Nearly a year ago, campus-community radio station CKLN at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada had its license revoked by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). Last month’s “Reclaim Your Radio” event across Canada was meant to bring attention to not only the plight of CKLN, but also to draw attention to the opportunity for […]
Oliver “Tuku” Mtukudzi is probably the best known Zimbabwean composer/performer on the international music scene. He also works as music director for Zimbabwe’s Kiss FM pop music radio station, which applied for a commercial private radio licence by the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe. But BAZ awarded the latest two licenses to several prominent supporters of Zimbabwe […]
Zimbabwe is in a medium-sized uproar over the allocation of two radio licenses to entrepreneurs associated with Prime Minister Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party. The signals will go to Zimpapers and AB Communications. The opposition newspaper The Zimbabwean identifies the principals of both companies as possible pro-Mugabe candidates in future elections. “Despite having no experience in […]
The United Kingdom’s broadcast regulation agency Ofcom has published its annual report (.pdf) on the state of community radio, and the figures indicate that income for UK community outlets has markedly declined. No big surprise, given the global recession. But the data also contains interesting clues suggesting that certain kinds of community radio strategies or […]
Haaretz reports that Israeli police and the Communications Ministry have shut down Radio Kol Hashalom in East Jerusalem. Israeli and Palestinian peace activists ran the station, which used broadcasting equipment in Ramallah and was licensed by the Palestinian authority. Kol Hashalom roughly translates as “All for Peace.” Israeli officials insisted that the station lacked the […]
On Monday, November 14, 22 non-commercial radio stations in Canada took part in a day of action and celebration dubbed “Reclaim Your Radio.” Organized by the National Campus and Community Radio Association (NCRA), the day-long radio event was designed to bring awareness to the importance of campus and community radio. A special 8-hour broadcast (an […]
Jim Ellinger of Austin Airwaves wrote with exciting news about a community radio station that he’s helping to launch along with RadioActive Radio in Borneo. Apparently the first community-run radio station in Malaysia, Radio Bario launched two weeks ago over the FM airwaves in the central highlands of Borneo. Yesterday Ellinger reported that the station […]
This week, the executive board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) approved a proclamation (PDF) for the establishment of a World Radio Day on February 13 (in honor of the day in 1946 that the United Nations established the concept of United Nations Radio). The objectives of this annual event would […]
Radio Era Baru has been broadcasting from the Indonesian city island of Batam since 2005. The station has been consistently denied a license from the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission but has a case in front of the country’s Supreme Court contesting the denial. Despite this the station was raided by Indonesian authorities on Sept. 13, who […]
The Netherlands has been a hotbed of unlicensed radio activity for decades. Dutch stations like the storied Radio Veronica, which broadcast off-shore from 1960 to 1974, inspired the UK pirate radio scene during the same time period. The country still has many stations on the air, many of them explicitly political and anarchist in outlook […]
