The answer: a leaked sex tape. It’s been making the rounds of the blogosphere this week. And if you keep your NPR affiliate on all day long, or load your iPhone up with This American Life and Planet Money podcasts, then this is the sex tape you’ve been waiting for. Or not. OK, it’s not […]
Archive | Op-Ed
Opinions, editorials and fun stuff.
September 11 and the radio revolution
NPR’s Ombudsman has a new post promising “massive 9/11 anniversary coverage” this weekend. It mentions a listener who has protested the network’s use of the phrase “terror attacks.” “Terror did not attack us on September 11th, terrorists did,” she wrote to NPR. Terror does not have hands with which to use box cutters. Terrorists do. […]
But does your radio station have its own beer?
Beer advertising is certainly a staple of any radio station aiming at a mostly male demographic, and beer companies sponsor many concerts and radio events. But how many stations actually have their own beer? I was sitting in a nice Chicago tavern that features vintage beer cans displayed on a shelf circling the room. I […]
WFMU and the anti-hippy tradition
Lurking around WFMU-FM of New Jersey’s great website, I’ve been stumbling across all kinds of fun blog posts about anti-hippy songs. The most famous of these, of course, is Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee,” but a 2008 post mentions others, including Ed Faucet’s “Hippy Stomp,” Alvie Self’s “Hippieville,” and Johnny Bucket’s “Hippy in a Blunder.” […]
NPR listeners irked by “illegitimate child” remark
“There is no such thing as an ‘illegitimate child’,” early public radio producer Elsa Knight Thompson once said. “There may be illegitimate parents.”* Thompson made this remark during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Raised in Seattle, she had married an Englishman and come with him to Europe. She was evacuating children from London when […]
How psychedelic are your Last.fm tags?
Those graphics loving geeks over at Last.fm are at it again. Remember the flower power experiment? Now Last.fm staffer Andrew Clegg describes how he’s grabbed a pile of the online music service’s user tags and combined them with data from the Echo Nest’s million song dataset. Then he brought the whole goulash over to the […]
Happy Birthday, Radio Survivor (we’re two!)
This weekend, Radio Survivor embarked on the Terrible Twos. On June 11, 2009 we posted our first story on Low Power FM radio. Jennifer Waits, Paul Riismandel, and I have been blogging away ever since. 24 months later, our mission is the same. We see ourselves as critical advocates for participatory radio—community, public, college, Low […]
In case of Rapture, Family Radio will be unmanned
You’ve seen the bumper stickers, and today at least it’s true for Family Radio. Their website has been unreachable all day, likely due to being overloaded with traffic. So that’s also made it difficult to get their online radio stream. So I tuned in to Family Radio’s shortwave station WYFR this afternoon (at 13615 Khz) […]
The five things I do when I hear weird music on the radio
Not long ago I was driving down the San Francisco Bay Area’s Highway 280 and listening to Foothills Junior College’s KFJC-FM, and some really weird music came on. I tried to get what it was from the deejay’s back-announce commentary, but got distracted by traffic. Anyway, it sounded like Karlheinz Stockhausen’s piece for String Quartet […]
The mediageek’s advice for college stations, part 1: Be true to your school
Having followed Jennifer’s first-rate coverage of the unfortunate sales of college stations KTRU, WRVU[apologies for the error, WRVU has not been sold, but it is under threat] and KUSF I’ve been giving a lot of thought as to how college stations solidify themselves. As some readers may be aware, in addition to fourteen years of […]