On Friday, the FCC released a Memorandum Opinion and Order, which may bring a resolution to the lengthy and contentious competition for a new low power FM (LPFM) channel in San Francisco at 102.5 FM. This paves the way for a potential time-share between the two remaining applicants: San Francisco Community Radio and San Francisco […]
It’s been particularly exciting for me to visit some of the new low power FM (LPFM) community radio stations that are in development thanks to the Local Community Radio Act. After an all-day field trip from Washington, D.C. to Culpeper, Virginia (to see the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center), […]
I am so looking forward to Penny Lane’s new documentary on John Romulus Brinkley, coming here to San Francisco in early July. Titled Nuts! it chronicles “Doctor” Brinkley’s rise as the Depression era midwestern mega-quack who championed the grafting of goat glands into the gonads of his patients. To promulgate this astoundingly bad cure for male sexual […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
