The documentary “WBCN and the American Revolution” chronicles the founding of Boston’s groundbreaking rock station that combined late-1960s countercultural politics and music in way that influenced freeform radio to come. Directed by journalist and former WBCN employee Bill Lichtenstein, the film will premiere on GBH 2 in the Boston area. It will air nationally on […]
Over the course of four seasons, the Peabody-nominated podcast “Scene on Radio,” a production of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, has earned a reputation for tackling head-on difficult topics around race, gender, justice and equity. But it didn’t start out that way. It started life as a documentary anthology that host and […]
“The radio industry… is an example of an industry that was doing pretty well, and they gutted it.” The “they” is the private equity industry, which provided the financing to companies like Clear Channel (iHeartRadio) and Cumulus to go on the epic buying sprees that resulted in today’s enormously consolidated commercial radio landscape. Investigative reporter […]
Musician, DJ and radio artist Don Joyce passed away nearly three years ago, leaving behind a voluminous archive of his unparalelled collage radio program “Over the Edge.” The documentary “How Radio Isn’t Done” sheds light on this member of Negativland, his life and his work in recontextualizing the never-ending flow of media messages that flood […]
Musician, DJ and radio artist Don Joyce passed away nearly three years ago, on July 22, 2015. He left behind a voluminous archive of his KPFA radio program “Over the Edge,” which took off in new, chaotic and creative directions when he welcomed the participation of the experimental band Negativland in 1981, then joining the […]
I just listened to the latest episode of The Quietus Hour featuring an interview with Matt Johnson, the principal behind the English post-punk band The The. Although Johnson largely put the band on hiatus—save some film soundtrack work—since its last formal release in 2000, I learned from the interview that on UK election day in […]
Can public and community radio find ways to innovate with podcasting, and reach new audiences, rather than mostly repackage what’s on air? Ernesto Aguilar, program director of Pacifica station KPFT-FM in Houston, joins to tackle that question. Our college radio correspondent Jennifer Waits joins as third co-host to run down our radio news headlines, and […]
There’s good news for anyone who hasn’t yet heard the BBC’s radio documentary, Podcasting – The First Ten Years. Both parts are both now available for on-demand listening for the next year. The countdown timer threatening only a week of availability that I wrote about last week is gone. Curiously, however, the documentary is not […]
Happy belated birthday to podcasting! According to a recent Guardian article written by the creators of UK podcast Answer Me This! the very term “podcast” was born on February 11, 2004, in a piece by journalist Ben Hammersley. That makes podcasting, as a thing, a little more than 10 years and 1 month old. In […]
One of the recurring topics of discussion around podcasts is the fact that it seems like a relatively small number of people actually listen to them, especially compared to the audience for videos of cats playing the theremin. Comedian and podcaster Graham Elwood told me, “I feel like podcasting (now) is kind of like Rock […]
