This November 30 marks the 20th anniversary of the protests against meetings of the World Trade Organization that shut down the city of Seattle. It also marks the birthday of the Indymedia movement, which brought together grassroots media activists from public access TV, print, community radio and internet technology to create a radical open publishing […]
Author Archive | Paul Riismandel
R.I.P. Radio Adventurer ‘The Professor’
SWLing Post editor Thomas Witherspoon recently notified us of the passing of “radio zealot” Michael Pool, a/k/a The Professor. I was an avid follower of Pool’s travels in AM radio listening and airchecking that he recorded for WFMU’s Beware of the Blog during the 2000s, and later on his own Radio Kitchen blog until about […]
Bonus Episode #178.5 – More Irish Pirates for the Radio Anoraks
We had so much fun talking with Irish Pirate Radio Archive founders Brian Greene and John Walsh on episode #178 that we went way past the 59 minutes we deliver for our radio affiliates. Since not everything could fit into our regular episode, we saved some of the nerdier bits for our Patreon supporters. We […]
How to Listen to Super Bowl LIII on the Radio
Looking for info on how to listen to this 2021’s Super Bowl LV? Click here. Updated Jan. 31, 2019 Once again it’s time for my annual hunt for the Super Bowl on the radio around the world. Last year I had fun listening to the first Australian to call the big game for his home […]
10 Reasons Why CDs Are Still Awesome (Especially for Radio)
Quite a lot of shade is getting thrown at CDs in the press these days. The LA Times reports, “The compact disc era may finally be entering its hospice stage,” while Rolling Stone declares, “CDs Are Dying Three Times as Fast as Vinyl Is Growing.” Putting aside the misleading equivocation of the RS calculation – […]
Retro Vacation Postcards from Radio Station Tours
Jennifer takes beautiful photos on her radio station tours, and we thought it would be great to find new ways of sharing them. We also want to do more to engage with and say “thank you” to our supporters on Patreon. So we created our first sheet of digital postcards. The first edition has four […]
Radio’s Wheels of Steel Are Coming Back: The Technics SL-1200 Mk VII
If Jennifer’s radio tours and my recent visits to stations are any indication, it seems like a large percentage of the physical media being played on community and college stations are vinyl records. Since true broadcast turntables have been out of production for decades, a variety of reasonably sturdy DJ turntables have filled in the […]
The Shortwave Radio of the Internet: Low Bitrate Streaming
While updating the 2004 podcast entries for my old radio show “mediageek” I was reminded that I used to post the episodes in both a 64kbps mono “broadcast quality” MP3 and a 16kbps. The reason why I posted such a low bitrate file, containing relatively low fidelity, was to make the show accessible to listeners […]
Walking the Talk: Preserving ‘mediageek’ at the Internet Archive
We’ve talked a lot about archiving and preserving radio here at Radio Survivor, especially on our podcast. Inevitably during these discussions I’ll open my big mouth and muse about how I should archive my own work somewhere it’ll be in safe hands, like the Internet Archive. But up to now, it’s just been talk. Now, […]
Podcast Prowler: History & Archiving with ‘Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It’
I’ve been following the work of historian and archivist Jason Scott for more than a decade, ever since he released his film “BBS: The Documentary” (available on the Internet Archive). He’s known for relentless efforts to preserve digital artifacts and media, like the text files that were the stock-in-trade of the early internet, Usenet and […]