The Eclipse Show on community radio station KGNU in Boulder CO is celebrating 40 years on the air, making it quite possibly the longest running hip hop radio show in the world. Radio Survivor has been examining the role that community and college radio has played in the development of hip hop culture, especially in […]
While planning my East Coast summer vacation, I fantasized about visiting numerous college radio stations in New York and Massachusetts, as I dreamed off ticking off more stops on my 140 station+ tour series. It’s always a balancing act, as my family members aren’t nearly as obsessed with sticker-covered cabinets, vinyl collections, and vintage audio […]
It is long past time when a community or college radio DJ or programmer can simply show up to do their show and expect to have an audience. Everyone who has a radio show bears the responsibility to build an audience for that show, and their station. Audience building is a challenge for every radio […]
How do I start podcasting? That’s one of the questions we field most frequently. So we answer it, in this second installment of our “Frequently Asked Questions” series. But first we do some follow-up about phone phreaker ‘Captain Crunch’ Draper (#147) and the nearly 1,000 challenges filed against applications for FM translator repeater stations (#144). […]
The Economist features a piece about college radio this week, with the headline How is College Radio Faring in the Streaming Era? – Not Signing Off Yet. It takes a cursory look at the state of college radio, unfortunately recycling stereotypical themes about the decline of college radio and its imagined heyday in the 1980s […]
It’s transition time at many college radio stations, as volunteers and staff members from the academic year graduate and pass the torch to new leadership. With these shifts, summer can be a good time for station projects and for making plans for the fall. A couple of fall radio conferences in the Pacific Northwest should […]
On this week’s episode we venture to prison and to a very unusual high school radio station. Members of the artist collective Provisional Island (Heidi Ratanavanich, Eileen Shumate, and Michael McCanne) speak with us about their prison-radio-themed exhibit, An Electric Kite, which is on view at the historic site/museum Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia through […]
Broadcasting to a minuscule potential audience of around 130 people during the dark days of winter, Ice Radio has much in common with my own college radio show that beamed into my school’s cafeteria at mealtimes. Similar to a college radio station in the pre-internet days, the community radio station at McMurdo Station in Antarctica […]
Inspired by an episode of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, we travel all the way to Antarctica to learn about mysterious community radio station, Ice Radio. Sadly, we learned of Anthony Bourdain’s death on the day that we recorded this episode. Ice Radio is the latest iteration of a radio station that began more than 50 […]
On this week’s podcast, we dig into the Hip Hop Radio Archive, which owes its very existence to some pioneering college radio shows. Founder Ryan MacMichael was in large part inspired by early hip hop programming that he heard over stations like Princeton University station WPRB. A work in progress, the Hip Hop Radio Archive […]
