The Radio Survivor podcast is a weekly show that explores the future of community media, with a focus on community radio, college radio, low-power FM and public access TV, along with podcasting and internet radio. Hosts Paul Riismandel, Eric Klein and Jennifer Waits highlight the best and most innovative audio programming and keep you updated on the news that affects our ability to make, create, hear and see great community media.
There are undiscovered musical treasures potentially fading away in closets, basements and storage units around the world. Seattle radio station KEXP teamed up with local universities and media organizations to help save a little of this cultural history with the Pop-Up Music Memory Digitization Lab. For one day members of the public were invited to […]
Two interviews that cover the state of low power radio in the United States. Stations that are on the air without a license – also known as Pirate Radio – and the low power stations that have FCC permission to broadcast due in part to the hard work of the former pirates. This episode is […]
The Eclipse Show on community radio station KGNU in Boulder CO is celebrating 40 years on the air, making it quite possibly the longest running hip hop radio show in the world. Radio Survivor has been examining the role that community and college radio has played in the development of hip hop culture, especially in […]
Radios in the trees, a transmitter in the pond, and a weather-driven synth. These are just some of what you’ll find on The Wave Farm, a 29-acre property in New York’s Hudson Valley dedicated to radio and transmission arts. It’s anchored by community radio station WGXC, accompanied by a cornucopia of additional tiny terrestrial and […]
What killed smooth jazz radio? Why aren’t there any commercial classical stations any longer? And, why do radio stations have a “format” to begin with? Matthew Lasar joins us to explore these questions about the fundamental organizing principle of most music radio. Matthew is a co-founder of Radio Survivor and the author of three important […]
How do I start podcasting? That’s one of the questions we field most frequently. So we answer it, in this second installment of our “Frequently Asked Questions” series. But first we do some follow-up about phone phreaker ‘Captain Crunch’ Draper (#147) and the nearly 1,000 challenges filed against applications for FM translator repeater stations (#144). […]
Did you know that upwards of 350 radio stations were established at summer camps across the United States? Dan Braverman, President of Radio Systems, Inc., joins us to share the history of summer camp radio, including his own experience setting up a camp radio station when he was just nine years old. Still involved with […]
On this week’s episode we venture to prison and to a very unusual high school radio station. Members of the artist collective Provisional Island (Heidi Ratanavanich, Eileen Shumate, and Michael McCanne) speak with us about their prison-radio-themed exhibit, An Electric Kite, which is on view at the historic site/museum Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia through […]
Inspired by an episode of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, we travel all the way to Antarctica to learn about mysterious community radio station, Ice Radio. Sadly, we learned of Anthony Bourdain’s death on the day that we recorded this episode. Ice Radio is the latest iteration of a radio station that began more than 50 […]
The Hip-Hop Radio Archive aims to digitize, preserve, share, and contextualize recordings of hip-hop radio from the 1980s and 1990s from commercial, college, community, and pirate stations of all sizes, telling the stories of the shows and the people that made them. Our guest is founder of the archive, Ryan MacMichael. Radio Survivor is a […]
