Last week Chicago Public Media CEO Torey Malatia published an Op-Ed piece in the public media journal Current, defending his station’s decision to cancel the syndicated Smiley & West program. Malatia’s piece appeared just days after Smiley & West returned to the Chicago airwaves on commercial station WCPT. In his op-ed Malatia lays out his […]
In a firey open letter released Monday, public television and radio host Tavis Smiley issued a series of firm rebukes to Chicago Public Radio CEO Torey Malatia, whose flagship station, WBEZ, cancelled Smiley and West at the end of September. In that letter Smiley says that he was willing to “simply move beyond” the cancellation […]
Chicago’s public radio station WBEZ quietly dropped the syndicated Smiley and West program from its Sunday line-up at the end of September. This stands in contrast to the station’s decision to drop Car Talk reruns from its Saturday line-up, which management communicated in an email to donor members explaining the decision and soliciting feedback (full […]
Vocalo is a rimshot station owned by Chicago Public Media‘ based in Chesterton, Indiana that went on the air in 2007 as an experiment in bringing user-generated content to broadcast radio. When it launched CPM president Torey Malatia hailed the idea with a lot of rhetoric about making radically public radio, emphasizing public affairs and […]
As a proud thirty-eight year-old member of Generation X, I have become just a little disturbed by a trend I’ve noticed in the last few years. One might call this trend the “indie-rockification” of public radio. As my fellow grunge-survivors and I, raised on the so-called “first wave” of alternative rock and derided by boomers […]
I first heard about the Chicago Independent Radio Project (CHIRP) when I moved to Chicago in the spring of 2008. For all intents and purposes the project grew out of the former incarnation of Loyola University’s WLUW-FM which operated as a community radio station from 1997 to June 2008. In 2001 Loyola announced that it […]
A couple of weeks ago I reported on Chicago Public Radio taking a glancing swipe against LPTV channel 6 stations that are effectively functioning like radio stations, taking advantage of their audio channel’s proximity to 87.7 FM. Now the owner of the Chicago smooth-jazz LPTV “radio” station WLFM-LP is striking back at CPR in both […]
Far outside the view of the general public, the virtual cratediggers of the FCC’s electronic recesses like Matthew and myself are sometimes privy to the little slap-fights that go on between broadcasters. In this case things are getting a little heated over the far left end of the FM dial, with a prominent public radio […]
