My Visit to the Oldest High School Radio Station in the U.S.: Portland’s KBPS
Radio Survivor readers are well aware of my passion for radio history and my appreciation for high school radio. For those reasons, it was a thrill to finally visit KBPS 1450 AM in Portland, Oregon a couple of months ago. Licensed to Portland Public Schools, the station is housed at Benson Polytechnic High School (thus […]
Ladies and Gentlemen: The Whitest Man Alive (trash and treasure from the KZSC library #4)
This is painful. I will just start this article by saying that I can’t make any excuses for what I am about to present to you. Bruce Willis as you’ve never seen him before. This is going to drag you kicking and screaming back to the worst parts of the 80’s or, if you weren’t […]
Podcast #30 – The Open Media Project Makes Gov’t More Accessible
The Open Media Project is a non-profit that provides tools and support for local and state governments to put meetings and events online. This makes government more accessible to the public, but also to journalists, community radio producers, and podcasters. Gavin Dahl, the project’s leader for government, guests to discuss the group’s work. In the […]
WMUA polka lovers keep fighting; UMass admin sticks to script
The great WMUA-FM Polka War continued through last week. Supporters of polka programming at the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus station kept protesting reductions in the genre. But the U.Mass administration is sticking to its guns. They’ll be more student involvement at the station, its principals insist, and that means less polka music on WMUA. “Polka programming will continue to […]
College Radio Watch: WRPI’s DJ Hairman, D.C. Studio for Michigan LPFM, and Teen DJ at Dartmouth Station
Radio Survivor’s podcast resumed this week after a break for the winter holidays. In this brand new episode, I give an overview of the state of college radio in 2015. It’s worth a listen, particularly if you missed my 2015 college radio year-in-review article. My segment starts at about the 60 minute mark. Also this […]
Radio Art and New Media in Radio Studies: An Interview with Magz Hall – Pt. 1
Happy New Year and welcome to 2016! The Academic Series for Radio Survivor has been a little quiet over the past few months, but we have a lot of exciting posts planned for this academic term. We’re happy to be back with a two-part interview with Dr. Magz Hall, who is a sound and radio […]
A Relic of Death (treasure and trash from the KZSC record library #3)
So here it is. Behold the beast. The hook that got this fish curious. This record can more or less be credited with the inception of my current writing preoccupation. It is, without a doubt, the most exciting find I have ever made, as well as the most infuriating. Going over the entire rock vinyl […]
LPFM Watch: 19 New Low-Power FM Stations Licensed
No new low-power FM construction permits have been issues yet so far in 2016. No applications have been dismissed, either. As I mentioned last week, there are only about 100 applications left to be processed by the FCC, so it’s likely we will see most, if not all, of these dealt with by year’s end. […]
College and community stations catch flak for Polka cuts and homeless tweets
Amherst, University of Massachusetts campus radio station WMUA-FM is having a Polka crisis. The Daily Hampshire has the deets. Apparently the signal is sunsetting some Polka shows, among them “Polka Bandstand” and “Early Bird Polka.” Plus there will be a general scaling back of Saturday Polka programming from twelve to four hours. This has not gone well […]
Podcast #29 – Will 2016 Be the End of Indie Internet Radio?
Small and medium sized internet-only radio broadcasters are facing a very immediate danger in 2016, due to changes in the performance rates that they are obligated to pay. Some estimates indicate that these fees may increase by as much as ten-fold, threatening to put hundreds, or even thousands of stations out of business. Paul digs […]