I am belatedly reading Sue Carpenter’s wonderful memoir 40 Watts From Nowhere and chuckling at her evolution from a disgruntled DJ wannabe to a radio station manager. The book is sine qua non for anyone who aspires to run any kind of community-style radio station, as far as I’m concerned, because it shows how different […]
Archive | FCC
Schenectady DTV Abruptly Closes Its Backdoor to FM Dial
To some it may seem like I’ve been beating a dead horse over the TV channel 6 on FM issue, but I can’t help but be fascinated with TV broadcasters taking such pains to be on what so many observers say is the dying medium of radio. In my second missive on the channel 6 […]
Fairness Doctrine phobes target FCC
Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski is in hot water with the right wing talk radio crowd. They’ve discovered that his Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer, Mark Lloyd, is a co-author of that noted and/or notorious study, The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio. So Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, has written […]
Congress, FCC launch campaigns for net neutrality, device openness
In moves that could have an impact on every voice and streaming radio service on the Internet, Congress and the Federal Communications Commission proposed laws and launched inquiries today that show that the Obama administration and its allies on Capitol Hill weren’t kidding when they promised to promote net neutrality and device openness. First, representatives […]
Listen to the Radio Survivors
In the vein of practice what you preach, two of the bloggers here, myself and Jennifer Waits, have regular weekly radio programs. Our third accomplice, Matthew Lasar, is a frequent guest on my program, mediageek. The mediageek radioshow covers grassroots media along with a focus on the regulatory and legal maneuvers that affect our ability […]
Hey radio pirates, think twice before you invoke emergency authorization
There’s another pirate radio station on the loose: FCC Free Radio in San Francisco. Jennifer Waits wrote a nice piece about it here on Thursday. I’ve been streaming the outlet for the last few days and it’s a fun signal with a big sense of humor. But I’m getting a little tired of these unlicensed […]
Does the FCC short change rural radio?
A small band of reform groups have asked the Federal Communications Commission to rethink how it allocates radio licenses in rural areas. They argue that the current system allows big broadcasters to grab suburban/rural signals on the edge of large metropolitan regions, in some instances knocking out smaller stations. The license seeker, they say, doesn’t […]
FCC Taking a Look at BusRadio
Every day I learn something new about radio and today I was really surprised to discover that there’s an entire radio service called BusRadio that is piped in to school buses and reaches a million kids. They tout themselves as “a superior, age-appropriate alternative to AM/FM radio programming.” According to an article in the Denver […]
Should the FCC count public radio station board members as owners?
The four major organizations that represent public broadcasting say the Federal Communications Commission shouldn’t count public radio and television station board members as the “owners” of the license in question.
AM on FM
Back in the early days of FM, when AM radio ruled the roost and an FM radio was still a rare commodity, many station owners simply simulcast their AM station’s programming on their FM stations. In the 1960s the Federal Communications Commission put the kibosh on that scheme, ordering FM stations to air different programming. […]