KDVS Covers Occupy UC Davis Events
As the Occupy movement picks up at university campuses across the United States, many college radio stations have been working overtime to report on these historic protests. Following last week’s pepper-spraying of students by campus police at Occupy University of California, Davis, the college radio station, KDVS, is presenting live coverage of the protests and […]
Radio Kol Hashalom, where are you?
Haaretz reports that Israeli police and the Communications Ministry have shut down Radio Kol Hashalom in East Jerusalem. Israeli and Palestinian peace activists ran the station, which used broadcasting equipment in Ramallah and was licensed by the Palestinian authority. Kol Hashalom roughly translates as “All for Peace.” Israeli officials insisted that the station lacked the […]
My Kindle Fire is an Internet radio
My Amazon Kindle Fire arrived in the mail on Thursday, and I’ve been fiddling with it ever since. Got my Facebook going, read a whole lot of newspapers via the Pulse application, and downloaded a free edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. After several days of downloading and noodling with various apps, however, I’m inclined […]
National “Reclaim Your Radio” Event Stresses Importance of Community Radio in Canada
On Monday, November 14, 22 non-commercial radio stations in Canada took part in a day of action and celebration dubbed “Reclaim Your Radio.” Organized by the National Campus and Community Radio Association (NCRA), the day-long radio event was designed to bring awareness to the importance of campus and community radio. A special 8-hour broadcast (an […]
Underwriting and Low Power FM: why does the NAB care?
Underwriting represents a very modest percentage of the budget of most Low Power FM radio stations in the United States. So reports the Prometheus Radio Project in a filing to the Federal Communications Commission. The latest data comes from a 2011 study conducted by Prometheus in collaboration with Keith Brand, Associate Professor of Radio, Television […]
Shortwave pirate radio preserved at the Internet Archive
Jason Scott is an archivist and historian of computer and internet history behind such great projects as textfiles.com, which preserves the wonders of the pre-web internet, as well as documentaries on pre-internet BBSs (bulletin-board systems) and text adventure games. Appropriately enough, he now works at the Internet Archive, and while catching up on his blog […]
In some places the EAS test wasn’t so successful
While many broadcasters had no problems receiving and retransmitting last week’s nationwide Emergency Alert System test, many others reports of problems are surfacing. John Anderson at DIYmedia.net compiled some of the glitches: Here in Wisconsin, radio stations broadcast 30 seconds of garbled audio that effectively degenerated into static. Similar results have been reported in Pennsylvania, […]
Remembering “The Noid”: WFMU uncovers old Dominos pizza jingles
It is said that there are some things best left forgotten. If that is your philosophy, stay away from New Jersey community radio station WFMU-FM’s wonderful Beware-of-the-blog blog. There WFMU listener Bob Purse has posted a slew of Dominos Pizza radio ads from the 1980s in MP3 format. I thought I had blocked these insipid […]
NPR: our listeners are not “self-importantly insufferable snobs”
NPR has finally gotten around to responding to a column in Slate describing the network’s army of listener e-mail and letter writers as “snoots.” In March, Farhad Manjoo went medieval on NPR listeners who protest various items on popular culture aired on All Things Considered and Morning Edition. He was particularly incensed at listener tirades […]
FCC says nationwide Emergency Alert System tesk was pretty OK, will know more later
At 2 PM Eastern time this afternoon some percentage of US radio listeners and television viewers heard or saw the national EAS test. I was in the main studio of Northwestern University’s WNUR-FM (where I serve as advisor), and waited patiently for our EAS unit to receive the signal from WBBM-AM, triggering the alert to […]