College Radio Watch: Hidden History of Carrier Current Radio and More News
I hope you caught this week’s Radio Survivor Podcast (episode #51), in which I talk about the history of carrier current college radio. Dating back to 1936, college radio carrier current stations starting popping up on campuses in earnest throughout the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and beyond. At one point there were rumored to be […]
Radio Station Field Trip #102 – WGTB at Georgetown University
After visiting WCUA at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. on February 24, I made my way to Georgetown in order to check out college radio station WGTB at Georgetown University. Since it’s a bit more difficult to get to via the Metro system, I opted for a long walk to campus, with a break mid-way […]
Podcast #51 – Carrier Current is Cool
The DC Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld the FCC’s open internet rules, also known as net neutrality. Co-Host of the podcast Eric Klein admits that he still finds it hard to believe that the big telecom companies can lose so Paul Riismandel explains it’s not such a surprise that Big Telecom didn’t get it’s […]
College Radio Watch: Happy 80th Anniversary to Carrier Current College Radio and More News
Thanks to Matthew Lasar for pointing out that this year marks the 80th anniversary of carrier current broadcasting on college campuses. According to Louis Bloch’s 1980 tome, Gas Pipe Networks, the first carrier current college radio station launched at Brown University in 1936. The technology caught on and by the late 1970s there were purportedly […]
Hey, let’s do a podcast! (hello? hello???)
My friend Ian Scheller has released volume two of his Hollywood Strips comics series. This panel (below) hit home for me, and perhaps for you as well. I don’t mean to single out podcasting here. Basically, this is my experience with spontaneously getting into almost any media project these days, from learning a new computer programming language […]
The Gas Pipe Networks is eighty
I own a lot of books about the history of radio. Unique among them is Louis M. Bloch Jr.’s charming and strange volume titled The Gas Pipe Networks: A History of College Radio, 1936-1946. Every now and then I open its pages and am transported to a distant world of struggling collegiate stations. The tome chronicles lads and […]
The Ghost of Broadcasting House
The BBC is entangled in a scandal which has strained relationships between its management and broadcasters, almost to breaking point, and devalued the public’s trust in the BBC. It is a case study in how inappropriate behaviour can become entrenched and out of control-and how hard it is for a large organisation to deal with […]
Podcast #50 – Prometheus v FCC and a Generation of Gridlock
The FCC has made nearly zero progress in its Congressionally mandated review and revision of media ownership rules for more than a decade. Instead the Commission has been dragging its feet for 13 years by failing to comply adequately to the ruling of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Prometheus v. FCC, which challenges […]
Could the FCC’s Legacy of Failure Trigger Even More Consolidation?
Editor’s Note: Prof. Terry also guests on this week’s Radio Survivor Podcast, which is a companion to this post. The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals recently handed down a decision in a third round of the case Prometheus Radio Project v FCC. This decision, while reasonably straightforward, has the potential to be earth shattering to […]
College Radio Watch: KFJC Live Broadcasts from Europe and More News
It’s summertime in college radio, which means that many stations are working with skeleton crews or are off-the-air (or off-the-net) for a few months. This became all the more clear to me this week, as my attempts to visit a few Southern California college radio stations were thwarted due to post-graduation closures. For many stations, […]