Opinions, editorials and fun stuff.
A station I used to work at is in a financial crisis. I don’t use that phrase capriciously. Membership has plummeted, the personal people meter rankings indicate that, statistically, no one is listening and the volunteer nature of the programmers is caught up in petty discourse defending the value of their shows and lamenting the […]
Darryl Parks is the former corporate brand manager for Clear Channel talk stations and was program director for Cincinnati news/talk WLW-AM. Now independent, Parks keeps a blog where he recently has trained his sights on his old business. A couple of weeks ago he dissected the plummeting ratings across the mostly-conservative AM talk radio format. […]
Here at Radio Survivor we’ve discussed how an internet fast lane might negatively affect internet radio, especially mobile internet radio. But we weren’t expecting it to actually happen so quickly. What I’m talking about is T-Mobile’s announcement on Wednesday that the company will allow customers to stream music to their smartphones without it impacting their […]
There’s a new radio studio docked on the shores of the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon’s St. John’s neighborhood, but this ain’t no pirate ship. A 1940s steam-powered tugboat is the new home of Steam Radio Syndicate, which made its debut broadcast on community station KBOO last Friday night. As Oregon Live reported, The show […]
Funnily enough, just last night I was channel surfing and settled in to a WKRP in Cincinnati rerun (the program is one of Jennifer’s top 5 TV shows depicting radio). This one tackled the very serious issue of payola, wherein a new morning DJ is gifted some cocaine from a record promoter, and has to […]
It’s been almost a week since the FCC voted to approve Chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposed Open Internet rules and open the rule making process. Despite the strong backlash following the first previews of the proposal, not a lot changed. Wheeler still proposes allowing what has come to be called an “internet fast lane,” permitting some […]
Cockroaches have been around for about 280 million years, a longevity record that has inspired Bloomberg to compare radio to the species. “Radio has survived everything,” this Bloomberg news video notes, “from eight tracks to iTunes, and so far, an onslaught of streaming music startups.” The piece cites industry claims that 92 percent of Americans […]
Radio Matters is a new feature on Radio Survivor in which guest authors will share their thoughts on the relevance of radio. In this inaugural post, scholar Brian Fauteux writes about the increasing scholarly interest in radio as he recaps the recent Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference – Jennifer Waits, College Radio & […]
Back in 2011, Radio Survivor’s Paul Riismandel asked the question, “Does Your Radio Station Have Its Own Beer?” After discovering a vintage co-branded beer can, he wondered why a community station today didn’t team up with a local craft brewery. Flash forward to 2014 and Minnesota Public Radio station “The Current” has announced that it […]
Last night I was willing to give FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler the benefit of the doubt when he released a statement saying, “There are reports that the FCC is gutting the Open Internet rule. They are flat out wrong.” Today I know that benefit was misplaced. After listening to a conference call the FCC had […]
