Radio Survivor celebrates 10 years on the internet and four years podcasting with our 200th episode. Matthew Lasar joins Jennifer Waits, Eric Klein and Paul Riismandel for this review of the last decade in radio that matters. Matthew tells the Radio Survivor origin story that sprang forth from his I.F. Stone inspired research deep into […]
It is a blasphemous question, I know. But since I’ve already put it in the headline, I’ll also spell it out in this post’s opening paragraph. President Donald Trump: good news for Pacifica radio? My decisive answer is . . . maybe. At this point, the Pacifica Foundation and its five radio stations can only go in […]
Oh man the geek in me is loving these pictures of Pacifica signal KPFT-FM in Houston’s new transmitter, posted on the station’s Facebook page. It is a beautiful thing. Basically a little over three years ago KPFT discovered that the station’s old vacuum-tube clunker radiated more heat than its transmitter site could safely handle. So they […]
Lisa Hollenbach is a literary scholar interested in poetry broadcasts from the 1950s to the 1970s. In her recent post for Antenna Blog‘s Radio Preservation Task Force series she describes her work as dealing with “several neglected cultural fronts at once, examining forms long declared dead” including poetry, radio, spoken word recording, and the Pacifica […]
NPR reports that one of its most beloved and distinguished correspondents, Margot Adler, has died at age 68 after a struggle with cancer. The NPR remembrance observes that Adler shaped “what we would call the NPR sound today: human, curious, conversational.” It should be noted that prior to her joining NPR, she was a mainstay at […]
Unfortunately, just because the occupation of Pacifica Radio’s national office in Berkeley is over doesn’t mean that there aren’t troubles elsewhere in the network. Pacifica’s WBAI-FM in New York City is facing “imminent eviction” of its transmitter from the Empire State Building. That’s according to a recently surfaced report to the Pacifica National Board from […]
Last week The Village Voice posted a good piece on WBAI which identified overgovernance as a primary source of Pacifica radio’s woes. It credited me as someone who helped craft Pacifica’s by-laws, but I obtained a correction. I’m also cited as suggesting that around 2,200 people “are directly involved in the voting process” at Pacifica. […]
The New York Times has weighed in on situation at Pacifica radio station WBAI in New York City with a story titled “Democracy May Prove the Doom of WBAI.” The New York station has laid off a huge percentage of its staff, we reported last week. Excessive fixed costs and inadequate programming played a big […]
A sobbing Executive Director of the Pacifica foundation disclosed on Friday that union negotiations at Pacifica station WBAI have concluded and across-the-board layoffs are very near. “It is with great sadness that I have to tell the WBAI listening audience that many of the voices that you have been listening to for many years will […]
Long time KPFA staffer Kellia Ramares-Watson has an interesting piece in The Leftist Review on the present and future of Pacifica radio, which owns KPFA. Kellia worked for the News and Operations departments at the station for some time, but quit when cutbacks (in her words) “imposed by the interim GM at KPFA, under orders […]
