The Radio Survivor podcast is a weekly show that explores the future of community media, with a focus on community radio, college radio, low-power FM and public access TV, along with podcasting and internet radio. Hosts Paul Riismandel, Eric Klein and Jennifer Waits highlight the best and most innovative audio programming and keep you updated on the news that affects our ability to make, create, hear and see great community media.
Radio waves don’t obey borders, and stations have been taking advantage of this fact since the dawn of the medium – often despite the rules of government regulators where the signals go. Dr. Kevin Curran of Arizona State University has been studying border radio stations extensively, making it the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Everyone […]
Scholar Jocelyn Robinson says about one-third of Historically Black Colleges and Universities have radio stations. Her mission is to survey them and help preserve their histories and recorded legacies through the HBCU Radio Station Archival Survey Project, which she directs. On this episode Robinson tells us about this project, and explains why it’s important to […]
Eric Nuzum started NPR’s podcasting efforts in 2005 where he worked for over a decade and helped produce hit shows like “TED Radio Hour” and “Invisibila” – he left NPR for Audible, where he led Amazons efforts in the realm of short form audio and podcasts until 2018. Eric Nuzum is currently a consultant and […]
On this week’s episode we learn about a brand new project at the Library of Congress that is focused entirely on archiving podcasts. Ted Westervelt, Manager of the Podcast Preservation Project at Library of Congress, joins us to share early details from this new initiative. He explains that the hope is that a wide variety […]
The PIRATE Act, recently passed by Congress, is intended to stem the tide of unlicensed radio broadcasting by providing the Federal Communications Commission with new tools. Chief amongst them are new maximum fines, and a shortcut to issuing them. But will this really work? Author and radio scholar John Anderson says that a lot of […]
Last week we declared that the 2010s were a banner decade for community radio. As Jennifer notes, though college radio had a tough start to the last decade, with the loss of prominent stations like KUSF, KTRU and WRVU, the service seriously bounced back, aided by factors like the low-power FM boom, internet radio, HD […]
We begin part one of our review of the last decade in radio with the observation that it saw the greatest expansion of community radio in history. Though the second US LPFM licensing window that happened in 2013 is a significant driver, the growth happened all over the world. The 2010s were also a growth […]
Here at the close of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 we’re celebrating the 31st anniversary of the end of one of the most fascinating periods in radio broadcast history, when pirate radio ruled the Irish airwaves. We enjoyed this interview – recorded at the beginning of 2019 – and we think you will, too. […]
Matthew Lasar starts off this episode by declaring that this was the year that his undergraduate students stopped listening to broadcast AM/FM radio. Then he admits, he’s nearly stopped, too. Find out why in this lively rundown of what was significant to radio in 2019. On the other hand, our resident college radio expert Jennifer […]
All nine judges on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals recently denied the FCC’s request for a rehearing on its many-times rejected media ownership rules. Prof. Christopher Terry calls this the Commission’s “Legacy of Failure.” But it begs the question, what does success look like? Prof. Terry, who teaches media law at the University of […]
