I went over to Pandora this morning, logged in via my account, and was presented with a very large visual ad offering me the chance to meet singles in San Francisco. It came complete with pictures of fictional women named “sugarfresh16” and “StarCrossedLuvly.” I switched to my Debussy channel and got an Enrico Morricone sound […]
I’ve heard a lot of complaints about NPR, but never that it exacerbated hearing problems. Now we can add that to the list. NPR’s ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos notes that a story on tinnitus (ringing in your ears) which included sounds associated with the malady got a lot of unhappy comments: “I have tinnitus and I […]
Here are several responses to my post guesstimating that pirate radio stations produce about 19,220 jobs per year worth $576,600,000 in income. Obviously my finding, calculated in about an hour, was a bit of a stretch. But it has stimulated an interesting discussion, as I hoped that it would. The first response comes from John […]
“There is no such thing as an ‘illegitimate child’,” early public radio producer Elsa Knight Thompson once said. “There may be illegitimate parents.”* Thompson made this remark during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Raised in Seattle, she had married an Englishman and come with him to Europe. She was evacuating children from London when […]
If you still haven’t seen Le Show host Harry Shearer’s documentary, The Big Uneasy, you can catch it at the Elmwood Theater in Berkeley this Saturday at 4:30 pm, followed by a QA with the author. The next day Shearer will produce his radio show from the studios of KALW-FM, the public station of the […]
I have often wondered how many jobs “unlicensed” media produce, be it P2P file sharing sites or pirate radio stations. A new study commissioned by the National Association of Broadcasters inspires me to attempt a rough cut of the pirate radio question. Based on my guesstimate study, broadly modeled on its methodology, I think that […]
For once, I wish that I still lived in Washington Heights, Manhattan. My favorite free form radio station, WFMU-FM of New Jersey, is holding a Listener Meetup Group literary reading in that lovely neighborhood on Monday July 11 at the Word Up community bookshop. Scheduled readers include WFMU DJs/fiction writers Kurt Gottschalk, Amanda Nazario, and […]
As I write this post, I am part of a DJ team on Turntable.fm for the freaky friday throwdown room. The room system is in beta at this point, I’m told, but there are five DJs and the music has been pretty wonderful so far. Here are the last five songs: Around The World – […]
Want to learn how to produce in-depth radio features with top producers like Rob Rosenthal, Jay Allison, and Ira Glass of This American Life? Transom.org has opened the application window for its seven week Transom Story Workshop, to be held in Cape Cod this October. Why seven weeks? “Unless you want to go to journalism […]
Are you a college/community/LPFM/unlicensed music show host? Does the show that comes on before you have an impact on your program, or your efforts to cultivate an audience? I ask now because I forgot to mention the question when I moderated a National Federation of Community Broadcasters workshop panel on great music programs. I first […]
