Opinions, editorials and fun stuff.
Your broadcast station–LPFM, community, college–needs to have its programming on the internet, one way or another. Now. Why? Because you risk missing a generation of listeners whose media intake is primarily online. YouTube is where they hang out the most, but online radio is also a destination. Where they’re moving away from is your AM […]
Looking for info on how to listen to this 2021’s Super Bowl LV? Click here. This year fans who want or need to hear Super Bowl LI on the radio can listen in to the usual suspects, at least in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. There are all sorts of good reasons to listen […]
Election day meant a lot of things to a lot of people. For community radio, this moment, so troubled for many, could be our time to shine as never before. We may even have podcasting and the ascent of president-elect Donald Trump to thank for it. The win in November by Trump took most of […]
Although it’s been a few years since we’ve put together our Radio Survivor Holiday gift guides, listing off radio gifts that we love, I’m always thinking about these lists. Whenever I run across an intriguing radio gift idea, I make a mental note and sometimes I race out to pick something up for myself. In […]
Mea culpa. When one sets out to launch an ambitious critique of community radio programming mistakes will be made, and I made them. This is a necessary aspect of testing ideas, as is coming back to revise, tweak and clarify. I am very grateful for the comments, feedback and criticism of my last two posts, […]
Jennifer Waits brings us the voices of three programmers at a mysterious and chaotic community station with deep connections to the Los Angeles art scene. KCHUNG is an unlicensed part 15 AM radio station with about 40 station managers and extremely eclectic programming. Paul Riismandel wrote a series of articles, offering strongly worded advice for […]
One of the greatest tensions for community radio stations lies in the spectrum between public access and public service. Although this conflict may not be explicitly discussed, it implicitly affects every single programming decision. It’s time for this tension to be made explicit, and for stations to actively grapple with how to balance a focus […]
This is a transitional time for community radio, unprecedented in the medium’s more than 60-year history in the U.S. Thousands of new LPFM stations are going on the air bringing service to communities that never had community radio, or adding new services to supplement existing community stations. At the same time many community stations risk […]
In my continuing quest to stay a step ahead of recording media degradation and obsolescence, I have undertaken the digitization of my remaining audiocassette collection. Last year I wrote about preserving my archive of interviews and air checks on minidisc, with the hope that the post would be informative and maybe compel some readers with […]
Catch Alice’s Restaurant on the 2023 radio dial. See our latest listening guide. Happy early Thanksgiving! After a particularly contentious Presidential election, many families are anxious about upcoming holiday gatherings. Some are banning political conversations, whereas others are setting ground rules for polite discourse. Perhaps the long-standing radio tradition of listening to Arlo Guthrie’s […]
