Opinions, editorials and fun stuff.
On my drive moving to Portland, OR from Chicago in August I came across a few unique radio shows. As we drove along I–80 in Wyoming I tuned in Denver’s KKZN 760 AM on Saturday afternoon where I encountered the Colorado Craft Beer Show. I like beer, and I like craft beer even more, so […]
It’s an obscure holiday, whose origin is likely less than 20 years old, and which we Radio Survivors only discovered last year–National Radio Day is Tuesday! Brown Paper Tickets is celebrating the day with a lunch to bring together potential low-power FM license applicants in the Seattle area. If your Seattle-area group is considering going […]
Andrew Leslie Phillips has written a short history of the Pacifica radio network, published below. He is interim general manager of Pacifica station KPFA in Berkeley, California. Phillips is a native of Australia. He spent seven years in Papua New Guinea as a government patrol officer, radio journalist and filmmaker before coming to New York […]
Radio strategy consultant Mark Ramsey is hosting a one-day “ideas festival” for radio called Hivio in San Diego today. While I wish I could have flown out to sunny Southern California to attend in person, I’m glad to watch a live feed of the show from my back deck in sunny Chicago today. Ramsey introduced […]
I am reading Evgeny Morozov’s diverting book To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. The conclusion mentions a variety of machines that act dysfunctionally in some way, but for a purpose—to alert the user that s/he is wasting energy. Among the theorized gizmos that Morozov cites is an “erratic radio,” described by […]
US Pirg has released a new report on commuting patterns that has to be worrying some radio people: we are driving less. “The Driving Boom is over,” proclaims US Pirg Senior Analyst Phineas Baxandall. “The constant increases we saw in driving up until 2005 show no sign of returning. As more and more Millennials become […]
Wrapping up the radio station scavenger hunt for this week, I’m sharing one more music genre color code sign. This “library legend” sign comes from KFJC, where I’m a DJ. In my travels, I’ve seen incredibly complex systems for categorizing music libraries. There are often many sub-genres and different colors of tape are sometimes affixed […]
Mid-way through my week of radio station genre charts, I started to realize that “charts” isn’t really the most accurate way to describe the music genre signage that I’ve spotted at various radio stations. I guess it’s more appropriately a music genre categorization schematic or a legend or a key. Genre “charts” are more likely […]
I was probably the only person who visited Family Radio headquarters during the pre-Judgment Day media frenzy in May 2011 who was interested in seeing the guts of the network’s radio station. I got the grand tour and was intrigued to see that the long-time Christian radio network had a large collection of music. In […]
As part of my new Radio Station Scavenger Hunt series, I’m highlighting music genre charts this week. Yesterday’s charts were from KBOO-FM and today I turn to some equally detailed charts from college radio station KZSC-FM at University of California, Santa Cruz. Although I’ve visited KZSC twice now, it was on my last trip (for […]
