KRAB-FM was the first station in what would become known as the “KRAB Nebula” of community stations that sprouted up around the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s. These 14 stations shared a common parentage in Lorenzo Milam, who helped found them, beginning with KRAB. First hitting the Seattle airwaves on December 12, 1962, KRAB […]
It can be challenging to track down the history of specific college radio stations and I often find interesting tidbits while doing online research. In the course of my research, I ran across a couple of sources from the early 1970s that point to the state of college radio at the time. As I’m ensconced […]
I’m a sucker for stories from FM radio’s freeform heyday, a time perhaps a little more hazy in memory because of its coincidence with 70s drug culture. Which goes to say that I enjoyed the Thanksgiving episode of WTF with Marc Maron featuring a breezy live interview with Los Angeles FM radio veterans Jim Ladd […]
Hoover was a staunch believer in public control of the airwaves. He wrote that when he arrived at the Harding Administration in 1920, radio broadcasting developers wanted regulation to prevent interference with each other, but “many of them were insisting on a right of permanent preemption of the channels through the air as private property […]
The Pacifica Radio Archives launched a new initiative to reach out to educators this week. I’m guessing that a lot of college and high school teachers still don’t know about all the historic audio goodies you can get from PRA. The archives’ “Campus Campaign” started in 2010 as a pilot project to integrate audio into the […]
Happy New Year! For your holiday weekend enjoyment I thought I’d share a couple of fun radio-related sites I’ve been made aware of. First, is the Retro Radio Farm, sent to me by Jenny. As described by MessyNessy Chic, it’s an Etsy store run by “a music box wizard of sorts, specialising in bringing some […]
Editor’s Note: A few weeks ago, John Anderson shared with Radio Survivor readers some details about a Library of Congress initiative focused on the preservation of local radio history all over the country. As he mentioned, The Radio Preservation Task Force is now hard at work identifying radio collections in every corner of the United […]
In this week’s podcasting news: Ars Technica on a decade of podcasting; LA Podfest schedule; Philadelphia Podfest; Public radio producer on the advantages of podcasting. The Ten Year History of Podcasting Because I dedicated last week’s Podcast Survivor to the dismissal of the podcast patent troll suit, I failed to mention a recent Ars Technica […]
Emily Hellwell over at the Inside NPR blog has a piece titled “How Public Radio Scotch-Taped Its Way Into [the] Public Broadcasting Act.” I thought of titling this response post “How NPR took a scissors to public broadcasting history.” The essay acknowledges the most famous part of the story—that the 1969 law almost went through […]
College Radio Day has come and gone, but I’d like to add a historic footnote to the festivities. College radio broadcasters in the 1960s convinced Congress to fund radio as well as television in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Without that campaign, it is unlikely that NPR would exist. The story is beautifully told […]
