The usual excellent suspects associated with our Radio Survivor podcast produced an interesting debate program about the “self-imposed smallness” of college radio last week. Popular radio blogger Ken Mills served as the show’s guest critic. He’s a very smart articulate guy with a lot of experience in radio. “I come from a management background,” Mills […]
Archive | Rough Notes
How can we protect community radio talk show hosts from their listeners?
Morning show host Carl Wolfson has another ten days or so over at XRAY FM in Portland, Oregon, then he says he is quitting. “OK. I’m done,” Wolfson declared on his Facebook page in late January: “The vitriol of so many Bernie [Sanders] supporters and the threat they pose to Democratic unity is a bridge […]
Rough notes: reflections on (patiently) listening to the new KUSP
Like a lot of people making their way through the KUSP-FM in Santa Cruz transition saga, I am listening patiently to the new sound. And this, apparently, is what I am supposed to do. “I would love for people just to have some patience,” Nikki Silva of the legendary Kitchen Sisters (which got its start […]
Rough notes: KUSP dumps its general manager
The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports that struggling public radio station KUSP has laid off its general manager Terry Green. He ran the operation for a dozen years, the last eight or so dedicated to making the signal more competitive with neighboring NPR outlet KAZU. But now KUSP is “on the brink of bankruptcy,” according to […]
Notes on community radio and democracy in Delhi, India and Mkushi, Zambia
Some interesting items on community radio from two very different places. In Zambia supporters of the Patriotic Front (PF) electoral party “briefly interrupted operations” at the Mkushi Community Radio Station on Tuesday “in protest against [the] alleged political inclination of a Board Member of that Station.” That’s according to the Lusaka Times online newspaper. It’s […]
No justice for “Radio Raheem” of Staten Island
The New York Times editorial board is appalled by a Staten Island grand jury decision not to indict the police officer who chokeholded Eric Garner of Staten Island. Garner died shortly thereafter. We wrote about Garner when filmmaker Spike Lee produced a YouTube video comparing the man to his fictional character Radio Raheem from the […]
Notes on the Boombox/Walkman war of the early 1980s
I’ve been rummaging through old articles about the emergence of the Walkman in the 1980s, and one thing stands out: some people thought it was a social cure for the Boombox. Here’s an excerpt from an old column by George Will, responding to the charge that the Walkman isolated people from each other. ‘Some sociologists […]
Beyond the wild west: government and the future of music radio
Turntable.fm shut down its last component earlier this year: Turntable Live—a concert version of now gone turntable.fm. TT.fm founder Billy Chasen reflected on the end of the Turntable project in a blog entry posted on Wednesday: “Ultimately, I didn’t heed the lessons of so many failed music startups. It’s an incredibly expensive venture to pursue […]
Net neutrality, mobile data caps, and the future of Internet radio
The Federal Communications Commission has opened up a new conversation on net neutrality in light of an Appeals Court’s mid-January strikedown of some of the agency’s Open Internet rules. “We establish a new docket within which to consider how the Commission should proceed in light of the court’s guidance in the Verizon v. FCC opinion,” […]
Last.fm and the YouTube commons
You don’t hear a great deal about Last.fm these days, in large part because it has been eclipsed by a myriad of new streaming music services. But on Wednesday the company announced that it had forged a deal with Spotify to bring the latter’s whole catalogue to Last.fm users. “Whether it be your own profile […]