The latest tweet from Pacifica station WBAI in New York City asks for help moving the operation out of its Wall Street digs: WBAI is “movin’ on up”. Volunteers are needed to help pack all day long this week. Email ops@wbai.org. According to a station staff announcement, BAI will temporarily move its studios to City […]
The man in charge of overseeing the election of board delegates to Pacifica radio’s five Local Station Boards (LSBs) has asked the network to end these contests once and for all. “Almost everybody agrees that the elections at Pacifica are too costly, time consuming, factionalized and factionalizing,” concludes Pacifica National Elections Supervisor Terry Bouricius in […]
East coast community radio stations WBAI-FM in New York City and WFMU-FM in New Jersey are still trying to dig themselves out of the Hurricane Sandy swamp. Yesterday, all the Pacifica stations ran a network-wide emergency fundraiser for lower Manhattan’s ‘BAI. Here’s an excerpt from Pacifica Executive Director Summer Reese’s appeal: When Superstorm Sandy hit […]
Hurricane Sandy is taking its toll on community radio. This just in from WFMU in New Jersey: Frank The Storm has taken our 91.1 fm transmitter off the air, as of Monday at 3:00pm. We’re trying to get the transmitter back up as soon as we can, but Frank knocked out all electric at the […]
My friend and noted radio historian Jesse Walker e-mailed me the other day. “Just found out that there’s a ton of back issues of the WBAI and KPFK folios posted at archive.org,” Walker wrote. “Did you know this?” He was referring to the Internet Archives, of course. I think I did know, but then I […]
This is turning into a significant year for documentaries about free form radio. We’ve already mentioned Freeform or Death, a film about WFMU-FM in New Jersey. Now comes Radio Unnameable, a doc about free form radio legend Bob Fass at Pacifica station WBAI in New York City. Fass began his remarkable career there in 1963. […]
The KPFA Worker website says that the Pacifica Foundation has retained the law firm of Jackson Lewis to manage some of its legal affairs. The foundation owns listener supported station KPFA in Berkeley, and four similar non-commercial stations in Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C. and Houston. “We see the entry of Jackson Lewis as […]
Like lots of New York radio listeners circa the late 1970s, I first heard Lynn Samuels when she was a regular host on Pacifica station WBAI. A classic talker from the free form era, Samuels mastered a kind of earthy stream of consciousness discourse, which drifted from Vietnam to who was buying the toilet paper […]
In its normative helter skelter way, Pacifica radio is providing ongoing coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Several weeks ago I posted a piece critical of New York station WBAI’s lack of live coverage of the activities in Zuccoti Park and elsewhere around the area. Since then ‘BAI has launched Occupy Wall Street Radio […]
I’m picking up a lot more frustration with Pacifica radio station WBAI-FM in New York regarding Occupy Wall Street—a general sense that the station could be providing much more live coverage of the actions and events than it currently airs. Apologies for the textblock approach to this issue. Here’s what economist and former WBAI programmer […]
