The opportunity for new low power community radio is coming this October, and Prometheus Radio Project is hosting a free hour-long webinar to help your community group get on the air. The webinar happens Wednesday, June 26, at 8 PM Eastern time. On hand will be guest speaker Ramon Ramirez, president of Oregon’s Farmworker Union, […]
Mid-way through my week of radio station genre charts, I started to realize that “charts” isn’t really the most accurate way to describe the music genre signage that I’ve spotted at various radio stations. I guess it’s more appropriately a music genre categorization schematic or a legend or a key. Genre “charts” are more likely […]
Last week I started my new Radio Survivor Scavenger Hunt series, in which I’m sharing pictures of items that I’ve spotted at radio stations during my travels. The first week focused on station graffiti and this week’s quest will reveal a range of music genre charts that I’ve seen at stations. Interestingly, many non-commercial stations […]
Record Store Day, the annual celebration of independent record stores, will take place all over the world on Saturday, April 20th. Non-commercial radio and independent record stores often have a synergistic relationship, so it makes sense that they would be natural partners for this event. Over the years I’ve heard about interesting collaborations between radio […]
There are reports from Zimbabwe indicating that the crackdown on independent radio is stepping up. Shortwave station SW Radio Africa reports that police in the town of Rusape went on raids of opposition party supporters looking for shortwave radios (via SWLing post). However a member of parliament said that the police found no radios. According […]
Occupy Boston Radio (OBR.fm), a one-year old online radio station, is in the midst of a 2-week Radio Camp. Events kicked off with an open house last weekend and as I write this, the station is holding a workshop (“Making Radio Sound Good”) hosted by radio programmer Linda Pinkow from M.I.T. radio station WMBR. Sessions […]
According to the Fifth Report and Order released in March, the FCC has started dismissing backlogged translator station applications based non ational and local caps. In that Order the FCC established caps for the number of applications a single applicant could pursue in a given market, and nationwide, in order to ensure open frequencies are […]
Chicago’s commerical “progressive talk” station WCPT is becoming a foster home of sorts for popular radio programs that have lost their homes on the non-commercial end of the dial. The daily independent news hour Democracy Now began airing on WCPT January 2. The program joins Smiley and West, which was exiled from Chicago Public Radio […]
Stephen Dunifer has been called the “Johnny Appleseed” of free radio for his work with Free Radio Berkeley which has been making and distributing FM transmitter kits for more than 17 years. FRB inspired many unlicensed broadcasters to take to the airwaves in the mid to late 90s, in part due to the publicity the […]
Next October future community broadcasters will be able to apply for more new low-power stations than ever before. On Tuesday the FCC released the text of its 6th report and order on the implementation of the Local Community Radio Act (LCRA) that was passed last Friday. As Matthew noted last Friday, the decision contains mostly […]
