Firing Juan Williams: Did NPR act appropriately?
NPR News recently announced the termination of news analyst Juan Williams based on some comments made during his October 21st appearance on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor. When asked to comment on the current situation between the United States and the Muslim community, Williams publicly stated, Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the […]
It’s official, Randy’s gone
As anticipated, today Randy Michaels, CEO of Tribune Company, formerly of Clear Channel, one of the grand architects behind the current state of commercial radio, resigned from his post at Tribune. This is how his former company’s flagship paper put it: Having lost the support of many employees, his board and the creditors who will […]
Randy Michaels to leave Tribune, crying all the way to the bank
It’s been quite the fortnight over at Tribune Tower. Almost two weeks ago NY Times media reporter David Carr dropped a bomb of a story detailing the sophomoric and sexist behavior of Tribune’s top management, led by Clear Channel’s former eternal frat-boy-in-chief, Randy Michaels. Then, almost as if on cue, Randy’s hand-picked “innovation officer” Lee […]
Those Sirius XM “qualified entity” channels – who wants them?
After two years of kicking the can down the road, the Federal Communications Commission has finally established rules for allocating those “qualified entity” Sirius XM channels. Quick history: back in July of 2008 the FCC approved the merger of Sirius XM satellite radio, but with lots of conditions. One of them was that four percent […]
Radio Guide for the 2010 CMJ Music Marathon
In a matter of hours the CMJ Music Marathon will get underway in New York City. Although it’s expanded from its college radio roots into a larger event with music showcases featuring around 1,000 bands, a film festival, artist-focused panels, and even gaming sessions this year; there is still a noticeable radio presence at the […]
Pandora offers fix for Droid X glitch (it works, too)
The other day I tried to fire up Pandora on my Droid X, and to my dismay, I got dialogue box saying that the feature was experiencing “unexpected technical difficulties.” When I clicked the “OK” button, it came up again. So I wound up force quitting Pandora from the “settings” feature. But to my double […]
82 Best Freeform College Radio Stations
Wow. I never want to do my own list of favorite college radio stations, but the one compiled by Zoomout is pretty impressive. In a lovely map featuring college radio station logos Zoomout gives praise to the top college radio stations in terms of freeform programming and streaming audio quality. The map’s creator Sujay writes: […]
2010 CMJ Music Marathon Preview and College Radio Awards Nominees
Next week the CMJ Music Marathon hits New York City and the surrounding areas from October 19 through 23. The annual college radio/indie music schmooze-fest will include music showcases, panels on the music industry, a special day-long College Day just for college radio DJs, a film festival, Entertainment Business Law Seminar, and a new music […]
Last.fm posts twin word pop band tags
Last.fm staff are a creative and unpredictable bunch. When the online radio service’s interns aren’t categorizing last.fm tunes by age and gender popularity, their database programmers deploy regular expression scripts to dive into the server’s postgreSQL database and dig up every band named with the same word twice. As in “The The,” “Talk Talk,” “Duran […]
Friends of KTRU Hire Law Firm to Protest Sale of Rice University’s College Radio Station
It was announced today that Rice University has finalized its sale of student radio station KTRU to the University of Houston. University of Houston plans to use the FM frequency in order to expand its public radio offerings beyond its current station KUHF (Houston Public Radio). The hope to create a sister station, KUHC, which […]