While on vacation this past weekend, I spotted a 1966 Stan Freberg comedy LP in a used bookstore. The album, Freberg Underground Show #1, audaciously announces on its cover that it is “Introducing a ZOWIE! new medium: Pay Radio!” Modeled after Freberg’s radio shows, the album replicates the same format, but was free from network […]
I am reading Victor Pickard’s terrific book America’s Battle for Media Democracy and wondering to myself: do we need another “Blue Book” for radio? What was the Blue Book (you may be asking)? It was a publication released by the Federal Communications Commission in 1946 titled “Public Service Responsibility of Broadcast Licensees.” As Pickard summarizes […]
Happy New Year! For your holiday weekend enjoyment I thought I’d share a couple of fun radio-related sites I’ve been made aware of. First, is the Retro Radio Farm, sent to me by Jenny. As described by MessyNessy Chic, it’s an Etsy store run by “a music box wizard of sorts, specialising in bringing some […]
Earlier this year I wrote my first post for Radio Survivor following the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference that took place in Seattle in March. In this initial post, I pointed to an increase of Sound Studies research at the conference and located within this field a vibrant cohort of radio researchers […]
Like everyone else, I’m busy with holiday events, but I thought I’d post a quick YouTube from my favorite Pentecostal radio evangelist, Aimee Semple McPherson. She was the first woman to receive a broadcast license from the government. “It is very foolish to hesitate to trust God,” McPherson told her radio audience from her Angelus […]
In late October I had an amazing time at the College Broadcasters Inc. (CBI) conference in Seattle. In addition to attending lots of informative sessions about student broadcasting, I was also on a few panels devoted to college radio history and to the diversity of college radio. (more…)
I continue to be impressed by the number of colleges and universities who applied for new LPFM radio licenses in the fall 2013 window. As I wrote in LPFM Watch yesterday, in the past few weeks a handful of college radio stations were granted construction permits for new LPFMs. By my count, this brings the […]
Many Radio Survivor readers are no doubt familiar with Kenneth Goldsmith’s work as the host of “Kenny G’s Hour of Pain” on the freeform radio station WFMU. Goldsmith hosted weekly radio programs at the station for fifteen years, from 1995 until 2010. In 2005 he commented on WFMU and its role as an experimental and […]
WFMU in Jersey City’s Beware of the Blog blog has some interesting audio artifacts from the Korean War: reel-to-reel audio letters from an Army doctor to his wife back in the states, circa 1954, just as the conflict was winding down. The surgeon who produced these ancient proto-podcasts worked at the 121 Evacuation Hospital in […]
A fantastic article was recently posted on Antenna Blog – a media and cultural studies blog operated by graduate students and faculty in Media & Cultural Studies at UW-Madison – that makes a number of strong claims about the need to study old media, including radio history. Its author, John McMurria, is an Assistant Professor […]
