Radio Survivor

“If you’re among the estimated 120,000 Apple enthusiasts who signed up to get an iPad on April 3, rest assured that you’ll be able to experience the NPR Web site in all its glory.”

So promises Kinsey Wilson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, NPR Digital Media, in his latest blog post. NPR’s designers and developers have been busy little beavers contouring the site to Apple’s hottest new machine, Wilson says.

“From day one, iPad users who visit the NPR Web site will get an experience that is optimized for the device,” he adds.  “Features like the NPR audio player have been given greater visibility and adapted for the unique technical requirements of this new platform; we’ve modified the navigation and made the site more ‘touch’ friendly; and we’ve improved the sponsorship experience all without changing the main site.”

Well, all we can say in response to this is that we told you so. In January our Paul Riismandel predicted that “the fact that some iPad models offer 3G wireless data connectivity out-of-the box, for a very reasonable $30 a month without any contracts make it a great candidate for mobile internet radio listening.”

“It won’t necessarily be any better for the car than an iPhone, Blackberry or Android phone,” he added. “But in other mobile circumstances it shows distinct promise.” On the other hand, Paul warned, the iPad won’t be great for multitasking, that is, listening to NPR while  doing other iPaddy type stuff.  So that may be a drawback for NPR types, big multitaskers for sure.

At the end of last month the FCC released its tallies for the total number of broadcast stations in the US as of Sept. 31, 2009 and Dec. 31, 2009. When you see the big number of 14,420 full-service radio stations it’s a big reminder that radio is still an enormous media presence in this country. This total represents an increase of 23 stations just from the end of September.

Here’s the breakdown for all radio types:

Full-power stations

• AM stations – 4790
• FM commercial stations – 6479
• FM educational stations – 3151
  TOTAL 14,420

  FM translator and booster stations – 6155

  Low-power FM stations – 864

  Grand total: 21,439

Note that FM translators and boosters are low-power stations that may not originate their own programming. They may only retransmit the signal of a full-power station. I’m pretty sure that a very large percentage of translators are non-commercial, thought I don’t have the exact number at hand. This is because the rules for non-comm translators are much looser than for commercial ones. A non-comm translator may be located any distance away from the station it retransmits, whereas a commercial translator must be located within its mother station’s expected broadcast range.

Educational stations encompass all non-commercial stations that have NCE licenses, including college, school, religious, community and public stations. The FCC does not distinguish between them.

Even though many observers have tuned out of radio, it’s going to be a long time before 21,439 broadcast stations are going to be abandoned and forgotten.

It has been two weeks since National Public Radio more or less apologized for its controversial All Things Considered obituary of the historian Howard Zinn, and the bitter listener comments are still coming in.

“I have read your post on the Zinn Obit and find it to be wordy gobbledeegook,” a listener responded several days ago to NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard’s blog commentary. “Your explanation at the end was sufficient! . . . Wordiness is no substitute for the simple conclusion you reached!”

The conclusion that Shepard finally reached in the last paragraph of her essay was that quoting former leftist and now decidedly right wing ideologue David Horowitz in the piece was inappropriate. “There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn’s intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect,” NPR quoted Horowitz as saying. “Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse.”

The Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting group jumped on that quote in a hot second. “NPR Finds Right-Wing Crank to Spit on Zinn’s Grave,” ran FAIR’s headline, “David Horowitz in ATC obituary with substance-free attack.” A gazillion furious e-mails later, Shepard replied, noting that the story had included words of praise from Noam Chomsky. But in the end she had this to say about the Horowitz quote: “Critics are right that NPR was not respectful of Zinn. It would have been better to wait a day and find a more nuanced critic—as the Washington Post did two days after Zinn died—than rushing a flawed obituary on air.”

But it’s also clear from the many subsequent responses to Shepard’s  post that NPR listeners are still bitter about the story. (more…)

The FCC opened up an important licensing window for new noncommercial FM stations in 2007, announcing the first round of license winners in 2008. However another 59 licenses remained up in the air due to the Commission needing to pick a winner amongst competing applications. The FCC announced those winners on Tuesday [PDF].

The Commission uses a point system to judge which group should receive a noncommercial FM license amongst multiple competitors. The system awards points with preference to candidates that are locally headquartered with an “established” presence, do not have a controlling interest in another nearby station and which propose to serve the largest number of people.

For the first time the FCC had to contend with applicants who are currently running low-power stations. Because the operators of LPFM stations cannot also operate full-power stations, the Commission will require these operators to give up their LPFM licenses before signing on with their full-power stations. In order to make sure their communities are not deprived of service any longer than necessary the Commission is allowing the LPFM stations to petition to maintain broadcasts until they are ready to begin test broadcasts with their full-power stations.

A total of nine LPFM station operators were in competition for licenses nationwide, and of these five won. Two winners are stations that have been operating as traditional community radio stations: Radio Free Moscow in Moscow, Idaho and Berkshire Community Radio in Great Barrington, MA.

Radio Free Moscow (RFM) edged out Fire Media Corporation and Country Roots Preservation Group based upon RFM demonstrating that it is an “established local applicant,” which neither of the other contenders claimed. Berkshire Community Radio (BCR) won out over the University of Massachusetts and Home Improvement Ministries. BCR and UMass both scored the same number of points, which required the FCC to use “tie breaker” criteria. The first tie-breaker criterion prefers the organization that has fewer licenses in other communities. UMass operates WBCR in Boston, while BCR, as a LPFM, operates no other, which resulted in BCR winning this competition.

Amongst the rest of the licensees [PDF], seventeen appear to be obviously religious groups, three are universities or colleges, two are primary or secondary schools, two are established public broadcasters and one is a Native American group. The nature or affiliation of the other licensees can’t be easily discerned from their names.

These awards are considered tentative because will be an opportunity for the filing of petitions to deny a license to any of the winners. However, in practice, such denials rarely occur.

So, I guess now it’s my turn. What is Radio Survivor (the blog)? It’s all about the idea that radio is a hardy, useful, practical and proven medium with a lot of life left in it. A Radio Survivor (the person) is someone who continues to believe in the medium. A Radio Survivor is not a luddite clinging to her transistor radio while eschewing iPhones and netbooks, nor is he a retro fetishist stuck in the past. Rather, a Radio Survivor recognizes the simple power inherent in broadcast audio, which can be done inexpensively and bring people together in a community.

I’ve been a radio broadcaster working in college, community and public radio since 1989, with just one year off from May 1993 to May 1994. And while I’ve had some sporadic work in radio, most recently as a college station adviser, as Matthew emphasizes, my approach is more as a listener and enthusiast rather than an industry insider. Much of what is written about radio is for the industry insider, and is therefore concerned more with profits, ratings and staffing changes than with the place of the medium in our society and everyday lives. Also often missing from insider coverage is critical analysis that challenges the business orthodoxy.

I write for Radio Survivor because I wish to challenge myself and others to consider what radio can be, not just be content or discontented with how it is. We can recognize the damage wrought by consolidation without giving in and leaving the medium for dead. We can highlight the stations and places where innovation is happening and 21st century is in the making. We can encourage new or lost listeners to give radio a new chance.

Radio, as a medium, has a great chance to survive because of the internet, iPods and mobile phones, not in spite of them. Just because Clear Channel and its mostly bankrupt consolidating brethren were too busy buying up stations, firing staff and elminating local service to notice the internet revolution doesn’t mean that the internet has to kill radio. I believe that there is still an audience that pines for local news, information and culture that is still hard to find on the internet, that doesn’t require a monthly broadband bill or data package and is there in the car, in the home or a hundred miles away from the nearest wi-fi hotspot. And as internet access becomes more ubiquitous and less costly radio can still be a complementary part of our information environment.

That’s Radio Surviving.

My friend and award winning documentary film maker Alan Snitow wrote to me a couple of weeks ago with a good question. How come you rarely hear anyone at National Public Radio call it “National Public Radio” anymore, just “NPR”?

I went over to NPR’s web site to refresh my memory on this. By golly, I wrote back to Alan, it’s true. The only place you see the full name is up top where the meta title is.

<title>NPR : National Public Radio : News &amp;
Analysis, World, US, Music &amp; Arts : NPR</title>

Everywhere else it’s just the acronym.

So what’s with that? Alan wrote to NPR a couple of days ago. Was this inspired by Kentucky Fried Chicken going to “KFC”?

To which an NPR spokesdroid offered this reply.

“Thank you for your question about NPR’s branding efforts.

Over the past few years, we’ve been gradually transitioning from identifying ourselves by our full name, “National Public Radio,” to referring to ourselves as simply “NPR.” We’ve found that most listeners – and other news outlets – refer to us as “NPR,” and the acronym is now well known. That trend took place with other media outlets years ago, for example today people refer to the BBC rather than the British Broadcasting Company, or to CNN rather than the Cable News Network. (more…)

Federally recognized Native American Tribes and Alaska Native Villages who apply for AM or FM radio stations will get “Tribal Priority” status, thanks to an FCC decision released today. Tribal Priority will give precedence to their applications or to companies controlled by tribes that want to set up stations intended to serve tribal land areas.

“More tribally-owned stations will mean new opportunities for these rural communities,” predicted FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, who supported the Order, “economic advancement from construction activity to erect broadcast facilities; advertisements for goods and services geared especially to tribal audiences and markets; career and employment opportunities in media-related fields; outlets for the distribution of diverse cultural programming and viewpoints, as well as public safety information for tribal lands. This initiative goes to the heart of localism.”

There are about 14,000 radio stations in the  United States, and 41 are licensed to federal recognized tribes. That’s less than a third of one percent of the total. To get technical, the FCC is giving Native Americans “Section 307(b) priority,” that being the language in the Communications Act that requires the Commission to “make such distribution of licenses, frequencies, hours of operation, and of power among the several States and communities as to provide a fair, efficient, and equitable distribution of radio service to each of the same.”

The FCC is adding some caveats to this windfall. Station owners who get Section 307(b) priority status won’t be able to downgrade their service level. But the agency is also looking into giving Native  American applicants extra bidding credits when they apply for stations.

The discussion leading up to this decision was somewhat contentious, with various groups, including the Catholic Radio Association, charging that Tribal Priority would represent an unfair or even race/identity based form of preference. But Native Public Media, which advocates for Native Americans, noted that the policy would not run afoul of various affirmative action standards, because Native Americans are classified “not as a discrete racial group, but, rather, as members of quasi-sovereign tribal entities whose lives and activities are governed by the [Bureau of Indian Affairs] in a unique fashion.”

Looks like that logic won the FCC over. “Tribes are uniquely situated to provide programming meeting their members’ needs,” the Order notes.  “The existence of a non-tribal commercial station or stations at a community located on tribal lands should not, in our view, preclude the establishment of a first local transmission service owned by a Tribe or Tribes.”

Every Thursday night I drive home from Santa Cruz, where I teach at the University of California campus situated in that fair city. Soon as 8 pm comes around, I tune into KPFA to listen to the Bonnie Simmons / Derk Richardson music show, which I absolutely love.

To be accurate, they’re actually two separate shows, but I experience them as one. Folk rock, hard rock, classic rock, R&B, lesbo-womyn’s-punk-crossover-wuddever rock, just folk, ethnic,  plus wuddever by itself—they play it all. Or, to be more accurate, they play the good stuff. And it is so good. Trust me on this. I don’t even listen to rock and roll and I listen to them religiously, because they’ve got that mysterious, unexplainable thing called great taste in music.

First comes Bonnie Simmons. Here’s the first five songs of a recent Bonnie playlist:

Elvis Costello	River in Reverse
jeb loy nichols	as the rain
eric bibb	flood water
joss stone	the chokin kind
sam phillips	same rain

I mean, who can argue with this? For two hours it’s like an alternate universe where nothing ever sucks. How does Simmons do it? Years of experience in the music biz, going back to the free form radio days: music director at KSAN, promoter for Prince and Dire Straights, deejay at KFOG, LIVE 105, and KOFY. Plus she managed Cake for eight years and currently hustles for Noe Venable and Etienne de Rocher. (more…)

I’m a media geek, hence my nom de internet. And I pretty much have always been, ever since I recognized that there were people, organizations and companies behind the shows I saw on TV and listened to on the radio. I remember reading Billboard and Radio and Electronics in the library while still in elementary school. I always read the paper’s TV supplement and radio listings (yeah, papers once had those) so I would know channels had what shows and what stations played what music — even stuff I had no interest in (as a result, for years I thought Get Smart was an educational program until I actually watched it).

I always wanted to understand how all this mass media got made, who was making it and what machinations affected what we could watch and listen to. That’s what fueled my interest in radio, why I got into college radio, and why I learned video production. I spent some time in graduate school studying the political economy of the media, only to realize being a professor wasn’t so much for me. I produced a weekly radio show exploring both the policy and grassroots angles of media for seven years, and now I blog here about radio.

And, really, until I got out of college I always felt a little bit alone in my interest in the behind-the-scenes of broadcast media, rather than being interested in the shows and programs themselves, like normal people. Graduate school and the rebirth of academic consciousness about media ownership and control in the 1990s showed me that I wasn’t so strange, at least in this interest. At the same time, aside from the short-lived Brill’s Content, there didn’t seem to be much in the way of a mass media publication or program that consistently looked at media that wasn’t intended for a strictly academic or industry audience.

Then I heard NPR’s On the Media. I’m not sure when that first happened–the program went national in 2001, but I think it was a few years before my local affiliate picked it up. Anyway, I recall initially being skeptical of the premise, expecting the program to sound like a radio version of a local media column, covering the coming and going of various executives and on-air talent, reviewing new program line-ups, ratings and the like.

In a manifesto for the program, co-host Brooke Gladstone explains that one of the reasons why she abandoned the typical media beat was that,

I would be asked to do a three-and-a-half minute piece every time Tina Brown passed wind (or so it seemed to me.) I wasn’t interested in that, and I lived in one of the half-dozen zip codes where people genuinely cared about Tina Brown [former New Yorker editor-in-chief].

Instead, she writes that,

I wanted to show how the media sausage is made.

That explains why when I actually heard it, I was pleasantly surprised.
(more…)

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez’s radio/TV program Democracy Now! is, without question, the most successful media vehicle in the history of the United States Left. Launched at Pacifica station WBAI-FM in New York City in the mid-1990s, it is now an independent venture, subscribed to by over 800 radio, TV, and Internet stations around the world. From the perspective of this media historian, Democracy Now! exceeds all previous attempts to spread an explicitly social justice oriented message via broadcast and/or print. No prior effort, starting with the The Masses at the beginning of the  20th century,  has ever come so far in terms of influence and reach.

I listen to Democracy Now!’s one hour broadcast on a regular basis because it is fast paced and timely, racing to wherever the action is—Haiti, Copenhagen, Washington, D.C, or Honduras. I don’t always agree with the program’s perspective, but I appreciate the effort DN makes to host debates and discussions within the Left about how to move forward, such as its recent debate about how to respond to the Obama adminstration’s health care initiative. The vast majority of community radio style public affairs programs, within and beyond Pacifica, simply ignore these disagreements and tout one line or another, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. DN has far outpaced those efforts in part because of its willingness to embrace a broader perspective.

Here is some of what I wrote about Democracy Now! in my second book on Pacifica, Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War.

When she chanced upon WBAI in New York, Amy Goodman had just graduated from Harvard College and returned to the city. She had been raised in Bay Shore, Long Island, by a family of activists; her mother had spent much of the 1980s working for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze. Her father, an ophthalmologist, had been a civil rights advocate in the 1960s, taking a stand for school integration in a predominantly white suburb.

“I would go to the night meetings,” Goodman later recalled. “A thousand people would be screaming, and I would watch him stand his ground. There were death threats, but he just went on. I think that very much shaped my feeling about what was just in the world.” Now out of school and on her own, she had just finished a series of articles for Ralph Nader and Alan Nairn’s Multinational Monitor on Depo-Provera, the controversial birth-control shot. Goodman was about to enroll in Hunter College for graduate classes in biochemistry when a course on radio production caught her eye. WBAI’s Andrew Phillips taught the class. At the time Phillips hosted a show called “Investigations,” a program dedicated to what radio producers call “actuality” – the sounds of people talking and doing things on tape, speeches, demonstrations, street interviews. Goodman sat in on the first lecture, then talked with Phillips afterwards. The latter knew a true believer when he saw one. He asked her if she wanted to apprentice for him at WBAI. She protested that she had no radio experience. “That’s fine,” Phillips replied. That evening the two walked the mile from Hunter on the East Side to WBAI’s West Side headquarters. Phillips put his new student to work editing tapes for an upcoming program on the fortieth anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. “And I never left,” Goodman later explained. (more…)