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 […]
Remembering Save KPFA Day
Ten years ago this Friday, one of the most remarkable events in the annals of United States broadcasting took place. Looking back on it now, I can hardly believe that it happened, even though I was there and saw it myself. On a very sunny Saturday July 31, 1999, about ten thousand people gathered in […]
College Radio Read: Kill the Music
I love reading stories about radio and every time I run across a college radio mention in a book, my interest in piqued. In the months to come I’m going to work on compiling a list of college radio “must reads,” from the academic to the autobiographic. My first pick: Kill the Music. Kill the […]
Vatican Radio Goes Commercial
Did you know about Vatican Radio? Around since 1931, it’s the official voice of the Pope and the Catholic Church. All these years it’s been broadcasting the Pope’s musings commercial free. Starting on July 6th, the station began airing ads in order to help defray some of the mounting costs associated with their global broadcasts […]
Clear Channel unloading four silent radio stations to minority non-profit; 846 to go
It was definitely a feel good moment last week when Clear Channel announced that it plans to donate four radio stations to the Minority Media Telecommunications Council. The MMTC says it will work with the National Association of Broadcaster’s Leadership Training Program to “use the stations for training and to incubate new minority and women […]
Even the Most Passionate Young Music Lovers Eschew Commercial Radio
The commercial radio industry’s reaction to last week’s Boston Globe article reporting on the relative dearth of young listeners can be fairly summed up, as “Nuh uhhhh! Not true!” Despite radio’s collective denial, I had this reality reaffirmed for me this past Friday. I had the opportunity to speak with a group of high school […]
Young People and Radio: Listening and Participating
There’s been some chatter this week about whether or not the youth of today are listening to radio. The standard cliche is that youth have abandoned radio and Monday’s Boston Globe article “Young Listeners Tune Out Radio in Search of New Music” repeats that refrain, quoting teens and folks in their 20s who report that […]
Slacker is crash free on Blackberry Curve (after SD card installed)
The great Blackberry/Slacker crash crisis was solved today after I took the generous advice of Radio Survivor commenter ilikepizza and installed an 8GB Micro SD memory card on the device. That gave my Curve 8330 the cache it needed to run smoothly. As I mentioned in my earlier post, Slacker was crashing the OS. Clearly […]
Channel 6 Radio Backdoor No More Lucrative than Plain Old Commercial Radio?
Last month I wrote about a few legacy analog channel 6 low-power TV stations operating as radio stations, taking advantage of their audio program butting up against the low end of the FM dial. One of the pioneers is New York City’s Pulse 87. However it seems as though the backdoor to the FM dial […]
Noncommercial Leaps Past Commercial with Public Radio Player 2.0
I’m actually amazed at how noncommercial radio has become the site of so much innovation in the medium in the last decade, and how commercial radio is getting left in the dust. On the music side we have Seattle’s indie rock KEXP and New Jersey’s freeform WFMU which both have significant internet listenership along with […]