College Radio Watch: 50th for KZSC, Farewell WSGR, Free Speech, and more News
A mysterious situation is brewing at St. Clair County Community College’s college radio station WSGR-FM, where word has it that the station has been shut down after 43 years on the air. According to the Port Huron Times Herald, The radio station was originally intended for students in the broadcasting degree program, which was discontinued […]
Podcast #119 – Chicago Independent Radio Project
The Chicago Independent Radio Project launched as an internet radio station nearly a decade ago, with a mission of bringing a truly independent music- and arts-focused community radio station to Chicago. Thanks to the Local Community Radio Act, which allowed the growth of low-power FM stations in the nation’s biggest cities—and a lot of hard […]
College Radio Watch: TV as the New College Radio and More News
Are TV shows the new college radio? An article on Interlochen, The Rewiring of Our Relationship to Music, dissects music discovery and invokes college radio in a few places. The author first references student radio DJs as understanding the importance of both old and new music, writing, “College-radio DJs, a guild whose influence is disappearing, knew […]
Down the Highway One with Second Inversion radio
I enjoy one of the best driving commutes of anyone I know. I drive from San Francisco, California down the Highway One to the University of California at Santa Cruz, where I teach. Usually I drive down the coast on Mondays, and back up on Thursdays. This week I downloaded King-FM’s application onto my iPhone […]
Podcast #118 – Making Sense of the FCC’s Effort to Kill Net Neutrality
The FCC is about to vote on rules that would reverse network neutrality protections that the Commission put in place just two years ago. The terms of this rollback were released right before Thanksgiving, and represent the FCC effectively abdicating its role in guaranteeing the free flow of information on the internet. Prof. Christoper Terry […]
Past Daily: Living History in Online Audio Archives
While looking for info on a BBC session recording of the 1980s new wave / post-rock band Talk Talk I stumbled upon a version of the band’s Radio 1 broadcast on a site called Past Daily. Digging into its archives I discovered a treasure-trove of audio archives, from a 1991 CBS Radio world news roundup […]
Tour East London’s Pirate Radio Scene in “Drowned City”
I’m delighted to keep stumbling upon video artifacts of pirate radio, like the 1970s Portland public access footage and 1990 shortwave pirate documentary I recently shared. Next up I’ve found a more contemporary documentary from 2014 looking at London’s pirate radio scene. The city has long been a hotbed of unlicensed radio activity, such that […]
Alice’s Restaurant and more 2017 Thanksgiving Radio Broadcasts
Catch Alice’s Restaurant on the 2023 radio dial. See our latest listening guide. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, the wind up to the holiday season, which means that the annual ritual of tuning in to hear “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” on the radio is just around the corner. As I’ve been chronicling year […]
Podcast #117 – Soundwork: Preserving the Legacy of Radio, Podcasts (& Alice’s Restaurant)
“Podcasts are luring people into listening,” Jennifer Waits reports, quoting the esteemed radio scholar Susan Douglas, from her keynote address at the recent Radio Preservation Task Force conference in Washington DC. Jennifer also relays some important reasons for studying radio history shared at the conference, especially to help understand the present and plan for the […]
Breaking News: Radio Lives
We’ve seen some press coverage in the last week or so highlighting radios survival and revival. Though this is not news to the Radio Survivor faithful—it’s also not fake news—and we think it’s still a good thing to track and take note of. Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger highlights eight (!) new low-power FM community stations […]