My most cynical response is that the name change represents nothing new; Clear Channel hasn’t really been in the radio business for more than a decade. Rather, the company was in the broadcast real estate business, buying up stations and repackaging them into clusters in order to reduce staffing and other costs. In the short term it was a wildly successful strategy from a profit standpoint, because it’s a ruthlessly simple formula: radically cut costs while keeping revenues mostly static. However, it wasn’t a sustainable approach because it also resulted in diluting the product–the programming itself–which listeners couldn’t help but notice, as they jumped ship to new competing platforms.

At the same time, I think it is true that the company’s shift in strategy really is a turn away from traditional radio, but at radio’s expense. By comparison, National Public Radio has used its internet platforms to compliment and court new listeners to its programming, on the air and online. While programming ostensibly is the product offered up in iHeartRadio, the overwhelming sameness of it all is rather striking. Sure there are dozens of active rock stations to choose from, but the distance between their sound and playlists can be measured in millimeters.

Now it is true that Clear Channel is actually a significant radio content company with its ownership of Premiere Radio Networks, home to such highly lucrative programs as Rush Limbaugh’s and Sean Hannity’s. And while you can listen to these programs by tuning in live broadcast streams from affiliate stations on iHeartRadio, there’s no way to listen at another time. Furthermore, iHeartRadio doesn’t provide a schedule for these stations so you know when to tune it. Sure, you can subscribe to on demand access to Rush or Hannity on their respective websites, but I argue that’s a scattershot approach. First, it limits the audience to the more dedicated, rather than casual listeners. Second, it takes place outside of iHeartRadio, fracturing the platform’s value as a one-stop shop for Clear Channel radio content.

The even more telling aspect of Clear Channel’s move away from radio as we know it is its Total Traffic Network which delivers real-time traffic reports over its stations’ HD channels. Why is this not a radio service? Because one of its primary purposes is to feed traffic data to navigation devices like Garmins and TomToms, not radios. In effect, this is a step towards making stations more valuable for the spectrum they occupy rather than the programming that they can deliver.

This isn’t to say that I believe Clear Channel is abandoning radio. Rather, it’s clear that Clear Channel is continuing to move away from relying on profiting from individual station revenues towards seeing stations as a nationwide commodity where local programming is more of an obligation than a raison d’être. I don’t see the company reinvesting in programming at local stations so much as using them as resources to create new data services and outlets to push national programming brands as consolidated under the iHeartRadio banner. This can be seen no more clearly than in the massive layoffs of on-air talent that Clear Channel imposed last October.

The change from Clear Channel Radio to Clear Channel Media and Entertainment is consolidation 2.0. For the sake of true local service and innovative programming, we could only wish that Clear Channel were actually leaving radio.

It’s vitally important to recognize that every time a new audio distribution technology comes along, the word “radio” comes along for the ride. When the first live audio streams went online in the mid-90s, did everyone call this “streaming internet audio?” No, they called it “internet radio.”

In the early 2000s when Sirius and XM first lit up their satellites hovering above the earth did they call it “satellite audio?” That’s right, they called it “satellite radio.”

Sure, “podcasting” doesn’t have the word radio in it. But the one-time neologism was built upon the conflation of “iPod” and “broadcast.” The latter word is certainly very related to radio, which was the first form of electronic broadcasting.

What this all means is that we see radio as a thriving, evolving and growing set of media united by the common application of distributing–or, broadcasting–audio programming to masses of people. Radio is the transmission of audio entertainment, information and art across a variety of media and formats.

Reading this one might wonder, “well, then, doesn’t that make records, CDs, audiobooks and album downloads some kind of radio, too?” My answer is that they’re close to radio, but don’t qualify as radio.

While services like Spotify and Rdio have blurred that line between listening to an album and listening to radio, radio is still a different experience. Music radio, in particular, is about delivering a curated experience that is more spontaneous, less processed, and more ephemeral than an album, which is comparatively crafted and composed. Sure, progressive rock radio often featured album sides, but the more frequent programming were carefully chosen DJ sets. Music radio is about the mix. And even though Pandora and last.fm deliver a mix programmed by an algorithm, the listening experience is more like that progressive rock station than a CD.

It’s not for nothing that Spotify calls its automated music streams “artist radio,” and Rdio is a semi-contraction of “radio” that needs to buy a vowel.

A point that’s hard to avoid is that these forms of radio all hearken back to the modes of presentation first pioneered in broadcast. The DJ, talk show and music set all originated with broadcast. Internet and satellite radio unambiguously crib these forms with the only big difference from broadcast being their method of transmission.

Podcasting is a particularly curious case, because in my opinion its invention reignited interest in radio forms by making it so much easier to distribute programs. Podcasting also gave listeners a kind of radio TiVo by relieving them of having to tune in to a station or stream at a particular time. The clever innovation of the automated download freed radio from the tethers of the cable and the electromagnetic wave, be it FM, AM, wi-fi or cell.

In fact, the rise of podcasting breathed life into forms of radio programming that had barely been heard from since the 70s, like radio drama and long-form comedy. Turns out that the international reach of podcasting means a particularly esoteric show can find hundreds or thousands of listeners, even if there may barely be a dozen potential fans in the broadcast radius of a single station.

This is just my long-winded way of saying that here at Radio Survivor we take all forms of broadcasted and transmitted audio programming. We think that makes our website unique. There are plenty of sites that do a good job of covering the broadcast industry, a particular radio personality or music and radio. But we haven’t found any that consistently look at the whole wide world of internet, satellite and broadcast radio. To us, it’s all RADIO.

This also means we intend to keep expanding our coverage, writing more about new online services, ways to improve the listening experience, new radio technologies, along with our continuing coverage of broadcast. In particular I hope to see us write more about podcasts and podcasting, since we’re seeing more artists, personalities and producers make the decision to completely bypass the broadcast and satellite gatekeepers, self-producing and distributing podcasts directly to audiences.

Back in August we made a call for writers and contributors, and we’re still looking. If you’ve considered writing about podcasting, satellite radio, internet radio or other radio forms–not just broadcast–then drop us a line.

“Terror did not attack us on September 11th, terrorists did,” she wrote to NPR.

Terror does not have hands with which to use box cutters. Terrorists do. Terror is a feeling. Terrorists are human beings who make choices to kill innocent people. The phrase “terror attacks” takes the responsibility off the men who committed premeditated murder and puts it on a feeling. Please, use the phrase “terrorist attacks” to describe what happened that day.

NPR’s Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos thinks this is a valid criticism. “Do you think the phrase ‘terror attack’ diffuses personal responsibility into a generalized feeling?” he asks. “Are we sliding into a form of political correctness, or language that is so neutral that it smacks of the inability to look a terrorist in the eye and call her what she is?”

With all due respect to NPR, one comes away from this exchange sensing an inclination to replace big difficult questions with little manageable ones. That’s understandable. The problem with anniversary journalism is that there isn’t any meaningful reason for revisiting the moment in question, save that we’ve decided that birthdays have meaning.

But since the media event is upon us, I thought I’d tackle two big questions for a spell. What did September 11, 2001 mean for the United States of America, and what does it mean for radio?

Paralysis

There’s no question in my mind that the vicious Al Qaeda criminals who killed thousands of innocent people on September 11, 2001 (including a member of my family) helped push  this country into a long period of paralysis and decline. The United States responded to the attacks with two wars. The Afghanistan war made superficial sense at the time. The Iraq war made no sense. Both failed.

Worse than failing, they subsumed our nation into a unilateral “war on terror” that never really identified its target. Instead, it distracted us from the precarious health of the United States itself, verging on economic collapse after years of massive and unmonitored corruption in its financial sector. When that corruption took its devastating toll in 2008, the country briefly rallied around a new president, then sank into a morass of ideological posturing and paranoia.

Consolidation and change

Within this ten year context, the media landscape dramatically changed. By 2001 the Clear Channel consolidation was in full swing—the network gobbling up about nine percent of the nation’s radio stations, and far more of its aggregate advertising revenue. Conventional local deejays disappeared, replaced by digitized national ones, skilled in the art of sounding like they lived next door.

Meanwhile, the Pandora Music Genome project had just begun to take off in 2001. It was followed by a variety of online radio experiments that allowed users an unprecedented degree of individual choice in online music listening and production.

The consequence was a marvelous period of online creativity: podcasts, Live365-casts, and radio aggregation applications galore. But the locally based radio station that struggled to bring everyone into a real time dialogue about the nation’s future became lost in the upheaval—its project seen as almost irrelevant. Attacks on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting further threatened its prospects, especially in rural areas.

It would be naive to imagine that open public dialogue is the only solution to our national dilemma, but it is part of the solution. Today, I experience as a precious national commodity every public, college, community, and commercial radio program that attempts to bring different people together into a civil real-time discussion.

Authentic radio is live. It is local. It is about the real time sharing of music, talk, and ideas. Although I write with admiration and excitement about the latest technological developments in online radio and audio, they will mean little for us as a people if they only encourage users to listen to or produce music and talk in fragmented cubicles or tribes, cut off from others or other groups by digital space and time.

We have had enough of that in this country. We need more real radio. We need public and market based strategies that bring real radio to our ears. This is my hope on the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001.

You’ve seen the bumper stickers, and today at least it’s true for Family Radio. Their website has been unreachable all day, likely due to being overloaded with traffic. So that’s also made it difficult to get their online radio stream. So I tuned in to Family Radio’s shortwave station WYFR this afternoon (at 13615 Khz) and it certainly sounds like the station is on auto-pilot.

Beginning at about 3:15 PM CDT the station aired a half-hour long Frequently Asked Questions list about the rapture, including explanations for why the world didn’t end in 1994 as Harold Camping first predicted (answer: he had incomplete information, as indicated by a question mark in the title of his book Are You Ready?). At 4 PM CDT a pre-recorded edition of Camping’s Open Forum call-in show went on the air. The first caller was challenging Camping’s May 21 rapture prediction, making Camping’s subsequent defense all the more hollow.

Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised Family Radio is automated today. As Jennifer reported earlier this week, the station’s programming is “generally produced several weeks in advance.” Furthermore, the station gave the staff yesterday off as a holiday. Although the Open Forum program is typically aired live, we also shouldn’t be surprised that today’s edition is a rerun, since Camping told Jennifer that today “he’d probably be watching TV and listening to the radio to hear about what was happening around the world.”

6 PM local time is when the rapture was supposed to happen today. As I write this 6 PM has occurred in most of the world outside of the Americas and there’s no report of rapture (although some have jokingly connected a Icelandic volcanic eruption that happened this afternoon). Nevertheless, I will tune in to WYFR at 6 PM local time for the Florida-based station just to see if there is any indication that the big CEO has taken control.

When Stephen Colbert gave a ‘medal of fear’ to a seven-year old girl at Jon Stewart’s Rally for Sanity, many of us laughed hard at NPR’s expense. And it felt good. If you missed the clip, fast forward to the 49:00 mark.

“Oh no, not NPR,” Colbert jokes. ”If their employees attend Jon’s rally, someone might think that NPR is liberal! No one could tell from the free pledge drive hemp-fiber tote bags they use to carry their organic kale roll-ups to their compost parties.”

Of course NPR is a source of timely news reporting on stories like private prison industry connections to Arizona’s SB 1070, and sneaky Senate maneuvering that prevented a potentially 95-5 or 98-2 vote for years.

But recently Ira Glass complained publicly that his colleagues sound like “talking robots.” To make matters worse, liberal satirist Harry Shearer points out these days “the initials stand for nothing.” Even the stuffy Financial Times calls NPR “smug and boring.” Ouch.

Restricting staff attendance to a comedic performance staged at the Washington Monument led to hilarious mockery of NPR and other press outlets. But beyond the related discussion about NPR’s coverage of hate groups, and the snore-inducing arguments about ethics codes, why is the press so scared of what the haters might say?

NPR went right ahead and gave critics all the ammunition they could eat, by firing Juan Williams before the rally even happened.

Before I can get to the most interesting parts of the NPR identity crisis, we should revisit the chain of events surrounding civil rights historian and former journalist Juan Williams.

The plot of NPR vs. Fox News, starring the honest black man and the mean white lady, was never very original. Hindsight being 20/20, it seems public debate was degraded yet again during October by conservative demonology and fake freedom of speech hypocrisy.

First Juan Williams, who is a black news analyst for NPR, makes racist statements to suck up to his other employer Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. Then the civil rights historian and former journalist gets a phone call from NPR informing him he’s been fired. Immediately Newt Gingrich and other conservatives demand an end to public funds for NPR. In the midst of pledge drive season, stations receive calls from “viewers” who promise to stop “watching.”

Next NPR’s CEO Vivian Schiller pours gasoline on the fire by ticking off the National Alliance for Mental Illness. Facing the cameras, she jokes Williams should have kept his feelings to himself “his psychiatrist or his publicist, take your pick.” Schiller subsequently apologizes for the way the termination was handled. And now NPR’s Board hires a law firm working the NBC-Comcast merger to lead a review of the dismissal.

The elephants eat up the opportunity to deliver a heaping pile of dung across the broadcast spectrum and the cable TV landscape. Luckily, a few in the press keep their senses despite the stink.

Civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald points out that NPR’s firing of Juan Williams “threatened to delegitimize” all ”fear-sustaining, anti-Muslim slander.” With so much of the emphasis of Endless War built up around a foundation of hate and racism, he concludes “there are too many interests served by anti-Muslim fear-mongering to allow that to change.”

Adam Serwer writes in Williams’ old paper the The Washington Post, “It’s clear from the context that Williams wasn’t merely confessing his own personal fears, he was reassuring O’Reilly that he was right to see all Muslims as potential terrorists.”

Indeed the subject had come up on October 18th in the first place because a week earlier Bill O’Reilly’s remarks on The View caused Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg to walk off the set in the middle of his interview.

But hey, at this point you’ve gotta feel sorry for Juan Williams. Sure, first he signed a new $2M contract with Fox News, and now he’s got a book deal. But his new book will “focus on free speech and the growing difficulty in America of speaking out on sensitive topics.” Wouldn’t you hate to try and explain how difficult speaking out can be while banking millions as a commentator?

Plus, the poor guy must have some conflicting voices inside his head, considering his earlier writings on the psychology of hate. “Common sense becomes racism when skin color becomes a formula for figuring out who is a danger to me,” wrote Williams in The New Republic back in 1986.

While reading back over so much controversy about NPR throughout the past few months, a key perspective emerged as more interesting than the rest of the pack. Regardless of NPR’s grounds for firing Williams, there is little hope of satisfying The National Review. Their claims about NPR’s left wing leadership hinge on judgements about “abortion-rights groups and environmental activism in particular.”

But what about other journalists of color who have worked within the NPR system?

During four years of work for NPR, Kiss the Sky author Farai Chideya saw no evidence of particularly liberal leadership, insisting instead the network is “run by a Beltway cohort.”

Although her African-American issues program was canceled and she no longer works there, Chideya blogged on Huffington Post recently that “this country needs NPR, now more than ever.”

She says they fired Williams for acting as hype man for Bill O’Reilly, the same thing he has been doing for years.

Do I think NPR fired him because he is black? No. Do I think NPR kept Williams on for years, as the relationship degraded, because he is a black man? Absolutely. Williams’ presence on air was a fig-leaf for much broader and deeper diversity problems at the network. NPR needs to hire more black men in house on staff as part of adding diverse staff across many ethnicities and races.

It also needs, broadly, a diversity upgrade that doesn’t just focus on numbers, but on protocols for internal communication. Among the revelations in this incident is that the Vice President of News fired Williams by phone without giving him the opportunity to come into the office and discuss it.

In 2009, minorities represented less than 9% of the radio work force despite making up at least 34% of the population. In 2008, the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC) calculated that minority news employment was statistically almost zero at English language, non-minority owned radio stations.

MMTC co-founder David Honig credits the collapse of minority employment in radio journalism to “word of mouth recruitment from a homogenous workforce.”

Considering the FCC’s own report on the need for diverse broadcast ownership — that the “welfare of the public” requires “the widest dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources” possible – Honig wants stronger equal employment opportunity enforcement.

So would Republican presidential hopefuls agree with him, that a more diverse NPR would be a better use of public funds? Do the elephants care about the quality of news that’s accessible in the peanut gallery?

Or are they grandstanding and whipping up ill-informed Americans into a frenzy in the name of Muslim-bashing? Despite a desperate need to change course in the Middle East,  this fall the GOP laughed all the way into office as NPR war reporters joined up with the rest of the subservient national press to please the Pentagon with their favorable coverage.

Listen critically to NPR’s reporting of US foreign policy and you will hear selective storytelling shining favorable light on CIA activities, and so-called experts providing dodgy history lessons on Afghanistan. While popular anchors parrot unsubstantiated claims about Iraq, and others kiss up to conservative politicians, commentators smirk their way through reactionary antagonism of whistle-blowers.

To me, it is no wonder that the anti-Iraq War invasion contingent of NPR’s audience seems so totally placated, four elections later.

It’s debatable whether those at the top of the right-wing echo chamber are in fact willfully misleading their audiences when it comes to funding radio with tax dollars. Either that or they’re afraid of what they don’t understand as usual.

Public radio station revenue is mostly made up of individual and business contributors, with less than 6% coming from direct federal, state and local government funding combined.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) funds barely 10% of all public radio budgets. NPR itself is funded mostly by member station programming fees and corporate sponsorships, and receives no government funding for operation costs.

Reality may be liberal, as the saying goes, but it’s plausible that at least one hundred million Americans are not. They don’t need Newts or Mama Grizzlies to tell them not to support NPR. Many of them dislike public radio because it sounds like liberal propaganda for an elite educated audience. Public radio executives rarely admit the need to think outside the core, but I’d say plenty of critics are accurate in their assessment.

Not long ago, my Radio Survivor colleague Matthew Lasar pointed out the disgust he felt when he heard Terry Gross and guest Will Ferrell laugh about the poor slobs who buy clothes at Marshall’s and get their hair done at Supercuts. Stay classy, Gross Air.

Feminist Music Geek Alyx Vesey blogged in August that Gross leans heavily on assumption and often attempts to “box interviewees’ responses into preconceived trajectories.” However Vesey and her fellow watchdogs were much more concerned with “sensitive white male condescension” from Bob Boilen of All Songs Considered. “Particularly in his dealings with women and the output of female artists,” she added.

Well, in November Bakari Kitwana wondered aloud on Huffington Post if Terry Gross should go the way of Juan Williams, considering her interview with Jay-Z about his new book Decoded. You decide, couldn’t what Kitwana heard be described as “sensitive white female condescension?”

“To be sure Juan Williams revealed his bias by openly, expressing his personal opinion. Terry Gross didn’t do that. Instead the bias is more subtle and insidious and lurks in the line of questioning,” Kitwana wrote. “And Terry Gross never goes off message.”

In a nearly hour long interview with a self-made record executive mogul and entrepreneur worth at least half a billion, on the occasion of the publication of a book he deems a coming of age story for his generation, the most pressing questions on the table range from insight into drug dealing to why rappers grab their crotches?

Given how pervasive the narrative Jay-Z calls ”history re-running its favorite loop” has become, Kitwana says it will take much more than firing journalists like Gross and Williams to purge it from our culture in America.

As the Executive Director of Mississippi Public Broadcasting Judy Lewis learned in September, you don’t mess with Gross Air.  The beloved daily talk show was reinstated on that affiliate’s schedule after Lewis pulled the plug, following listener complaints over sex talk on the program. Then Lewis was canned instead. (Technically, she resigned.)

Make no mistake, it is very clear that many in my parents’ generation love Terry Gross and the other veteran voice talents. About 1 in 10 Americans tune in at some point every week. Even with the US economy teetering on the brink of collapse and the rest of the radio biz in a tailspin, NPR is experiencing boom times. As Radio Survivor noted one year ago, despite it all, NPR keeps growing.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben’s favorite public radio personality is the wittiest of them all, Ira Glass. McKibben makes Glass the centerpiece of his recent feature for the New York Review of Books, admiring his “commitment to covering the 330 degrees of life that didn’t show up on the newscasts. It’s about life the way most of us experience it, where heartbreak or lunch is as important as stock prices or distant revolutions.”

Back in August, Ira Glass drew knowing applause from a sold-out crowd at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall with the admission he listens to NPR stories thinking, “I would be a better person if I can get through this story.”

“The world they describe is much smaller than the real world,” he continued. They sound like “talking robots. The aesthetics of the language is so stiff.”

The goal for the creator and host of This American Life, is to “add fun, joyfulness and surprise” to stories. According to reports, he noted onstage that this “never happens in broadcast journalism,” which is “a failure of craft.”

Calling to mind Patton Oswalt’s over-the-top bit about NPR is author James Wolcott’s recent piece for Vanity Fair, called The Sound of Sanity.

Today NPR is just about the last outfit that hasn’t retrenched and retreated from Marshall McLuhan’s global village but instead has extended its feelers to tap even the faintest faraway dot on the map with a moving story to tell, navigating near-impossible terrain if necessary.

This can lead to borderline self-parody, too many dispatches from remote villages about the dying native craft of flute-making narrated by a correspondent who sounds as if s/he majored in empathy at Deepak Chopra Junior College, a mourning dove with a microphone.

But the beauty of radio is that the ambience of other countries, other cultures, fills the sonic background with no camera eye imposing a single dominant message-image (a close-up of scorched belongings to signify the ravages of war), and no reporter standing in the foreground, colonizing the frame with a face full of concern.

The Financial Times applauds NPR for being “the closest America comes to the BBC.” However, “it is also a bit smug and boring.”

74% of Spot.Us users surveyed in September think public media is higher quality than their commercial counterparts.

So, we get it, masses of college graduates love NPR, even if it is more Wonder Bread than organic kale roll-ups.

Meanwhile, grassroots activists shoot off their mouths about lapdog coverage, journalists of color wonder when their fair share of the workforce will come, while corporate-backed Republicans attack NPR for serving up smooth sounds of sanity, safe for the three-car garages of liberal elites.

For the future of public radio, quite possibly the most important critique of the NPR brand is inaccessibility. Fans of small “d” democracy, libertarians and much of the community radio movement feel the bigger the member station, the more editorially closed off from real people.

Plenty of listeners dedicated to the low end of the FM dial are concerned so-called corporate “persons” have too much influence on the big pubcasters.

For example, one blogger writes, “KBYU should not use the public airwaves to solicit donations from listeners until it first makes complete and regular disclosures of its finances.”

The editor of a free daily email series called LUV News, Jack Balkwill, was quoted on the excellent Keep Public Radio Public website in November, writing:

Corporate sponsors include the taxpayer-bailed-out General Motors, Citibank, and Bank of America. Others include Citgo Oil, Mastercard, Visa, BP Oil, Dow Chemical, and Fox Broadcasting.

Throughout the day, NPR’s programs: Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, The Diane Rehm Show and others invite guests from the corporate funded think tanks to opine. These people are clearly paid to sell out the American public. Transnational corporations get sycophancy in return for their investments to the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, Cato Institute and so forth, and what they expect is obedience to their philosophy of lower corporate taxes and higher corporate welfare, at any cost to the public interest.

When legendary Simpsons voice actor Harry Shearer, host of Le Show on KCRW, found out NPR wouldn’t cover his new feature-length documentary on either of the network’s two flagship news programs, he set out to buy underwriting announcements instead. But NPR’s legal department ruled he couldn’t use the words “documentary about why New Orleans flooded” in his spots, so he fumed on Huffington Post that at NPR the initials stand for nothing.

If NPR doesn’t stand for National Public Radio anymore, what does it stand for?

In an Op-Ed during the Williams fiasco, former NPR foreign editor and current KPCC Pasadena news director Paul Glickman offers this simple answer: “NPR is the premier broadcast news organization in America.” And he’s right.

Well over 30 million Americans tune into their local NPR member stations every week, and the plan is to grow audience numbers to 50 million people over the coming decade.

NPR’s own research shows millions more Americans would, too, if public radio becomes more lively and less serious. Researchers found the perception of inaccessibility to be the greatest barrier to entry.

“Inherently, news and information is NPR’s sweet spot, and understanding how that was unfolding in the world of news and information was the primary goal of this study,” vice president of programming Margaret Low Smith told Current in September.

News consumers from various demographic groups feel excluded. Confirming comments from Ira Glass, the summary proposes a more conversational tone in news delivery. “There is an appetite for… people sounding more like real people.” Sorry Host Whisperer, but your days may be numbered.

Of course a mix of digital strategies could help increase public access. No doubt streams and podcasts will continue driving listenership. In July, NPR’s Facebook page surpassed one million fans. In September they launched a handsome Tumblr blog, stripped-down and appealing to visual learners like me.

They’re also finding that Twitter data lets NPR glimpse a “future of app-loving news junkies.” Facebook and Twitter combined now account for 7-8 percent of traffic to NPR.org, an amount that has doubled in the last year, according to Nieman Journalism Lab.

That’s just the beginning. Digital initiatives include PBCore, the new internal API for NPR news gatherers, iPad optimization, projects with silly acronyms like PMP and AAPP, even a new team of comment police for NPR’s web platforms.

The Argo Network, which aims to cover 12 distinct topics in 12 hyper-local newsrooms is a cool idea. Plus, how does adding reporters to all 50 statehouse beats sound? Open Society Foundations put up the seed money for that project, called Impact of Government.

One of the biggest dreams is significant investment in more than 300 new positions for reporters and editors in top markets. Despite a budget calling for unnecessarily bloated salaries, when I consider the news crisis we’re facing nationwide, I say bring ‘em on.

“This is public media’s moment,” Libby Reinish of Free Press wrote in October. “We must rebuild the charred remnants left behind by commercial media’s slash-and-burn tactics, and we need all hands on deck in order to raise a new foundation for American journalism in its place.”

Keep in mind, her article on NewPublicMedia.org was about the Prometheus Radio Project’s barnraising with community radio station WGXC in upstate New York. But “Building a Radio Station, Building a Movement” was also a reminder about the blueprint (.pdf) Free Press has envisioned.

Bringing together all our public interest journalism resources – including community radio and NPR, cable access and PBS, nonprofit startups and independent bloggers – means thinking critically about the “premier broadcast news organization” in America. Keeping track of what the public’s biggest news network is up to can help all of us move forward from this identity crisis.

I agree with Farai Chideya that Americans need a more robust, more diverse NPR. What do you think?

As Matthew puts it, “We’re the voice of listeners, participants and consumers, rather than the ‘voice of the industry.’” There are hundreds, if not thousands of sites with this kind of perspective on television, movies and music. We believe strongly that radio deserves at least one.

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The Federal Communications Commission has put the finishing touches on its rules for “white space” broadband devices—that is, gadgets that can send and receive high speed Internet across unused TV channels. Rolling out the service will be very tricky, since it involves portable gizmos that link to mobile or fixed machines that link to a database that tells them which channels are currently unused, therefore available for streaming (the relax-it’s-going-to-be-easy-version is explained on the youtube.com video on your right).

Anyway, assuming this project goes as scheduled (I’m guessing first devices in stores in a year or two), one would hope that folks will be able to start streaming radio stations using these machines.

Here’s what I’m hoping—that white space technology will make the economics of streaming radio cheaper. Right now bandwidth costs are clearly holding PC and mobile radio back.

As WFMU’s Ken Freedman puts it, “The way the Internet is built right now, there’s a catch 22, which is that the more people who use it [online streaming radio], the less well it works . . . The costs of operating an FM transmitter are minute compared to everything we spend for streaming, and we buy bandwidth in bulk.”

But that, I presume, is because Internet streaming radio stations buy their bandwidth from Internet Service Providers, rather than essentially becoming their own ISPs via these white space transmitters. Unlicensed bandwidth devices will allow neighborhoods to create community mesh networks that transmit and receive data through the unused TV bands. These mesh systems could obviously stream radio.

I’m not sure whether this technology will lend itself to big Internet streaming operations at this point. But it could facilitate smaller ones. It all depends on how fast the technology rolls out, and how quickly consumers adopt it.

Anyone out there with big radio-related plans for this stuff? Drop us a line!

“The way the Internet is built right now, there’s a catch 22, which is that the more people who use it [online streaming radio], the less well it works,” Freedman says. “And that’s just not the case with FM, or broadcast television, or cable. But, the Internet doesn’t have to be like that, but I don’t see much realistic hope for changing that.”

The economics on broadband streaming are “just terrible,” Freedman adds, “which is very frustrating to me because that’s where all the market is going. And at this point now, my radio station WFMU has twice as many people listening online as we do over FM, whereas it was only two years ago that we had finally crossed that barrier, where we had more people listening on the Internet than we had listening over FM. Now, two years later it’s twice as many.”

Bergmayer asks Freedman about WFMU’s online costs versus FM broadcasting.

“Oh, there’s no comparison,” Freedman explains. “It’s so much more expensive to pay for bandwidth than, you know… The costs of operating an FM transmitter are minute compared to everything we spend for streaming, and we buy bandwidth in bulk. Now, we just buy huge, huge contracts of bandwidth. So, we’re only paying, I don’t know, we’re paying $5 or $10 a meg of throughput because we buy so much of it.”

And the interview continues:

John: Well then, since we’re talking about broadcast versus FM, I do have a few questions on what you think the future of broadcasting is in the Internet environment. I mean, I know a lot of tech geeks. A lot of my friends just essentially see broadcasting as a totally obsolete technology. And in fact, the other day I sort of slagged off FM as being a sort of outdated technology in one of my blog posts, and got heat from some of my friends who work in community radio and similar projects. So, I was wondering if you just had any general thoughts. I mean, do people still want to listen to broadcast?

Ken: Old people do. Young people don’t. I think it is an obsolete technology, but it’s hard to make predictions as to what’s going to happen since the future of media, nobody’s ever been able to really accurately predict it. When television came out, everybody predicted the end of radio and that didn’t happen. Radio just kind of reinvented itself. And when FM took off, people predicted the end of AM, and AM ended up reinventing itself as a talk format.

So, it’s hard to predict, but I do see FM and AM and the radio model in general as being incredibly archaic and out of date now. It’s hard to imagine how it’s going to reinvent itself. The experience that I can get listening to a radio station on an iPhone or an Android with all the interactive features, it’s not just a return to transistor radio. It’s way beyond that.

Read the rest of the discussion here.

I should add that I too gave Bergmayer a little grief for his comments on FM in one of my Ars Technica posts, but I agree that there’s just no comparison between FM and the range of interactive options I get on my Droid X. And that’s why the technological moment we are in is so simultaneously wonderful and frustrating.

Any comments from Radio Survivor readers about how we get out of this bind and onto the next phase? Is there some sustainable way to merge the affordability of FM with the versatility of broadband? Has that already been done?

Continuing its series of workshops–which are more informal than hearings–on a variety of important topics, the FCC will hold one on the topic of “Public and Other Noncommercial Media in the Digital Era.” This workshop is part of the Commission’s project on the Future of Media and the Information Needs of Communities. This day-long workshop is happening next Friday, April 30, and will be streamed live online. You can also read a PDF announcement and agenda.

The frame of the workshop is the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which created public radio and television as we know it today in the US. This is the topic of the first presentation ” A 1967 Moment… A Vision for Public Media.” Of course, noncommercial and public service broadcast media existed in the US prior to 1967, from the very beginning of broadcast. Nevertheless, the Act marks a significant moment when the value of public service broadcasting was acknowledged and solidified.

Radio is represented throughout the workshop’s panels. I’m glad to see that there are representatives from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters and Prometheus Radio Project, alongside representation from more mainstream public radio organizations like NPR. Unfortunately I see no representation for college radio, which we Radio Survivors certainly argue stands as a unique service distinct from community and public radio, even if many public stations are owned and operated by higher education institutions.

I think this oversight is notable because college radio continues to be the place where many of tomorrow’s public broadcasters get their start, while simultaneously providing valuable cultural and informational service to communities. At the same time college stations face unique challenges brought on by budget pressures at their home institutions and the desirability of their precious spectrum space that other would-be broadcasters covet. It would certainly be great to see the FCC invite someone who can speak on behalf of college broadcasters.

I will be tuning in to the webcast Friday and will certainly have some thoughts to report here.

Although radio is still very popular, with 92% of respondents saying that they listen to AM/FM radio; people are less likely to say that they are profoundly impacted by it or use it as a way to discover new music. Only 22% of those surveyed say that AM/FM radio has a “big impact” on their lives. People are much more likely to report that their cell phones (64%), broadband Internet (49%) and even satellite radio (27%) are having a big impact on their lives.

One of the most interesting (and sad) findings to me was that radio is becoming less and less of a tool for music discovery. When asked, “Among internet, television, radio and newspapers, which do you turn to first to learn about new music?”, 39% of respondents said “radio” and 31% said “Internet.” Although more people said radio, this is a huge decline from 2002, when 63% of respondents said that they turned to radio first to learn about new music. Most strikingly, among 12 to 24-year-olds, the Internet (52%) has surpassed radio (32%)  as a the first place to turn when seeking out new music.

Other interesting findings include:

-84% use/own a cell phone

-52% of those surveyed have listened to online radio

-44% of those surveyed own an iPod/digital music player

-12% use/own satellite radio

-31% said they were aware of HD radio and 3% use/own HD radio

-The use of an iPod/MP3 player has the most impact on radio listening for 12 to 34-year-olds, with 23 to 27% reporting that they spend less time listening to terrestrial radio due to the use of a digital music player

On the positive side of this, though, among young people ages 12-24, 40% said they would listen to AM/FM radio “a lot more” or “somewhat more” if they were able to access it through a cell phone radio tuner. Additionally, 51% of all respondents said they would be very disappointed if their favorite AM or FM station was no longer on the air, with 78% of respondents saying they would listen to as much AM/FM radio in the future as they currently do “despite increasing advancements in technology.”

So, although technology is nipping at terrestrial radio’s heels; there’s still room for radio to remain relevant for young people if it continues to reinvent itself and expands its reach to mobile platforms. To get more details on this study, see the full report (PDF) on the Edison website.