weakness of liberal-leaning radio and liberal politics. But any reasoned analysis of the radio industry demonstrates that neither is the case. Rush Limbaugh, in particular, and the rest of the nation’s most […]
I think I can speak for my fellow Radio Survivors when I say that we really enjoyed putting together our run-down of the fourteen most important radio trends of the last decade. And yet, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the many aspects of radio that we really love. So, beginning this month each of […]
I first heard about the Chicago Independent Radio Project (CHIRP) when I moved to Chicago in the spring of 2008. For all intents and purposes the project grew out of the former incarnation of Loyola University’s WLUW-FM which operated as a community radio station from 1997 to June 2008. In 2001 Loyola announced that it […]
If we get into the wayback machine and set it for 1996 we’ll find that it was a time before MP3s, when online video was nearly an oxymoron and broadcast radio was, by-and-large, a healthy and profitable business. Online audio, including live streaming, was a new technology relying on high degrees of compression in order […]
On my recently ended radioshow I tried to reguarly to give updates on unlicensed radio. To me it’s one of the still lively modes of civil disobedience in electronic communications, especially in the internet age. Although there is low-power FM in the US, and a growing community radio movement world-wide, the urge to broadcast without […]
Amazon.com Widgets I keep reading all this hype about how HD Radio is the big audio deal at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, yet I fail to quite see what’s so exciting. Sure, there are some new models of HD Radio receivers rolling out, but the number of new entries roughly equals the number of […]
The biggest news at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show might be Google’s new Nexus smartphone, but that doesn’t mean there’s no space for radio in all the gadget frenzy. Your resident RadioSurvivors don’t yet have the travel budget to jet off to Vegas to roam the show floor in person. Instead, I’m picking through the […]
