Podcast #74 – Station or Static? KCHUNG Is L.A.’s Underground Radio
Jennifer Waits brings us the voices of three programmers at a mysterious and chaotic community station with deep connections to the Los Angeles art scene. KCHUNG is an unlicensed part 15 AM radio station with about 40 station managers and extremely eclectic programming. Paul Riismandel wrote a series of articles, offering strongly worded advice for […]
College Radio Watch: Holiday Radio Drama Season is Here and More News
In the past week, I’ve been amazed by the amount of Christmas music that is emanating from sound systems in the local businesses that I’ve been frequenting. Coffee shops, medical offices, shopping malls, and clothing stores have been some of the places where I’ve heard familiar holiday tunes. College radio is a mixed bag, with […]
Public Access vs. Public Service – Addressing the Biggest Hidden Tension in Community Radio
One of the greatest tensions for community radio stations lies in the spectrum between public access and public service. Although this conflict may not be explicitly discussed, it implicitly affects every single programming decision. It’s time for this tension to be made explicit, and for stations to actively grapple with how to balance a focus […]
Podcast #73 – Catching Up with Bainbridge Island’s Community Podcasting Experiment
This week we follow up with the subject of one our first episodes, Bainbridge Community Broadcasting. Paul took a day trip on a ferry from Seattle to visit Bainbridge Island and drop in on BCB. Co-founder Barry Peters took a few minutes to give a tour of the BCB studios and provide an update on […]
Trapped in the Grid: Why Community Radio Risks Irrelevance
This is a transitional time for community radio, unprecedented in the medium’s more than 60-year history in the U.S. Thousands of new LPFM stations are going on the air bringing service to communities that never had community radio, or adding new services to supplement existing community stations. At the same time many community stations risk […]
Preserving Audio That’s on Cassette
In my continuing quest to stay a step ahead of recording media degradation and obsolescence, I have undertaken the digitization of my remaining audiocassette collection. Last year I wrote about preserving my archive of interviews and air checks on minidisc, with the hope that the post would be informative and maybe compel some readers with […]
Turn the lights on! What we can learn from KPFA’s Bill Mandel
William Mandel has died. Mandel broadcast over KPFA’s airwaves for almost half a century, offering commentaries on the now-defunct Soviet Union. He wrote books about the USSR, among them Soviet Women and Soviet but not Russian: the Other Peoples of the Soviet Union. He spoke at just about any public event at which someone would let him appear. He died […]
Tuning in to Alice’s Restaurant on the Radio on Thanksgiving 2016
Catch Alice’s Restaurant on the 2023 radio dial. See our latest listening guide. Happy early Thanksgiving! After a particularly contentious Presidential election, many families are anxious about upcoming holiday gatherings. Some are banning political conversations, whereas others are setting ground rules for polite discourse. Perhaps the long-standing radio tradition of listening to Arlo Guthrie’s […]
Podcast #72 – Pete Tridish Celebrates an LPFM Success Story
Pete Tridish works as a radio engineer, building low power and full power community radio stations. He initially did this work with Prometheus Radio Project and now with International Media Action. “Back when I was working with Prometheus Radio Project, which was a group that worked to expand the low power radio service and create […]
College Radio Watch: Arkansas Travels and More College Radio News
I’m already itching to visit more college radio stations, but first I need to write up all of my recent field trips. With that goal in mind, I just posted a piece about my visit to college radio station KHDX at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. Staffers there have been busy since my visit and […]