Is Twitter the New College Radio?
When I was a kid in the 1970s my parents would try to pry me away from the television, warning me that it was going to “rot my brain.” Yet, my dad also admitted to me that his parents made the same pronouncements to him about the dangers of listening to too much radio. Each […]
Analog TV Is Alive. It’s Radio.
A couple of weeks ago I was scanning the FM band as I made my short commute from my far-north Chicago neighborhood to WNUR in Evanston for a station meeting. At the bottom end of the dial I encountered a fading station playing a steady stream of smooth jazz with no DJ. I’d never heard […]
Radio, Apparently, Is Not Part of Chicago's Media Future. But It Should Be.
This past Saturday I attended the Chicago Media Future Conference, which was an unofficial follow-up to the Chicago Journalism Town Hall held in February. Both events intended to address the current perceived crisis in journalism as evidenced with the closure of papers, reporters getting laid off and a sharp decline in ad revenue. One attendee […]
The Holy Grail: getting Internet radio into your car (Part I)
Everybody knows that the trick to getting Internet radio past the early adopter crowd and into the ears of Ma and Pa Kettle means getting into it into cars. Commercial broadcasting seems ready for that to happen. How do we know? The National Association of Broadcasters sent us a profile of Autonet Mobile. Autonet calls […]
Pandora and privacy
I wish that Pandora Internet radio made it a little more obvious that you’ve got to adjust your profile options if you don’t want the whole world to know what you listen to. Somebody showed me the new people search engine Spock the other day, and so of course I looked myself up. And there […]
Congress grills FCC, NAB on Low Power FM
Representative Mike Doyle was on a roll today at a Capitol Hill hearing on getting more Lower Power FM radio stations rolled out across the country. He had the Federal Communications Commission and National Association of Broadcasters before him, and wanted to know why, if LPFM third adjacent interference is such a concern for commercial […]
The Good FCC
On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission, by a bare majority, voted to lift its over three decade old prohibition against an entity owning a newspaper and a television station in the same market. Most FCC watchers will now shift their visors to Congress and the circuit courts, where media reform activists will doubtless turn in […]
Forget XM/Sirius; give satellite radio to the listeners
Merger proposals are dangerous moments for the masters of our telecommunications sector. When two or three media moguls go hat in hand to the Federal Communications Commission, asking for permission to unite, they unleash a public comment cycle on the question. That always releases the dreamers and reformers, who come up with alternative scenarios for […]
The FCC's new 'payola' rules
Four radio giants have agreed to pay the United States government a total $12.5 million dollars to settle an Federal Communications Commission investigation into their “payola” practices—the undisclosed play of music in exchange for cash, gifts, or favors. The FCC says that CBS radio, Entercom Communications, Clear Channel Communications, and Citadel Broadcasting will agree to: […]