March 27 is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Radio Caroline, the infamous pirate radio ship that brought rock n’ roll to the UK airwaves and sparked many a pirate radio fantasy thereafter. On that day in 1964 Radio Caroline began broadcasting with a test transmission. Broadcasts Aboard a ship In Liverpool the Mersey […]
The flow of new low-power FM construction permits is slowing to a trickle as the FCC gets towards the end of the singleton applications. Many of the 19 stations authorized in the last week require a 2nd adjacent waiver in order to be spaced a little closer to existing stations. Commensurately, a fair number of […]
A new very low-power FM station hit the Portland, Oregon airwaves this week. XRAY.FM is a new community station that took over the license for Reed College’s legacy class D station at 91.1 FM in 2012 with the help of Common Frequency. The station mounted a very successful Kickstarter in January. Starting with a goal […]
In this week’s podcasting news: a look at Transom’s new “This Is Radio” video series, a comparison between digital magazines and podcasts, and a Kickstarter update. The online and IRL public radio workshop Transom.org just premiered the This Is Radio video interview series. The first installment profiles Roman Mars, producer of the podcast and radio […]
Last Thursday the national board of the Pacifica Foundation fired Executive Director Summer Reese, who was hired for the position in November after serving on an interim basis for more than a year. The how and why of Reese’s ouster are unclear. According to the New York Times article that broke the story, board members […]
The fight against the Podcast Patent Troll continues on. Last week there was a small victory for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, while podcaster Adam Carolla starts a legal defense fund to fight the troll in court. On Friday Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins struck down an attempt by Personal Audio to subpoena the names of donors […]
When we last wrote about Jelli it was nearly five years ago. Jennifer wrote about their user-controlled radio model, which lets listeners choose upcoming songs on a local station using its website or the Jelli smartphone app. That version of Jelli still kind of exists at about a dozen stations, but you’d hardly know it […]
The big news in public radio today is that New York Public Radio, home to WNYC, WQXR and New Jersey Public Radio, received a $10 million grant from the Jerome L. Greene Foundation. This comes on top of two previous grants that together totaled $11 million. This news is significant not just because it is […]
This past week was fairly quiet on the low-power FM front compared to what we’ve seen most of the year so far. Only six more construction permits have been issued since last week, bringing the count to 1047 applications granted. There were some interesting and informative comments to last week’s LPFM Watch which reported on […]
South by Southwest starts this Friday, and the sprawling festival has something for lovers of just about every type of media, including all forms of audio and radio. Yesterday my colleague Jennifer outlined the radio related panels and meet-ups happening there this year. Podcasting represents in Austin, too, from panels, to live recordings and screenings. […]
