Radio Survivor celebrates 10 years on the internet and four years podcasting with our 200th episode. Matthew Lasar joins Jennifer Waits, Eric Klein and Paul Riismandel for this review of the last decade in radio that matters.

Matthew tells the Radio Survivor origin story that sprang forth from his I.F. Stone inspired research deep into the digital catacombs of the FCC database, unearthing comments that broadcast execs never imagined would be public – such as one who accused prominent media reformists of being “communists.”

Jennifer recalls how a literature review for a journal article on college radio revealed how little scholarly work existed on the topic, compelling her to document this important media form that Matthew says he has learned is, “the first public radio.” “The present is future history,” Jennifer observes. This prompts Paul to comment how we’ve begun to fulfill that promise, given that Radio Survivor now has dozens of citations in scholarly works.

On the way through these stories, everyone notes the changes in the broadcast and online media landscape since 2009, how some publications have come and gone, and offering reasons why Radio Survivor has managed to survive. It’s a discussion of interest to anyone who has tried to, or wants to, sustain a passion project fueled primarily by volunteer labor.

We’re making a ‘zine!

As we announce on this episode, in August we’ll be publishing our first ever print project, hand made in the spirit of great independent radio.

We’ll send issue #1 to every Patreon supporter who gives at the $5/month level or more. But you have to be signed up by August 1, 2019.

Plus, every new sign-up gets us closer to our goal of 100 Patreon supporters so that we have a foundation to do the work of documenting the upcoming 20th anniversaries of Indymedia and low-power FM.

See our ‘zine page to learn more, or go ahead and sign up now.

Show Notes:

• A Decade of Radio Surviving
• College Radio Watch: Ten Years of College Radio Coverage and More News
• Lasar’s Letter on the FCC: VNR executive files e-mail with FCC against “radically left wing” group
• The Official Website of I.F. Stone
• Spinning Indie
• mediageek
• Matthew’s books:
  • Pacifica Radio, the Rise of an Alternative Network
  • Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War
  • Radio 2.0: Uploading the First Broadcast Medium
• Help Us Tell the History of Indymedia & LPFM
• RadioSurvivor’s Top Radio Shows – Paul’s #1: Free Speech Radio News
• A Sad Goodbye to Free Speech Radio News
• Garrett Wollman’s Radio Tower Quest
• History of the Grassroots Radio Conference
• Podcast #190: Radio Spectrum and Transmission Art
• Radio Survivor ‘Zine #1

The post Podcast #200 – How We Survived a Decade of Independent Publishing appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Amazon Echo. Google Home. And soon, Apple’s HomePod. Smart speakers are quickly taking up residence in homes. Taking voice commands to deliver news, weather, music and more, they play a very radio-like role in people’s daily routine.

Radio journalist Brian Edwards-Tiekert joins to explain what these speakers can do, what they can’t, and what the implications are for community radio and podcasters. He recently completed a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University where one of his research topics was the relationship between smart speakers and local journalism, co-authoring a post on Medium with the findings.

Radio Survivor is a listener-supported podcast. You can support us two ways:

Make a monthly contribution through our Patreon campaign.

Make a one-time or recurring donation with any major credit card via PayPal.

Show Notes:

• Brian Edwards-Tiekert at the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship
• Will Alexa Destroy Us? On Medium, by Gabriel Spitzer and Brian Edwards-Tiekert
• How and Why Public Comments on Net Neutrality Make a Difference
• Podcast #92 – Conspiracy Theory & Community Radio includes Matthew Lasar’s explanation on the value of comments in FCC proceedings

The post Podcast #96 – Are Smart Speakers Smart for Community Radio? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

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I’m not a futurologist, but here are two reasons why I think that community radio will matter 20 years from now. Neither of them has anything to do with digital media or marketing.

First, community media, and especially community radio, will matter thanks to global warming. By 2035 one of Greenland’s principal glaciers will have substantially broken up, raising the sea level significantly. This is only one example of how climate change will impact the earth. As superstorms, droughts, and floods proliferate, locally based electronic media centers will become critical to communities seeking to navigate their way through these emergencies.

Second, FM and AM broadcasting will become increasing useful to populations trying to end run state/corporate digital censorship. We’ve already seen examples of digital shutdowns in various regions of India and elsewhere. Basically you have telecoms cooperating with governments, closing off Internet access during what regional or national administrations deem social emergencies. During those times, good old old-school AM/FM should come in handy for allowing the targets of this kind of censorship to renew discussion and even bring back various kinds of digital communication.

These are, to my mind, the real bottom line reasons why community media is important. Your reasons are always welcome as comments or posts on our forum pages.

The post Community broadcasting in 2035: the let’s-get-real version appeared first on Radio Survivor.

We are always writing about North Carolina State University campus station WKNC-FM around here, and now they’ve gone and done something fun and creative again. This time it’s the WKNC “Radio Ride,” billed as an “alleycat” bicycle race and scavenger hunt fundraiser through Raleigh for the station.

On August 29, contestants will meet at the Raleigh Arts Collective and at one PM they’ll receive clues for checkpoints around town. They should expect to bike for around 15 to 20 miles. The winners will receive prizes from Raleigh Denim and Negative Fun Records.

This has got me thinking again about something I ponder from time to time: the relationship between radio and bicycles. It seems very relevant because here in San Francisco where I live a huge portion of the population bikes to work and elsewhere. This often includes me, but usually I’m one of the oldest people on the bike lane. Most of my of my co-bikers are millenials, folks in their twenties and thirties, doing what the demographers have been saying they’ll do: not driving cars and opting for alternatives instead, like bikes.

If they’re not driving cars, of course, it probably means that they’re listening to radio less. But I see many of them with smartphones or iPods and such. The question for me is, are they listening to broadcast or Internet radio or podcasts on their bikes?

I’d like to see a discussion about how to make bicycles more radio friendly and vice versa. There are all sorts of issues. First, I’m not certain that riding your bike with ear buds on is such a good idea, safety wise. Are there ways to listen to audio content on a device that offers short range volume? Or maybe through your helmet, allowing you to still hear what’s going on around your immediate city-street environs?

Cars are, in my opinion, very questionable things, but they’ve had such a great relationship with radio; how do we transfer that partnership to bikes? Comments on this question very welcome.

The post Radio and bicycles: can they help each other? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Related: Matthew Lasar takes a look under the hood of Audience Engine.

Does America’s maverick freeform music station have what it takes to shake up non-profit journalism?

It’s no secret non-commercial news online is facing hardships. Funding and engagement remain persistent needs, with no guaranteed formulas for staying afloat in a competitive journalism field. The local and hyperlocal journalism startups that are on the presumably facing the biggest issues, however, are on radar of an eclectic music powerhouse.

In an era of playlists, algorithms and formatting, New York’s WFMU is one of the last freeform music radio stations left. Its mix of cultural relics, Creative Commons-licensed tracks and arts programming have made the radio station a curiosity in non-commercial radio. WFMU is the subject of a new documentary film, Sex and Broadcasting, as well as the center of chatter about what music programming is and used to be.

Enter Audience Engine. Aimed at making community based media sustainable, WFMU has sought to make its model rooted in fostering online communities available to public and community radio stations and others. The open-source options will be made available free for download and implementation later this year.

When Nieman reported last year on Audience Engine, WFMU was planning a variety of components, including tools for archiving and podcasting. Audience Engine’s first add-on, MVP, a crowdfunding effort that can be extended to fundraising management, is set to go live in October. A new organization, Congera, was founded under the auspices of WFMU to administer Audience Engine. While the source code for the software will be shared publicly so anyone can add and modify, Congera will offer consulting, managed hosting and other services for outlets that need it.

Audience Engine has applications that go beyond radio. In WFMU General Manager Ken Freedman’s assessment, Audience Engine could change journalism the way WFMU switched up online music listening.

“One of the things I am most excited about is seeing how the system we have developed applies to investigative journalism,” Freedman said. “I think it does. In order to explore that, we’re going to create news sites that are based on operating in a completely different way. But I think it’s a model for sustainable journalism.”

With 70 percent of the station’s revenue coming from online donations, WFMU’s fortunes have been paved by more than a decade of web engagement. Program-based chat rooms, interactive playlists, and commenting have been part of the WFMU radio ecosystem since the early 2000s. The result for WFMU has been a strong fan base garnered through its efforts.

Similarly, developer Ken Devine says, news sites must focus on creating renewed relationships with audiences. Such includes understanding donor habits and interests, establishing an understanding of content they like individually, and how the audience consumes content. Parsing the volume of data will require news organizations to think differently about how they relate to the audience. However, Devine contends, Audience Engine and other methods give news outlets a way to engage with audiences not unlike any other news organization does, but this time in an open-source fashion.

Freedman and Devine remarked Audience Engine’s environment has appeal to small- and medium-sized organizations, of which many independent news groups often fit in terms of categorization. Originally targeted as a frontend addition for Content Management Systems like Drupal, WordPress has become more a focus for Audience Engine. While such is the result of slowdowns in Drupal 8’s debut and the selection of WordPress for WFMU’s new website, the ubiquity of WordPress as a platform could be seen as a strategic positioning too.

WordPress has emerged as the web’s most popular CMS, with the New Yorker, BBC America, Quartz and Time among its most prominent sites using it. Freedman and Devine acknowledged, however, that their objective is to build widgets, add-ons and applications that are aimed at working seamlessly with a station’s existing tool set.

Freedman suggested a news website could use Audience Engine to build journalism around communities. For example, an environmental beat or an investigative reporter could have forums, crowdsourced content and reader interactivity. Money could come from twice yearly public radio-style fund drives, with reporters having individual fundraising goals.

Sound familiar? Various non-profit news sites have tried it, with mixed results. Freedman opines that previous efforts have been ineffective for several reasons.

“I really haven’t seen a journalism website approach crowdfunding the right way,” he said. “On the other hand, I have seen podcasts that have had incredible success, such as 99 Percent Invisible and Radiotopia. It’s of course a matter of how you do it, but it’s also a matter of how you cultivate your online community when you’re not fundraising.

“To use a horrible sports metaphor, champions are made in the offseason. It’s not enough to put a fundraising widget up when it’s time to get money. You have to be interacting with and cultivating your online audience all year ’round, so when it is donation time, your community will come through for you.”

Although Freedman concedes such notions will be tested with new technology and new models, Devine says the open-source nature of this effort serves a range of purposes for organizations by solving several issues. “Extending the power of any organization with constituents or listeners or whatever you may have, we have to get away from direct mail, phone banks, and from those modes of fundraising that are unfortunately still with us,” he said. ”

Audience Engine is expected to launch its crowfunding tool in the fall, with community and audio archiving and podcasting components to come in 2016.

The post Can WFMU’s Audience Engine Shake Up Non-Profit Journalism? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

As I promised in my last post about [soon to be] fully Pandora owned radio station KXMZ-FM in Rapid City, South Dakota, I’d try to get more details from KXMZ deejay Mike Swafford about how “Hits 102.7” is working with the streaming service to connect with the Rapid City audience. On Friday, Swafford sent me a summary about the Pandora/KXMZ collaboration. Here are various ways that it is playing out.

For the last two years Pandora has been working with KXMZ via a Local Managment Agreement. The “first and most obvious thing” Pandora gave the operation, Swafford emphasized, was data on the tunes to which Rapid City Pandora subscribers have been clicking the proverbial thumbs up icon:

o Within our format we were able to use this information to select the songs the local listeners wanted so that our selection of music each week could reflect that as opposed to using national charts to decide what listeners were interested in locally.

o Prior to the relationship with Pandora the station would have had to pay thousands for a company to do local research with various unreliable methods that would be presented weeks or months after they conducted their research.  With Pandora it is weekly results with their actual interaction as opposed to recall or asking if they like certain songs.

KXMZ’s Mike Swafford

Next, Pandora created a channel that featured the format and songs generally played on KXMZ. Hits 102.7 deejays directed listeners to the channel, and “we were then able to follow the trends of our listeners from their interaction on that Pandora channel,” Swafford says. Based on this information, KXMZ created a “Ten at Ten” show that introduced the station’s fans to tunes that “weren’t on our playlist yet but were new songs on Pandora that were getting a lot of interest.” This was followed by a similar “Five at Five” program and various additional Hits 102.7 Pandora channels.

“Knowing that many people listen to more than one type of music allowed us to promote these other formats on air and the Hits website,” Swafford explained, “so that when they wanted to turn to that type of music they could listen to it on Pandora and know that the songs were based on what the people in Rapid City like listening to.”

Finally, KXMZ created another local program called “What’s on my artists Pandora Channel?”:

o This airs during the morning show and is a fun program where we take a featured artist from the Hits 102-7 playlist and play the first three songs a Pandora user would get if they typed in that artist to create a station.

o The first song will be from the featured artist and then the second and third songs are based on the algorithms that Pandora is able to create from the first song.

o This sometimes leads to playing second and third songs that we may not normally play but because it has a musical DNA with the first song we follow the process and introduce listeners to the songs and why they are related to the featured artist’s song.

What do Pandora and KXMZ have planned for the future? Their relationship “opens the door for HITS to be able to target listeners on Pandora in Rapid City for certain artists that we may be doing a promotion with,” Swafford says:

o This means that if we are promoting a concert for Meghan Trainor on the radio station we can run promo’s on her artist channel in Rapid City to inform them of the show and what the radio station is doing.

o It also means that if we decide to bring in a concert or help a concert promoter in Rapid City find out how popular that artist is locally we can find that information based on the artists local Pandora use.

Like “I said before,” Swafford’s note concluded, “these are the things I work with and make it exciting for me.”

The post How Pandora helps its South Dakota FM station build audience appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Once again, we are very excited to present an interview with a leading media historian for Radio Survivor’s Academic Series. John Durham Peters is a media and cultural historian and social theorist who is currently the A. Craig Baird Professor in Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. He is also a consultant and participant with the Radio Preservation Task Force, an initiative that has been an ongoing focus of this series. He’s the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication and The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, which “reveals the long prehistory of so-called new media” and is forthcoming this year from The University of Chicago Press.

In this interview, Peters shares his expertise on a number of pressing issues in Radio Studies, including his thoughts on the likelihood of radio moving into new secondary functions as we head into the future, our persistent desire for shared listening experiences, and the need for archival durability. We’ve broken the interview down into two separate posts. This first section includes questions about the future of radio and radio’s non-human element. The second post, which will be shared next week, asks about communal listening, the relationship between radio and community, and the task of researching media history.

Radio Survivor: You delivered a fantastic plenary talk at the “What is Radio?” conference in Portland, Oregon in 2013. I truly enjoyed this conference because it was a rare opportunity for so many scholars, practitioners, and listeners to come together and talk about radio. Your talk, “Radio’s Nonhuman Penumbra” fell under the closing plenary category of “Radio’s Future.” In her review of the conference, and of your talk, Radio Survivor’s Jennifer Waits wrote that you described radio as “one of the most existential media” and as possessing “a wonderful non-human dimension.” Going back to both the title of the conference and of the plenary, how might we foresee the future of radio?

John Durham Peters: Radio is difficult to define. Indeed, “what is” questions are often philosophically difficult, no matter the topic. Because radio involves a live signal, which is dependent on natural conditions such as the electromagnetic spectrum, and operates in the acoustic, that is temporal, dimension it invokes existential questions in a way perhaps more intense than other media. (I love it that radio amateurs are avid followers of weather reports about the solar wind–there is a cosmic side to radio.)

To be fair, many media raise implicit larger questions: writing and photography have always been associated with death and the grave, and cinema has always been connected with life and motion (as the history of its various names, from bioscope to motion pictures, suggests). But because radio depends on a live transmission, a jumping of the spatial gap between two termini, and on sound, it always implies questions about touch, connection and vanishing. Sound, as Hegel famously said, exists by disappearing, and if sound did not disappear, it would pile up into an unintelligible soup of brown noise. Sound’s ability to be heard depends on its constant vanishing, its making room for what comes next. In this and other ways, the spectrum is full of specters.

This feature of sound has inspired a number of thinkers who see acoustics as a special domain of existential questions, perhaps most notably the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, who, as an amateur musician and inveterate tinkerer with audio and computer hardware, saw sound media–radio holding a prominent place among them–as the most philosophically rich and aesthetically beautiful things that human beings (or the gods) had ever brought into being. Kittler’s unfinished magnum opus on music and mathematics–only two of a projected eight volumes were published in his lifetime–saw key acoustic innovations with the Greek alphabet, so he sketched a long history that is a nice backdrop for speculating on the future of radio.

One thing clear in media history is that old media never die, they just take on specialized functions. Even the telegraph didn’t exactly die; it just got absorbed into the Internet. If you look for an equivalent to radio before the twentieth century, one strong comparison is bells. Alain Corbin’s Village Bells on bells in the nineteenth-century French countryside is a book beloved among radio historians, and with good reason. Bells were the heart of communication systems in towns throughout Europe and North America. They were both civic and religious media. Bells proclaimed the time, summoned soldiers and worshippers, announced holidays, funerals, and weddings, as well as coming storms or dangers. They were at once herald, headline, weather report, siren, and status update. As bells were displaced by other sounders of community news, the one meaning they kept was a sacral one: the sound of deep time, death, and the echo of history. When they “gradually stopped being signs, portents, or talismans,” Corbin notes, bells were left with the role of “anchoring the gnawing sense of nevermore.” The eerie sense of days long gone we hear in bells today was not heard 300 years ago: a changing media ecology has changed the medium and message of bells.

I expect something similar with radio; indeed, we have already seen radio undergo big changes.  We should not expect radio’s obsolescence but rather the discovery of new, restricted, sacralized, secondary functions. Something like this already happened with the rise of formats in 1950s America.

Radio Survivor: Thinking about the non-human dimension of radio, I’m reminded of your work on the sociable aspects of communication, particularly during, as you’ve called it, the “twilight of broadcasting,” where “peer-to-peer communications occur via mediated devices as freely as they do via the flesh.” Would you say the non-human dimension of radio has changed in the twilight of broadcasting?

John Durham Peters: The article from which the phrase “twilight of broadcasting” comes considers the psychotic results when broadcast and interpersonal modes of address are confused. As many historians of radio have noted, it took a while for radio personae to hit upon the sociable, conversational formula of addressing not masses but individuals in the comfort of their homes.

It actually is remarkable that more listeners did not believe that performers were not their personal friends. But what protected listeners from that psychotic supposition was the knowledge that there were many other simultaneous co-listeners out there in a large imagined community. As live public address to the great audience invisible fades away in radio address we revert more and more, in many cases, to the constellation dreamed of in wireless telegraphy, of instantaneous one to one, almost telepathic communication, connected by a brain wave or material apparatus at a distance. (It is interesting that some of the earliest descriptions of schizophrenia treated it as radio waves.)

To be sure, there are still many situations of address to an unknown audience–indeed, that may be the basic fact of any kind of communication, even face to face. But with the fading of the society-defining ambition of broadcasting built into the daily and weekly programming schedule, the imagined co-listenership of radio is disappearing. If you listen to music on YouTube, you have to make do with the total number of hits–but you lack the sense of simultaneously fellowship with others in real time. I remain convinced that music sounds better when heard on radio than on individualized music services such as Pandora, just because you have the sense that it has the durable quality of something public, something real, not just a private phantasm that no one else is sharing. A child seeing something will point to it: one of our basic existential needs is to share our experiences. We seek validation to know we are not crazy, that this experience is more than spectral.

Radio Survivor: Thanks! We will pick up from here next week.

The post Thinking through Radio History: An Interview with John Durham Peters – Pt. 1 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Happy 2015! As we start the year, it’s a good time to reflect on the biggest radio stories of 2014 and also to make our predictions for 2015. Over the past few weeks we’ve shared our thoughts on the state of college radio, low power FM (LPFM), radio in academia, and podcasting in 2014, as well as some lists of our favorite radio moments of the year. Here’s our recap.

The most-read stories on Radio Survivor this year covered a wide range of topics, including Internet radio, jazz radio, Alice’s Restaurant, podcasting, Deezer, the Super Bowl on the radio and the Princeton Review list of popular college radio stations.

The top two stories of the year were My Chromecast is an Internet Radio and Thanksgiving 2014 Brings Another Chance to Hear Alice’s Restaurant. You can see how 2014 compared with other years (2011 was a doozy) by taking a look at our Year in Review archives.

Our reflections on 2014:

2014 – The Year in Podcasting

2014: The Year that College Radio Embraced LPFM

2014 – A Pivotal Year for LPFM

Radio Survivor Academic Series 2014 Year in Review

Plus some 2014 list-making:

10 Fascinating Things Spotted at College Radio Stations in 2014

Top 100 Composer Lists: And the Point is…?

Radio Survivor’s Top Podcasts of 2014

2014 Radio Survivor Holiday Gift Guides

And, finally, some predictions for 2015:

Opportunities Abound for Podcasting in 2015

The post Radio Survivor’s 2014 Year in Review appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This is part one of a series identifying ways community radio stations can adapt and ultimately embrace digital disruption as a tool to empower communities through media.

A lot of the pushback I get from community radio stations – and yes, well-resourced NPR affiliates – is that there aren’t enough people to work on digital. Yes, stations would love to be able to produce a bunch of different podcasts. Yes, community radio would love to spend more money on websites and a person – just one person! – to manage the digital content. But budgets are already stretched thin.

So as digital disruption drives audience ratings off a cliff without making up for it in online streaming and pledge drives become even more difficult, what’s a community radio station to do?

Turn the station website into a blog. With a personality.

Too often I see community radio stations treating their websites as their second tower. Radio first, then digital content…and even then it’s the intro of the news story with the play button icon below it. We must move beyond this. Let me propose something revolutionary.

I’ve pitched this idea at a few community radio stations: cut the over the air news and public affairs shows that involve managing volunteer programmers and put that staff muscle into coordinating content for a community content generated website. This was my big dream when I was the News Director at KFAI in Minneapolis. I ultimately had to settle for starting a participatory journalism website, tcdailyplanet.net.

Music reviews, a free speech zone, a video from a practicing Muslim about the polite way to wish a Happy Ramadan, and original local news content are part of the Twin Cities Daily Planet’s regular offerings. If it had a radio tower, it could be a community radio station. It has the same number of staff of a lot of stations and the pay is just as bad. Instead it’s a community media site and generating hundreds of thousands of hits.

Too extreme for you? I thought so. Nobody’s ever taken me up on it. What a program director or music director could do instead is start writing the regular blog: shows coming to town, his or her top song pick from each genre of music played at the station. You could have a lot of fun with it. And who knows? Maybe some of the volunteer programmers will notice and ask you how they can start contributing too!

Curate your over the air content. Be choosy.

KBUT, a plucky community radio station in Crested Butte, Colorado, decided to spend a little time on a music blog. It’s simple, it integrates new mobile apps like SoundCloud and it complements their music offerings over the air. Does it have every single song that played over the air? Of course not. That would be impossible, and not the least ridiculous.

Who might you ask should manage this work? Read my post on why some community radio stations are uniquely positioned to restructure their staff.

Collaborate with your fellow community radio stations.

KBUT’s music blog would be a great project for a group of community radio stations to collaborate on with each station putting a little bit of money into a pot to pay for a music blogger to maintain one site to cultivate an audience. If it sounds hard, it’s because it is. What is the pay out? Is it going to improve your pledge drives? The jury is out on those questions, but if community radio is to survive in a digital landscape, stations must work together to pool resources.

The post How community radio can adapt to digital disruption appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The RAIN newsletter has an interesting opinion post up by Mike Spinelli, formerly at SoundExchange, now in law school studying music licensing. Spinelli’s post is titled “The ‘me’ generation: why music curation isn’t the answer.” We are all individualists now, Spinelli says. Looking at various aspects of Beats Music, he contends that “human-curated playlist are not where streaming services are headed.”

In conclusion:

“The future is in being able to determine what I want to hear without me knowing it yet. A curated playlist may have a few songs I like, but a service built around this concept to enhance music discovery is inefficient. The future is in the data listeners provide, and refining that data to reach the right listener. That is where we’re headed.”

To get specific, our aspiring royalties lawyer is scoffing at Apple CEO Tim Cook’s comment (as Apple prepared to buy Beats Music) that “human curation was important in the [Beats] subscription service – that the sequencing of songs that you listen to affect how you feel.” Indeed, Beats takes playlist power very seriously, making it easy for subscribers to create them on the service’s web or mobile interfaces. But, the author asks us: do we really want to go back to cassettes? “A playlist created by a superstar (or anyone for that matter) is not what a listener wants to put on when they log into a streaming service,” he claims.

As evidence of this Spinelli submits a leaked Beats royalty statement posted by The Trichordist. Not surprisingly, the Trichordist makes quite a meal of what it regards as inadequate songwriter compensation (RAIN has posted a more dispassionate analysis of the figures).

It’s always interesting to me when people talk about “the answer” and “the future.” I immediately ask myself the same question: ‘the answer to and the future of what?’ In Spinellis’ case I feel pretty confident that he is talking about the future of money. But there are other futures to discuss as well. These include the future of friendship, of sharing, and of communities. And for those futures, music curation in the form of playlists looms large.

If nobody wants curation when they log into a streaming service, how do we explain the popularity of 8tracks.com? The playlist app is now so huge its recently installed forums pages overflow with discussions and comments, and it is fresh with new funding from Venture Equity. If nobody wants curation, why are there gazillions of exportable Spotify playlists up on web and blog sites (here is one of ours)? Ditto for SoundCloud.

Ok; to be fair, maybe these sort of application features don’t generate as much income as put-us-in-the-driver’s-seat music streaming channels. But I do very much hope that the constantly evolving world of Internet radio isn’t pressured by the labels and their advocates to put all their features into one future, to the exclusion of all others. That kind of future would an awfully lonely and boring one, at least for me.

We cover social music sharing communities every Monday in our Internet DJ feature (except when we cover them on other days).

The post If music curation isn’t the answer, what’s the question? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The piece cites industry claims that 92 percent of Americans tune in at least once a week, “unchanged since 1970.” Then comes a quote from Clear Channel’s Bob Pittman: “Do you think we are so dumb that we would pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year to program music stations versus playing music? . . . Why do you pay an announcer ten million dollars a year or twenty million dollars a year? Because they’re worth it.”

Bloomberg doesn’t cut Pittman off at this point and note Clear Channel’s penchant for deejay layoffs, but the feature does point out that in the 1990s the radio giant let go of a whole wave of locally based formats in favor of generic national content. We should also remember that while the percent of Americans who listen to radio hasn’t changed, the amount of radio they consume has. Arbitron’s Radio Today survey in 2001 noted that Americans on average spent about 20.5 hours a week listening to AM/FM radio. In 2014, Nielsen’s State of the Media report observed that consumers age 18 to 34 now only listen to about 11.5 hours a week while the 35 to 49 demographic only tunes in around 14 hours a week. Even “boomers,” as Nielsen call them, now listen around 14.5 hours a week at best.

This is millions of hours lost to broadcast radio. Still, as Internet and mobile radio services struggle to pay data and royalty fees, it’s becoming increasingly clear that AM/FM enjoys huge structural advantages that won’t go away.

BTW: did you know that roaches love booze and can live for a week without their heads? Sounds like the radio industry to me!

The post Bloomberg upgrades radio to cockroach status appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Radio strategy consultant Mark Ramsey is hosting a one-day “ideas festival” for radio called Hivio in San Diego today. While I wish I could have flown out to sunny Southern California to attend in person, I’m glad to watch a live feed of the show from my back deck in sunny Chicago today.

Ramsey introduced the show this morning to frame its raison d’être to the audience: that radio needs to look to ideas that come from outside the radio industry. That’s why more than half the conference speakers aren’t from radio.

He suggested that maybe radio isn’t as special as those inside the industry like to think it is, asking the provocative question: “If you’re going to make plans to the future, is it better to make them on the basis of myths or on the basis of reality?”

Ramsey then outlined a list of radio’s vulnerabilities, which are areas which other media compete with radio, taking away audience. According to Ramsey, the most vulnerable area is “soundtrack,” where radio provides music for a listener’s day. There are obvious competitors and replacements in this area, from smartphones to Pandora.

Star access is where radio is least vulnerable, Ramsey argued. This is where radio has exclusive content and talent that can’t be found elsewhere. Whether it’s Howard Stern on SiriusXM or Terry Gross and Fresh Air on NPR, this is the place where the old adage is relevant: content is king.

As a counterpoint, Ramsey gave the examples of Marc Maron and Kevin Smith, two very popular podcasters who have moved to cable TV, but not radio.

Of course, I can’t agree enough that personalities and content are king on radio. My opinion is that’s where commercial radio has failed epically for the last decade and a half, ever since the biggest owners, like Clear Channel, started treating stations more like Monopoly houses, firing local talent and squeezing the life out of content.

This is a valuable conversation for the mainstream radio industry to have, and one that I think public, community, college and low-power stations can benefit from. In some ways it’s a sign of mainstream radio’s predicament that it takes an effort from outside the main industry players to even broach these questions.

Strategy is important, and it has to be about more than just marketing and branding. But economics will trump. Commercial radio has to be willing to spend money on content and talent, not just talk about it.

That said, I look forward to the rest of Hivio today.

The post Festival of ideas looks outside radio for strategy and inspiration appeared first on Radio Survivor.

[www.johan.redstrom.se]

The Erratic Radio is a re-designed radio that ‘listens’ not only to normal radio frequencies but also to those around the 50Hz band – frequencies emitted by active electronic appliances. As a reaction to increasing energy consumption, the functional behavior of the radio becomes erratic and unpredictable, thus conceptually relating to the unpredictable, uncontrollable, and intangible effects of increasing energy consumption.

Morozov thinks out loud about the utility of this strange product: “Imagine hungry radio listeners bringing the radio set into the kitchen to grab some food without missing their favorite show,” he writes. “As they move around the kitchen, the show gets increasingly difficult to hear, as the sound reflects the strength of the electric magnetic field in the the current location.”

Most radios don’t consume that much energy, but the point here is to raise awareness about the costs of the typical array of devices we deploy. As designers Anders Ernevi, Samuel Palm, and Johan Redström elaborate:

As you sit at your office, you switch on the radio and tune in the preferred station. Listening to the music for a while, you realize you need to turn on the light. Starting to turn on a series of desk lamps, the radio gets increasingly noisy as it shifts away from the selected frequency. Only by turning the lights off again, returning to the original state, will the radio work properly again….

The trio posit a whole array of “erratic” gadgets designed to challenge the very “distant” sense most consumers have regarding skyrocketing energy use, including erratic television sets, erratic toasters, and erratic blenders. Yet more on the radio:

In order for the radio to tune out and behave erratically, this center frequency needs to be shifted. The ‘erratic-ness’ of the radio is thus created through hacking into the radio channel selection filter, allowing a microcontroller to slightly alter the frequency chosen. In order for the radio to react to energy usage, a sensor has been devised, measuring the electrical fields around the radio. This provides a sense, not only for the actual consumption, but also for the electricity that surrounds us in our everyday life depending on where the artifact is placed. This kind of sensing does not provide accurate measurements of consumption, but it gives an additional feature of mobile measurements.

“We are suckers for various technologies,” Morozov notes, “but we rarely recognize that their use is only made possible by vast sociotechnological systems, like water supply and now cloud computing. Thus does the author praise the “strangeness” of these gadgets. “The strangeness is deliberate: it seeks to introduce aspects of risk and indeterminacy into the use of such devices.”

I suppose that it would be simpler just to set up some kind of energy overuse alert system in one’s house—a flashing red button or something similar. But I wonder how many people would soon shrug their shoulders and experience the alert as part of the background auto-flow of life.

A radio, on the other hand, that suddenly gave me Rush Limbaugh rather than my local classical station . . . now that would get my attention.

The post Wasting energy? “Erratic” radio gives you wrong frequency on purpose appeared first on Radio Survivor.

US Pirg has released a new report on commuting patterns that has to be worrying some radio people: we are driving less.

“The Driving Boom is over,” proclaims US Pirg Senior Analyst Phineas Baxandall. “The constant increases we saw in driving up until 2005 show no sign of returning. As more and more Millennials become adults, and their tendency to drive less becomes the norm, the reduction in driving will be even larger.”

“Millennials” means 16 to 34 year olds. They drove “a whopping” 23 percent less miles in 2009 than they did eight years earlier. “In addition, Millennials are more likely to want to live in urban and walkable neighborhoods and are more open to non-driving forms of transportation than the older generation of Americans,” the report notes.

Baby boomers, now retiring in droves, are driving less as well. The study challenges government statistics that suggest that driving rates will continue to grow. If US Pirg is correct, that means, of course, that we will be listening to radio in our cars less. And on top of that, those of us who will still use automobiles may not even be driving. We may find ourselves in self-driving cars, watching TV or reading newspapers along the way.

Here are journalism and media professors Austin E. Grant and Jeffrey S. Wilkinson commenting on that prospect at the recent What is Radio Conference in Oregon:

Interviewer: “I know that where I hear radio the most is when I get in the car I turn it on. That’s almost the only time I will listen to radio. How much do you guys predict that [self-driving cars] will affect radio in the future?”

Wilkinson: “Well, it’s going to affect it a lot, unless the people involved in radio stations and radio production, they have to change.”

Grant: “There’s another way to think about it. Radio is typically seen as a secondary activity. You listen to radio while you drive in the car. You listen to radio while you are making dinner. You listen to radio while you are working. There will always be room for a service that provides secondary activity. So even when people are in the car, they might be reading the newspaper, they’ll want the radio. Or it might be TV, but as long as people consume multiple media simultaneously, I think radio will be one of those mediums.”

That’s good to hear, but it seems like every day the prospects for radio get more complicated. Here is the US Pirg infographic on the report below:

The post Will the end of driving mean the end of radio? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

As the troubles facing Pacifica radio persist without apparent end, I sometimes wonder whether the five station listener supported radio network should voluntarily dismantle itself—that is, transfer its licenses to five local non-profit entities.

I am not the first person to suggest this. Community radio pioneer Lorenzo Milam more or less laid the idea out back in 1999. So did former KPFA Music Director Charles Shere. I differ with their scenarios in that I envision a break up facilitating the birth of a stronger national organization for progressive community radio.

There are several cases for sun setting the Pacifica Foundation, which owns the licenses to five listener supported radio stations in the United States. The first is that the organization finds itself in a potentially irreparable state of financial crisis. According to the network’s latest audit, over the last four years the non-profit has lost over five and a half million dollars. That’s roughly half of what Pacifica collects in listener subscriber donations in a typical September-to-September fiscal period. Its working capital has declined from positive $2,835,309 in 2007 to negative $1,034,153 as of September 30, 2011.

“These conditions and events have given rise to a substantial doubt about the Foundation’s ability to meet its obligations as they become due,” the audit warns, “without substantial disposition of assets outside the ordinary course of operations, or restructuring of debt, or externally forced revisions of its operations or similar actions.”

Last sentence of the audit: “Substantial doubt remains as to the ability of the Foundation to continue as a going concern as of the date of this report.”

The second reason is that the Pacifica network has no clear mission. Since Pacifica democratized in 2002/2003, turning its local governance boards over to subscriber elected delegates, it has become an electoral battleground, in which different agendas for the organization have fought each other to a standstill in draining contests for local station board seats (here’s a quick tutorial on Pacifica governance).

This is most obvious right now at Pacifica station KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California, which now has two different morning drive-time shows (Up Front at 7 AM; Morning Mix at 8 AM), controlled by the supporters of two different electoral factions. But similar convulsions have taken place at the other stations, WBAI in New York City, KPFT in Houston, KPFK in Los Angeles, and WPFW in Washington, DC.

For all practical purposes, these elections have reduced Pacifica radio to a large body of air time surrounded by people who want some. As the network deteriorates, its fate will continue to be decided, helter skelter, by whoever is elected to its five local station boards, which, by my estimate, have now cost the organization $2,928,461 since the network democratized itself a decade ago ($2,802,685 plus $125,776 for 2011 as per the latest audit). That figure will probably rise well above the three million zone when Pacifica holds its next round of board elections this year. So desperate is Pacifica’s current executive director about this regular debacle that in a recent board meeting she suggested that it might be cheaper to drop the event and be sued than to let the fool thing go forward.

The third and more structural argument for a break up is that the Pacifica Foundation is expected to perform two tasks that often seem if not at odds, certainly a burden upon each other. The first is to oversee the administrative affairs of five locally based listener supported radio stations. The second is to collect a portion of the income that these stations and Pacifica affiliates generate to fund and distribute programming to almost 140 affiliate community or college based radio outlets.

It seems to me that the second task is a very worthy and necessary one—aggregating resources for shows like Democracy Now! and Free Speech Radio News, as well as the other programs that Pacifica distributes. According to a recent article in Current, the foundation is behind on its payments to DN and FSRN. Nonetheless, some non-profit entity should be able to focus on this task more, and supervise the five stations far less. In truth, they ought to take care of themselves. Many independent community radio stations across the country do so; some with great success.

An accident?

Some historical background might help the discussion (I wrote a book about this, if anyone is interested). Pacifica radio could be accurately described as an “accidental network.” Although the Foundation very purposefully launched KPFA in 1949, its acquisition of the next station, KPFK-FM in Los Angeles was controversial. The pacifist organizers of that project wanted a separate non-profit for the frequency; some quit when they discovered that it would be otherwise. A philanthropist gave WBAI in New York City to Pacifica in 1960. When Pacifica’s then board President was contacted about the gift, he initially thought it was a crank call. The founders of KPFT-FM in Houston weren’t that interested in joining Pacifica; by some accounts they affiliated only because they thought that it would smooth the path to a Federal Communications Commission license.

Thus the only two truly deliberate Pacifica stations are KPFA and the network’s historically black, jazz oriented station WPFW-FM, launched in 1977 after a long bureaucratic struggle. These two signals have been endlessly suspicious of each other over the decades. I’ve lost count of the number of KPFA activists who have derogatorily referred to WPFW as the station that hardly broadcasts any public affairs programming, and the number of WPFW programmers who deployed some variant of the phrase “that white station in Berkeley” to refer to KPFA. There has never been much basis for unity in this relationship.

Nonetheless, starting in the mid-1980s, a new generation of Pacifica board members and managers began asking the obvious questions: how do we make Pacifica greater than the sum of its parts? How do we turn this fragmented scenario into a competitive network? The results were successful, to a degree. By the late 1990s, after a decade of being overshadowed by NPR, Pacifica could point to gavel-to-gavel coverage of significant national events, and most importantly, the launching of the remarkably successful program Democracy Now!

But a whole generation of programmers were displaced by the process, and by 1999 the network exploded from the resultant tensions, leading to the managerial shutdown of KPFA in Berkeley, followed by a similar debacle at WBAI. The “democratization” of Pacifica in 2002/2003 was supposed to resolve these conflicts by somehow guaranteeing that governance would remain in the hands of Pacifica’s “grass roots” base. But that thinking seems magical in retrospect. Instead the “network” is now honeycombed with factions of air time seekers and air time defenders using the foundation’s costly subscriber elections as their battleground.

As the situation deteriorates, it becomes less and less clear whether Pacifica is worth the endless trouble that it creates for itself and others. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that many activists climb up to the Pacifica national board from their respective local boards with very little knowledge of the organization as a whole (I’ve also lost count of the number of board members I’ve met who couldn’t match call letters with location for three out of the five Pacifica stations). In this capacity these Solons make life and death decisions about the other Pacifica frequencies with barely any understanding of them, sometimes guided by self-interested or ideological agendas rather than facts. This also greatly polarizes Pacifica’s internal life.

The latest strategy for Pacifica, perhaps repudiated at the last National Board Meeting in Berkeley, could be roughly characterized as follows: remove paid, unionized professional staff from station air slots and replace them with what I would characterize as “entrepreneurial volunteers,” who derive their compensation from professional or ideological self-promotion.

Shortly before ripping the entire KPFA Morning Show down in the late months of 2010 and replacing it with a hodgepodge of volunteer hosts, Pacifica Executive Director Arlene Engelhardt offered this justification for the move.

“I think we’ve lost sight of our way, particularly at KPFA more so than at the other stations in the Pacifica network. We use less volunteers and pay more staff for functions that in some cases could be done by volunteers, than is happening at other stations in the network.

That’s one of the foundations of community radio, and I think that when times were, shall we say, fat, there was plenty of money, it was great to pay everyone for almost every function within the station. Now that we’re hitting some lean times, it’s time to remember what our foundation was, that was in volunteerism.”

Speaking at the Berkeley gathering, at which even more draconian staff cuts were proposed by national management, KPFA Local Station Board Vice Chair Sasha Futran offered an assessment of this strategy:

What I understand the majority here wants to do is cut the programming that brings in the money. . . . There are some phenomenal people who can come in and be good on the air right away. But they’re fairly rare. And your paid staff is going to produce the programming that people will listen to, and therefore with more listeners you will bring in more money. It’s a downward spiral to cut staff from the stations that are bringing in marginal surplus or just making it.

It was encouraging to learn that Pacifica appears to have stepped back from this top-down retrenchment oriented approach. According to the SaveKPFA faction, which opposed the closing down of the Morning Show, the national governing board eventually passed a resolution proposed by one of the slate’s board members. It commanded each station to autonomously produce a “thorough and realistic analysis of the station’s projected revenue and expenses,” and submit that to the Pacifica National Office and Pacifica National Board. The most challenging pillar of this task will fall upon WBAI in New York City, which pays exorbitant rent for its studios in the Wall Street area and for its transmitter access, and must move soon to relieve itself and the network of these burdens.

The budget resolution was “an important step forward for local control,” SaveKPFA proclaimed—that is, local control for the five Pacifica stations.

But if “local control” is the ultimate goal here, and if Pacifica isn’t even steadily keeping up with its contributions to Free Speech Radio News and Democracy Now!, what is the point of the Pacifica Foundation? Isn’t it time that we again asked the obvious questions relevant to the present? Is Pacifica radio as it is currently construed more trouble than it is worth? Doesn’t the rapidly expanding multiverse of community, college, unlicensed, and Internet radio venues, soon to be bolstered by a new generation of Low Power FM stations, deserve a better system for program distribution than this Byzantine quagmire?

One way out

In the past, interested parties have suggested Local Management Agreements between Pacifica and the stations as a solution to the problem. But while they’ll give the stations some autonomy, they’ll never resolve conflicts over money. So here is a napkin-notes hypothetical orderly transition towards a new system (or as orderly as possible given the subject matter):

Step one: Some new entity that oversees national programming and distribution for community radio should be established. It would perhaps be overseen by Democracy Now! (attention Pacifica conspiracy-theory lovers: DN isn’t behind this idea; nobody at the firehouse studios was consulted about this essay). Free Speech Radio News and the Pacifica Archives would merge into the foundation, along with relevant staffs and resources.

This is only one possible scenario, of course. There are many other ways that the new entity could be configured. One would hope that Pacifica’s many affiliate stations would enjoy more of a presence in any future scheme.

Step two: Shortly thereafter, the Pacifica Foundation would transfer the Federal Communications Commission licenses of the five Pacifica stations to their respective Local Station Boards, as they concurrently themselves up as non-profits. They would be granted these licenses on one proviso—they must pay the new national programming foundation around eight to twelve percent of their annual income for the next ten years, which is much less than they contribute to Pacifica now.

Some mechanism for making certain that this obligation is fulfilled would have to be set up. This would form the basis for funding national programming. Must carry agreements for national shows would also be attached to the deal.

Step three: Once the stations have become independent, what is left of the Pacifica Foundation’s resources and assets relevant to them would transfer to them (such as the KPFA building)—the rest would transfer to the new foundation. Pacifica radio would cease to exist. Its replacement would have a clearer, simpler purpose, with an agreed upon stream of income for a decade.

This is obviously a rough sketch. I’m sure that factors that I have not foreseen impede this scenario. It might take an organizational miracle to pull off. Some coordination with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be necessary to make it work, along with the FCC, of course. Like any such transition, there are risks involved.

But the current situation cannot continue. It threatens to close the Pacifica network down, and probably sooner rather than later.

I look forward to constructive responses to this post. I’d be surprised if Radio Survivor readers write in to claim that there is still some basis for unity at Pacifica. This is an organization whose factions now spend much of their time trying to squelch each other via censure motions, parliamentary board maneuvers, lawsuits, or recall campaigns. Feel free to insist that Pacifica would be a great network if those awful people that you dislike or oppose would just shut up, stand down, change, or go away. The problem, of course, is that they won’t.  After all, have you?

PS: In case anyone is wondering, I took no position on the recall vote at KPFA on KPFA Local Station Board delegate and Pacifica National Board member Tracy Rosenberg. Predictably, the matter is now bottled up in court, which is the fate of most Pacifica electoral events. I see the whole controversy as a symptom of Pacifica radio’s elections, which, as I argue in this essay, reliably produce highly polarized boards whose principals are far more interested in getting or defending air time for their followers than they are in finding common ground or solving urgent problems. Send me a reasonably thought out petition calling for the end of these races. That’s something I’d like to sign.

As usual, civil responses to this essay are welcome. Gratuitously nasty, insulting, and accusatory comments will find themselves lost in our spam queue, along with posts that contain expletives and lots of hyperlinks.

The post Rough notes: towards the end of Pacifica Radio (and the start of something new) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Perhaps inspired by its new report indicating that almost one in five Americans have listened to Internet radio in their cars, the Edison research group has a new revelation: Twitter is a form of broadcasting. Upon what evidence is this thesis based? The responses to a survey question that the outfit put to a sample cohort: “How often do you hear about Twitter feeds, commonly called tweets, through media such as TV, radio, newspapers, or websites other than Twitter?”

44 percent answered “Almost Every Day.” 13 percent replied “Sometimes.” 16 percent responded “Regularly but Not Daily.” Eight percent said “Rarely.”

From this Edison’s Tom Webster construes the following:

Regardless of how you use Twitter, most Americans (as in an actual majority of Americans ) view Twitter as a purely broadcast network.

As such, Broadcasting is far from dead, and social isn’t killing it. Social is changing it, but in terms of how most Americans consume tweets, Twitter is just another cable network.

If you are measuring anything based upon unstructured data mined from Twitter (particularly influence), you are missing nearly 80% of the potential impact of Twitter by not taking the cross-media and offline impact of Tweets into account.

There is no question that Twitter has become part of radio. I hear hosts mention listener tweets all the time on various commercial and non-commercial talk radio shows. The same happens on TV. But I also hear those hosts mention e-mail questions on their programs. Does that make e-mail a broadcast network, too? How about text messages? How about online forum posts?

The notion that because Americans hear tweets mentioned on radio or cable TV, they experience Twitter as “just another cable network” is an unsupportable leap of logic. First, Twitter is a source of information that broadcast networks use, for sure. But fragmented and almost pointillistic in nature, Twitter is constantly telling you to go away and look at something else: a web post, a picture, a sound, a newspaper article, or a video. Twitter is a fast moving, jittery, cascade of signposts directing you to networks, but it isn’t a network itself.

Think about it. At nine PM at night, after a long day of work, what do you want to do: watch an HBO show like Game of Thrones or Mad Men, or listen to a TV host mention tweets? Would you really want to watch Jon Stewart respond to tweets on a regular basis (besides his college buddy Anthony Weiner’s). Sure, it’s fun to hear a tweet or two mentioned on your favorite radio program, but would you want the show to focus on them for a full half hour?

Second, consumers don’t just “consume” tweets, they produce them, and even crowd source them just like you do. This means that tweets aren’t just material for your radio station, they’re competition for your radio station. You mention somebody’s tweet, and a significant chunk of the Twitter mob will grab their TweetDeck search tool to find out who this person is. Next thing you know, some of your audience is gone.

This Edison research is useful, in that it sheds light on the extent to which Twitter has become part of the lingua franca of broadcasting. But I like to think of broadcast stations as places where you want to stick around and let someone else do the driving for a spell. That’s not Twitter—where we leave the driving to you, and the next thing a station program director knows, you are somewhere else.

The post Is Twitter a radio station? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The National Association of Broadcasters annual show and convention just started in Las Vegas, bringing together nearly every sector of the broadcast industry to show off new products, discuss trends and hob nob. Unfortunately, the Radio Survivor travel budget doesn’t yet cover more than cab fare across town, so we don’t have a correspondent on the ground in Vegas. But, like the Consumer Electronics Show, we’re watching the reports from NAB as they come across the wire, searching for radio-related news.

These days radio tends to be overshadowed by television, video and wireless broadband technology, but it is far from left out altogether. Emmis Communications, Intel and iBiquity were scheduled to show off their new prototype HD Radio-enabled smartphone on Monday, but as of 11 PM EDT I haven’t heard any additional news about the unveiling.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski made his annual address on Monday and his overall message was that the broadcast industry’s fortunes are looking good. In particular he emphasized that the broadcasters who see themselves as being in the content creation business have a great many opportunities to take advantage of internet and mobile platforms alongside broadcast. Genachowski told broadcasters that too many stations are missing out, explaining,

“Many stations don’t have local news and content-creation operations that they can leverage over multiple broadband platforms; and on a percentage basis that’s also particularly true in the larger markets. The economics are the economics.

Genachowski also observed that “radio listening remains robust,” noting that,

“more than 90 percent of Americans listen to the radio weekly. And even with the many new digital sources of audio, radio ad revenue is up 9% since 2009.”

He also did a little shilling for the Obama administration by pointing out how advertising from the auto industry has grown strongly across the broadcast industry. Genachowski asked broadcasters to, “imagine the effect on broadcasters if the administration hadn’t prevented the collapse of the American auto industry.”

Closing out his address Genachowski made a pitch for broadcaster’s public inspection files to move out of the file cabinet and online, something we’ve covered here at Radio Survivor. He took on opponents of online public files by referencing a litany of editorials and other comments in support of the FCC’s proposal. Genachowski quoted a statement from a group of journalism school deans, who said

“Broadcast news organizations depend on, and consistently call for, robust open-record regimes for the institutions they cover; it seems hypocritical for broadcasters to oppose applying the same principle to themselves.”

He also said

“Bloomberg View looked at the burden and jobs arguments that have been made by opponents of online disclosure and concluded that ‘neither is credible.’ The New Republic examined broadcasters’ position and concluded: ‘the arguments they offer are so flimsy they collapse on inspection.'”

That signals pretty clearly that Genachowski’s FCC seems pretty intent on pressing forward with having broadcasters move their public files online, just as he encourages them to make the most of digital platforms in other ways.

Many broadcasters in the audience did not receive Genachowsi’s remarks too warmly, and were especially annoyed that he didn’t take questions. They were particularly miffed to hear that the Commission doesn’t seem to be backing down on online public files.

I guess when you’re FCC Chair, you don’t come to NAB to party and make friends. Some broadcasters will be disappointed that what happens in Vegas doesn’t necessarily stay in Vegas.

The post FCC Chairman tells NAB that “business is better,” but your public files are going online appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Friday the 900 lb. gorilla of commercial radio announced that it is changing its name to Clear Channel Media and Entertainment, striking the word “radio” from its name. Even though the company still owns 850 terrestrial broadcast stations–down from its post-1996 height of 1200–Clear Channel is trying to emphasize its belated focus on the internet, seen most clearly with its recently refreshed iHeartRadio platform.

My most cynical response is that the name change represents nothing new; Clear Channel hasn’t really been in the radio business for more than a decade. Rather, the company was in the broadcast real estate business, buying up stations and repackaging them into clusters in order to reduce staffing and other costs. In the short term it was a wildly successful strategy from a profit standpoint, because it’s a ruthlessly simple formula: radically cut costs while keeping revenues mostly static. However, it wasn’t a sustainable approach because it also resulted in diluting the product–the programming itself–which listeners couldn’t help but notice, as they jumped ship to new competing platforms.

At the same time, I think it is true that the company’s shift in strategy really is a turn away from traditional radio, but at radio’s expense. By comparison, National Public Radio has used its internet platforms to compliment and court new listeners to its programming, on the air and online. While programming ostensibly is the product offered up in iHeartRadio, the overwhelming sameness of it all is rather striking. Sure there are dozens of active rock stations to choose from, but the distance between their sound and playlists can be measured in millimeters.

Now it is true that Clear Channel is actually a significant radio content company with its ownership of Premiere Radio Networks, home to such highly lucrative programs as Rush Limbaugh’s and Sean Hannity’s. And while you can listen to these programs by tuning in live broadcast streams from affiliate stations on iHeartRadio, there’s no way to listen at another time. Furthermore, iHeartRadio doesn’t provide a schedule for these stations so you know when to tune it. Sure, you can subscribe to on demand access to Rush or Hannity on their respective websites, but I argue that’s a scattershot approach. First, it limits the audience to the more dedicated, rather than casual listeners. Second, it takes place outside of iHeartRadio, fracturing the platform’s value as a one-stop shop for Clear Channel radio content.

The even more telling aspect of Clear Channel’s move away from radio as we know it is its Total Traffic Network which delivers real-time traffic reports over its stations’ HD channels. Why is this not a radio service? Because one of its primary purposes is to feed traffic data to navigation devices like Garmins and TomToms, not radios. In effect, this is a step towards making stations more valuable for the spectrum they occupy rather than the programming that they can deliver.

This isn’t to say that I believe Clear Channel is abandoning radio. Rather, it’s clear that Clear Channel is continuing to move away from relying on profiting from individual station revenues towards seeing stations as a nationwide commodity where local programming is more of an obligation than a raison d’être. I don’t see the company reinvesting in programming at local stations so much as using them as resources to create new data services and outlets to push national programming brands as consolidated under the iHeartRadio banner. This can be seen no more clearly than in the massive layoffs of on-air talent that Clear Channel imposed last October.

The change from Clear Channel Radio to Clear Channel Media and Entertainment is consolidation 2.0. For the sake of true local service and innovative programming, we could only wish that Clear Channel were actually leaving radio.

The post They can take the radio out of Clear Channel (but that won’t take Clear Channel out of radio) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

We, your humble Radio Survivors, are unabashed fans of broadcast radio. That much should be clear to anyone who peruses our site. But we hope that readers also see that we don’t limit ourselves to the AM, FM and shortwave dials.

It’s vitally important to recognize that every time a new audio distribution technology comes along, the word “radio” comes along for the ride. When the first live audio streams went online in the mid-90s, did everyone call this “streaming internet audio?” No, they called it “internet radio.”

In the early 2000s when Sirius and XM first lit up their satellites hovering above the earth did they call it “satellite audio?” That’s right, they called it “satellite radio.”

Sure, “podcasting” doesn’t have the word radio in it. But the one-time neologism was built upon the conflation of “iPod” and “broadcast.” The latter word is certainly very related to radio, which was the first form of electronic broadcasting.

What this all means is that we see radio as a thriving, evolving and growing set of media united by the common application of distributing–or, broadcasting–audio programming to masses of people. Radio is the transmission of audio entertainment, information and art across a variety of media and formats.

Reading this one might wonder, “well, then, doesn’t that make records, CDs, audiobooks and album downloads some kind of radio, too?” My answer is that they’re close to radio, but don’t qualify as radio.

While services like Spotify and Rdio have blurred that line between listening to an album and listening to radio, radio is still a different experience. Music radio, in particular, is about delivering a curated experience that is more spontaneous, less processed, and more ephemeral than an album, which is comparatively crafted and composed. Sure, progressive rock radio often featured album sides, but the more frequent programming were carefully chosen DJ sets. Music radio is about the mix. And even though Pandora and last.fm deliver a mix programmed by an algorithm, the listening experience is more like that progressive rock station than a CD.

It’s not for nothing that Spotify calls its automated music streams “artist radio,” and Rdio is a semi-contraction of “radio” that needs to buy a vowel.

A point that’s hard to avoid is that these forms of radio all hearken back to the modes of presentation first pioneered in broadcast. The DJ, talk show and music set all originated with broadcast. Internet and satellite radio unambiguously crib these forms with the only big difference from broadcast being their method of transmission.

Podcasting is a particularly curious case, because in my opinion its invention reignited interest in radio forms by making it so much easier to distribute programs. Podcasting also gave listeners a kind of radio TiVo by relieving them of having to tune in to a station or stream at a particular time. The clever innovation of the automated download freed radio from the tethers of the cable and the electromagnetic wave, be it FM, AM, wi-fi or cell.

In fact, the rise of podcasting breathed life into forms of radio programming that had barely been heard from since the 70s, like radio drama and long-form comedy. Turns out that the international reach of podcasting means a particularly esoteric show can find hundreds or thousands of listeners, even if there may barely be a dozen potential fans in the broadcast radius of a single station.

This is just my long-winded way of saying that here at Radio Survivor we take all forms of broadcasted and transmitted audio programming. We think that makes our website unique. There are plenty of sites that do a good job of covering the broadcast industry, a particular radio personality or music and radio. But we haven’t found any that consistently look at the whole wide world of internet, satellite and broadcast radio. To us, it’s all RADIO.

This also means we intend to keep expanding our coverage, writing more about new online services, ways to improve the listening experience, new radio technologies, along with our continuing coverage of broadcast. In particular I hope to see us write more about podcasts and podcasting, since we’re seeing more artists, personalities and producers make the decision to completely bypass the broadcast and satellite gatekeepers, self-producing and distributing podcasts directly to audiences.

Back in August we made a call for writers and contributors, and we’re still looking. If you’ve considered writing about podcasting, satellite radio, internet radio or other radio forms–not just broadcast–then drop us a line.

The post Podcasting, satellite, internet and broadcast: it’s all RADIO to us appeared first on Radio Survivor.

“Terror did not attack us on September 11th, terrorists did,” she wrote to NPR.

Terror does not have hands with which to use box cutters. Terrorists do. Terror is a feeling. Terrorists are human beings who make choices to kill innocent people. The phrase “terror attacks” takes the responsibility off the men who committed premeditated murder and puts it on a feeling. Please, use the phrase “terrorist attacks” to describe what happened that day.

NPR’s Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos thinks this is a valid criticism. “Do you think the phrase ‘terror attack’ diffuses personal responsibility into a generalized feeling?” he asks. “Are we sliding into a form of political correctness, or language that is so neutral that it smacks of the inability to look a terrorist in the eye and call her what she is?”

With all due respect to NPR, one comes away from this exchange sensing an inclination to replace big difficult questions with little manageable ones. That’s understandable. The problem with anniversary journalism is that there isn’t any meaningful reason for revisiting the moment in question, save that we’ve decided that birthdays have meaning.

But since the media event is upon us, I thought I’d tackle two big questions for a spell. What did September 11, 2001 mean for the United States of America, and what does it mean for radio?

Paralysis

There’s no question in my mind that the vicious Al Qaeda criminals who killed thousands of innocent people on September 11, 2001 (including a member of my family) helped push  this country into a long period of paralysis and decline. The United States responded to the attacks with two wars. The Afghanistan war made superficial sense at the time. The Iraq war made no sense. Both failed.

Worse than failing, they subsumed our nation into a unilateral “war on terror” that never really identified its target. Instead, it distracted us from the precarious health of the United States itself, verging on economic collapse after years of massive and unmonitored corruption in its financial sector. When that corruption took its devastating toll in 2008, the country briefly rallied around a new president, then sank into a morass of ideological posturing and paranoia.

Consolidation and change

Within this ten year context, the media landscape dramatically changed. By 2001 the Clear Channel consolidation was in full swing—the network gobbling up about nine percent of the nation’s radio stations, and far more of its aggregate advertising revenue. Conventional local deejays disappeared, replaced by digitized national ones, skilled in the art of sounding like they lived next door.

Meanwhile, the Pandora Music Genome project had just begun to take off in 2001. It was followed by a variety of online radio experiments that allowed users an unprecedented degree of individual choice in online music listening and production.

The consequence was a marvelous period of online creativity: podcasts, Live365-casts, and radio aggregation applications galore. But the locally based radio station that struggled to bring everyone into a real time dialogue about the nation’s future became lost in the upheaval—its project seen as almost irrelevant. Attacks on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting further threatened its prospects, especially in rural areas.

It would be naive to imagine that open public dialogue is the only solution to our national dilemma, but it is part of the solution. Today, I experience as a precious national commodity every public, college, community, and commercial radio program that attempts to bring different people together into a civil real-time discussion.

Authentic radio is live. It is local. It is about the real time sharing of music, talk, and ideas. Although I write with admiration and excitement about the latest technological developments in online radio and audio, they will mean little for us as a people if they only encourage users to listen to or produce music and talk in fragmented cubicles or tribes, cut off from others or other groups by digital space and time.

We have had enough of that in this country. We need more real radio. We need public and market based strategies that bring real radio to our ears. This is my hope on the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001.

The post September 11 and the radio revolution appeared first on Radio Survivor.

You’ve seen the bumper stickers, and today at least it’s true for Family Radio. Their website has been unreachable all day, likely due to being overloaded with traffic. So that’s also made it difficult to get their online radio stream. So I tuned in to Family Radio’s shortwave station WYFR this afternoon (at 13615 Khz) and it certainly sounds like the station is on auto-pilot.

Beginning at about 3:15 PM CDT the station aired a half-hour long Frequently Asked Questions list about the rapture, including explanations for why the world didn’t end in 1994 as Harold Camping first predicted (answer: he had incomplete information, as indicated by a question mark in the title of his book Are You Ready?). At 4 PM CDT a pre-recorded edition of Camping’s Open Forum call-in show went on the air. The first caller was challenging Camping’s May 21 rapture prediction, making Camping’s subsequent defense all the more hollow.

Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised Family Radio is automated today. As Jennifer reported earlier this week, the station’s programming is “generally produced several weeks in advance.” Furthermore, the station gave the staff yesterday off as a holiday. Although the Open Forum program is typically aired live, we also shouldn’t be surprised that today’s edition is a rerun, since Camping told Jennifer that today “he’d probably be watching TV and listening to the radio to hear about what was happening around the world.”

6 PM local time is when the rapture was supposed to happen today. As I write this 6 PM has occurred in most of the world outside of the Americas and there’s no report of rapture (although some have jokingly connected a Icelandic volcanic eruption that happened this afternoon). Nevertheless, I will tune in to WYFR at 6 PM local time for the Florida-based station just to see if there is any indication that the big CEO has taken control.

The post In case of Rapture, Family Radio will be unmanned appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Editor’s Note: Radioactive Gavin has collected more than 300 articles on radio and digital music over the past 3 months for Common Frequency. This is the second in a series of seven posts he is contributing, looking back at the end of a rough year in radio.

When Stephen Colbert gave a ‘medal of fear’ to a seven-year old girl at Jon Stewart’s Rally for Sanity, many of us laughed hard at NPR’s expense. And it felt good. If you missed the clip, fast forward to the 49:00 mark.

“Oh no, not NPR,” Colbert jokes. “If their employees attend Jon’s rally, someone might think that NPR is liberal! No one could tell from the free pledge drive hemp-fiber tote bags they use to carry their organic kale roll-ups to their compost parties.”

Of course NPR is a source of timely news reporting on stories like private prison industry connections to Arizona’s SB 1070, and sneaky Senate maneuvering that prevented a potentially 95-5 or 98-2 vote for years.

But recently Ira Glass complained publicly that his colleagues sound like “talking robots.” To make matters worse, liberal satirist Harry Shearer points out these days “the initials stand for nothing.” Even the stuffy Financial Times calls NPR “smug and boring.” Ouch.

Restricting staff attendance to a comedic performance staged at the Washington Monument led to hilarious mockery of NPR and other press outlets. But beyond the related discussion about NPR’s coverage of hate groups, and the snore-inducing arguments about ethics codes, why is the press so scared of what the haters might say?

NPR went right ahead and gave critics all the ammunition they could eat, by firing Juan Williams before the rally even happened.

Before I can get to the most interesting parts of the NPR identity crisis, we should revisit the chain of events surrounding civil rights historian and former journalist Juan Williams.

The plot of NPR vs. Fox News, starring the honest black man and the mean white lady, was never very original. Hindsight being 20/20, it seems public debate was degraded yet again during October by conservative demonology and fake freedom of speech hypocrisy.

First Juan Williams, who is a black news analyst for NPR, makes racist statements to suck up to his other employer Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. Then the civil rights historian and former journalist gets a phone call from NPR informing him he’s been fired. Immediately Newt Gingrich and other conservatives demand an end to public funds for NPR. In the midst of pledge drive season, stations receive calls from “viewers” who promise to stop “watching.”

Next NPR’s CEO Vivian Schiller pours gasoline on the fire by ticking off the National Alliance for Mental Illness. Facing the cameras, she jokes Williams should have kept his feelings to himself “his psychiatrist or his publicist, take your pick.” Schiller subsequently apologizes for the way the termination was handled. And now NPR’s Board hires a law firm working the NBC-Comcast merger to lead a review of the dismissal.

The elephants eat up the opportunity to deliver a heaping pile of dung across the broadcast spectrum and the cable TV landscape. Luckily, a few in the press keep their senses despite the stink.

Civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald points out that NPR’s firing of Juan Williams “threatened to delegitimize” all “fear-sustaining, anti-Muslim slander.” With so much of the emphasis of Endless War built up around a foundation of hate and racism, he concludes “there are too many interests served by anti-Muslim fear-mongering to allow that to change.”

Adam Serwer writes in Williams’ old paper the The Washington Post, “It’s clear from the context that Williams wasn’t merely confessing his own personal fears, he was reassuring O’Reilly that he was right to see all Muslims as potential terrorists.”

Indeed the subject had come up on October 18th in the first place because a week earlier Bill O’Reilly’s remarks on The View caused Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg to walk off the set in the middle of his interview.

But hey, at this point you’ve gotta feel sorry for Juan Williams. Sure, first he signed a new $2M contract with Fox News, and now he’s got a book deal. But his new book will “focus on free speech and the growing difficulty in America of speaking out on sensitive topics.” Wouldn’t you hate to try and explain how difficult speaking out can be while banking millions as a commentator?

Plus, the poor guy must have some conflicting voices inside his head, considering his earlier writings on the psychology of hate. “Common sense becomes racism when skin color becomes a formula for figuring out who is a danger to me,” wrote Williams in The New Republic back in 1986.

While reading back over so much controversy about NPR throughout the past few months, a key perspective emerged as more interesting than the rest of the pack. Regardless of NPR’s grounds for firing Williams, there is little hope of satisfying The National Review. Their claims about NPR’s left wing leadership hinge on judgements about “abortion-rights groups and environmental activism in particular.”

But what about other journalists of color who have worked within the NPR system?

During four years of work for NPR, Kiss the Sky author Farai Chideya saw no evidence of particularly liberal leadership, insisting instead the network is “run by a Beltway cohort.”

Although her African-American issues program was canceled and she no longer works there, Chideya blogged on Huffington Post recently that “this country needs NPR, now more than ever.”

She says they fired Williams for acting as hype man for Bill O’Reilly, the same thing he has been doing for years.

Do I think NPR fired him because he is black? No. Do I think NPR kept Williams on for years, as the relationship degraded, because he is a black man? Absolutely. Williams’ presence on air was a fig-leaf for much broader and deeper diversity problems at the network. NPR needs to hire more black men in house on staff as part of adding diverse staff across many ethnicities and races.

It also needs, broadly, a diversity upgrade that doesn’t just focus on numbers, but on protocols for internal communication. Among the revelations in this incident is that the Vice President of News fired Williams by phone without giving him the opportunity to come into the office and discuss it.

In 2009, minorities represented less than 9% of the radio work force despite making up at least 34% of the population. In 2008, the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC) calculated that minority news employment was statistically almost zero at English language, non-minority owned radio stations.

MMTC co-founder David Honig credits the collapse of minority employment in radio journalism to “word of mouth recruitment from a homogenous workforce.”

Considering the FCC’s own report on the need for diverse broadcast ownership — that the “welfare of the public” requires “the widest dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources” possible — Honig wants stronger equal employment opportunity enforcement.

So would Republican presidential hopefuls agree with him, that a more diverse NPR would be a better use of public funds? Do the elephants care about the quality of news that’s accessible in the peanut gallery?

Or are they grandstanding and whipping up ill-informed Americans into a frenzy in the name of Muslim-bashing? Despite a desperate need to change course in the Middle East,  this fall the GOP laughed all the way into office as NPR war reporters joined up with the rest of the subservient national press to please the Pentagon with their favorable coverage.

Listen critically to NPR’s reporting of US foreign policy and you will hear selective storytelling shining favorable light on CIA activities, and so-called experts providing dodgy history lessons on Afghanistan. While popular anchors parrot unsubstantiated claims about Iraq, and others kiss up to conservative politicians, commentators smirk their way through reactionary antagonism of whistle-blowers.

To me, it is no wonder that the anti-Iraq War invasion contingent of NPR’s audience seems so totally placated, four elections later.

It’s debatable whether those at the top of the right-wing echo chamber are in fact willfully misleading their audiences when it comes to funding radio with tax dollars. Either that or they’re afraid of what they don’t understand as usual.

Public radio station revenue is mostly made up of individual and business contributors, with less than 6% coming from direct federal, state and local government funding combined.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) funds barely 10% of all public radio budgets. NPR itself is funded mostly by member station programming fees and corporate sponsorships, and receives no government funding for operation costs.

Reality may be liberal, as the saying goes, but it’s plausible that at least one hundred million Americans are not. They don’t need Newts or Mama Grizzlies to tell them not to support NPR. Many of them dislike public radio because it sounds like liberal propaganda for an elite educated audience. Public radio executives rarely admit the need to think outside the core, but I’d say plenty of critics are accurate in their assessment.

Not long ago, my Radio Survivor colleague Matthew Lasar pointed out the disgust he felt when he heard Terry Gross and guest Will Ferrell laugh about the poor slobs who buy clothes at Marshall’s and get their hair done at Supercuts. Stay classy, Gross Air.

Feminist Music Geek Alyx Vesey blogged in August that Gross leans heavily on assumption and often attempts to “box interviewees’ responses into preconceived trajectories.” However Vesey and her fellow watchdogs were much more concerned with “sensitive white male condescension” from Bob Boilen of All Songs Considered. “Particularly in his dealings with women and the output of female artists,” she added.

Well, in November Bakari Kitwana wondered aloud on Huffington Post if Terry Gross should go the way of Juan Williams, considering her interview with Jay-Z about his new book Decoded. You decide, couldn’t what Kitwana heard be described as “sensitive white female condescension?”

“To be sure Juan Williams revealed his bias by openly, expressing his personal opinion. Terry Gross didn’t do that. Instead the bias is more subtle and insidious and lurks in the line of questioning,” Kitwana wrote. “And Terry Gross never goes off message.”

In a nearly hour long interview with a self-made record executive mogul and entrepreneur worth at least half a billion, on the occasion of the publication of a book he deems a coming of age story for his generation, the most pressing questions on the table range from insight into drug dealing to why rappers grab their crotches?

Given how pervasive the narrative Jay-Z calls “history re-running its favorite loop” has become, Kitwana says it will take much more than firing journalists like Gross and Williams to purge it from our culture in America.

As the Executive Director of Mississippi Public Broadcasting Judy Lewis learned in September, you don’t mess with Gross Air.  The beloved daily talk show was reinstated on that affiliate’s schedule after Lewis pulled the plug, following listener complaints over sex talk on the program. Then Lewis was canned instead. (Technically, she resigned.)

Make no mistake, it is very clear that many in my parents’ generation love Terry Gross and the other veteran voice talents. About 1 in 10 Americans tune in at some point every week. Even with the US economy teetering on the brink of collapse and the rest of the radio biz in a tailspin, NPR is experiencing boom times. As Radio Survivor noted one year ago, despite it all, NPR keeps growing.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben’s favorite public radio personality is the wittiest of them all, Ira Glass. McKibben makes Glass the centerpiece of his recent feature for the New York Review of Books, admiring his “commitment to covering the 330 degrees of life that didn’t show up on the newscasts. It’s about life the way most of us experience it, where heartbreak or lunch is as important as stock prices or distant revolutions.”

Back in August, Ira Glass drew knowing applause from a sold-out crowd at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall with the admission he listens to NPR stories thinking, “I would be a better person if I can get through this story.”

“The world they describe is much smaller than the real world,” he continued. They sound like “talking robots. The aesthetics of the language is so stiff.”

The goal for the creator and host of This American Life, is to “add fun, joyfulness and surprise” to stories. According to reports, he noted onstage that this “never happens in broadcast journalism,” which is “a failure of craft.”

Calling to mind Patton Oswalt’s over-the-top bit about NPR is author James Wolcott’s recent piece for Vanity Fair, called The Sound of Sanity.

Today NPR is just about the last outfit that hasn’t retrenched and retreated from Marshall McLuhan’s global village but instead has extended its feelers to tap even the faintest faraway dot on the map with a moving story to tell, navigating near-impossible terrain if necessary.

This can lead to borderline self-parody, too many dispatches from remote villages about the dying native craft of flute-making narrated by a correspondent who sounds as if s/he majored in empathy at Deepak Chopra Junior College, a mourning dove with a microphone.

But the beauty of radio is that the ambience of other countries, other cultures, fills the sonic background with no camera eye imposing a single dominant message-image (a close-up of scorched belongings to signify the ravages of war), and no reporter standing in the foreground, colonizing the frame with a face full of concern.

The Financial Times applauds NPR for being “the closest America comes to the BBC.” However, “it is also a bit smug and boring.”

74% of Spot.Us users surveyed in September think public media is higher quality than their commercial counterparts.

So, we get it, masses of college graduates love NPR, even if it is more Wonder Bread than organic kale roll-ups.

Meanwhile, grassroots activists shoot off their mouths about lapdog coverage, journalists of color wonder when their fair share of the workforce will come, while corporate-backed Republicans attack NPR for serving up smooth sounds of sanity, safe for the three-car garages of liberal elites.

For the future of public radio, quite possibly the most important critique of the NPR brand is inaccessibility. Fans of small “d” democracy, libertarians and much of the community radio movement feel the bigger the member station, the more editorially closed off from real people.

Plenty of listeners dedicated to the low end of the FM dial are concerned so-called corporate “persons” have too much influence on the big pubcasters.

For example, one blogger writes, “KBYU should not use the public airwaves to solicit donations from listeners until it first makes complete and regular disclosures of its finances.”

The editor of a free daily email series called LUV News, Jack Balkwill, was quoted on the excellent Keep Public Radio Public website in November, writing:

Corporate sponsors include the taxpayer-bailed-out General Motors, Citibank, and Bank of America. Others include Citgo Oil, Mastercard, Visa, BP Oil, Dow Chemical, and Fox Broadcasting.

Throughout the day, NPR’s programs: Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, The Diane Rehm Show and others invite guests from the corporate funded think tanks to opine. These people are clearly paid to sell out the American public. Transnational corporations get sycophancy in return for their investments to the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, Cato Institute and so forth, and what they expect is obedience to their philosophy of lower corporate taxes and higher corporate welfare, at any cost to the public interest.

When legendary Simpsons voice actor Harry Shearer, host of Le Show on KCRW, found out NPR wouldn’t cover his new feature-length documentary on either of the network’s two flagship news programs, he set out to buy underwriting announcements instead. But NPR’s legal department ruled he couldn’t use the words “documentary about why New Orleans flooded” in his spots, so he fumed on Huffington Post that at NPR the initials stand for nothing.

If NPR doesn’t stand for National Public Radio anymore, what does it stand for?

In an Op-Ed during the Williams fiasco, former NPR foreign editor and current KPCC Pasadena news director Paul Glickman offers this simple answer: “NPR is the premier broadcast news organization in America.” And he’s right.

Well over 30 million Americans tune into their local NPR member stations every week, and the plan is to grow audience numbers to 50 million people over the coming decade.

NPR’s own research shows millions more Americans would, too, if public radio becomes more lively and less serious. Researchers found the perception of inaccessibility to be the greatest barrier to entry.

“Inherently, news and information is NPR’s sweet spot, and understanding how that was unfolding in the world of news and information was the primary goal of this study,” vice president of programming Margaret Low Smith told Current in September.

News consumers from various demographic groups feel excluded. Confirming comments from Ira Glass, the summary proposes a more conversational tone in news delivery. “There is an appetite for… people sounding more like real people.” Sorry Host Whisperer, but your days may be numbered.

Of course a mix of digital strategies could help increase public access. No doubt streams and podcasts will continue driving listenership. In July, NPR’s Facebook page surpassed one million fans. In September they launched a handsome Tumblr blog, stripped-down and appealing to visual learners like me.

They’re also finding that Twitter data lets NPR glimpse a “future of app-loving news junkies.” Facebook and Twitter combined now account for 7-8 percent of traffic to NPR.org, an amount that has doubled in the last year, according to Nieman Journalism Lab.

That’s just the beginning. Digital initiatives include PBCore, the new internal API for NPR news gatherers, iPad optimization, projects with silly acronyms like PMP and AAPP, even a new team of comment police for NPR’s web platforms.

The Argo Network, which aims to cover 12 distinct topics in 12 hyper-local newsrooms is a cool idea. Plus, how does adding reporters to all 50 statehouse beats sound? Open Society Foundations put up the seed money for that project, called Impact of Government.

One of the biggest dreams is significant investment in more than 300 new positions for reporters and editors in top markets. Despite a budget calling for unnecessarily bloated salaries, when I consider the news crisis we’re facing nationwide, I say bring ’em on.

“This is public media’s moment,” Libby Reinish of Free Press wrote in October. “We must rebuild the charred remnants left behind by commercial media’s slash-and-burn tactics, and we need all hands on deck in order to raise a new foundation for American journalism in its place.”

Keep in mind, her article on NewPublicMedia.org was about the Prometheus Radio Project’s barnraising with community radio station WGXC in upstate New York. But “Building a Radio Station, Building a Movement” was also a reminder about the blueprint (.pdf) Free Press has envisioned.

Bringing together all our public interest journalism resources — including community radio and NPR, cable access and PBS, nonprofit startups and independent bloggers — means thinking critically about the “premier broadcast news organization” in America. Keeping track of what the public’s biggest news network is up to can help all of us move forward from this identity crisis.

I agree with Farai Chideya that Americans need a more robust, more diverse NPR. What do you think?

The post Radio’s Fall – Part Two: NPR’s ‘Liberal’ Identity Crisis appeared first on Radio Survivor.

As Matthew puts it, “We’re the voice of listeners, participants and consumers, rather than the ‘voice of the industry.'” There are hundreds, if not thousands of sites with this kind of perspective on television, movies and music. We believe strongly that radio deserves at least one.

Every so often we will ask for your support in helping to keep Radio Survivor updated with high quality commentary, news and ideas about radio. Right now our plans include a visual redesign, an increase in the number of posts and an expansion in the range of voices you read here.

Luckily, it’s very easy for you to support Radio Survivor at no addition cost to you. If you ever use Amazon to buy anything you can help us earn a little bit from our affiliation. Just come to Radio Survivor first and enter through one of our Amazon links. Then Radio Survivor will receive a small commission for every item you buy, and it will cost you nothing more.

Of course we’re always happy if you just want to give us a little donation to out tip jar in order keep things running. The money we take in goes right back into hosting the site and investing to make it better. Nobody is drawing a salary here, we do this for the love of radio.

Thanks again for stopping here at our little corner in the internets.

The post Please lend Radio Survivor a hand appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The Federal Communications Commission has put the finishing touches on its rules for “white space” broadband devices—that is, gadgets that can send and receive high speed Internet across unused TV channels. Rolling out the service will be very tricky, since it involves portable gizmos that link to mobile or fixed machines that link to a database that tells them which channels are currently unused, therefore available for streaming (the relax-it’s-going-to-be-easy-version is explained on the youtube.com video on your right).

Anyway, assuming this project goes as scheduled (I’m guessing first devices in stores in a year or two), one would hope that folks will be able to start streaming radio stations using these machines.

Here’s what I’m hoping—that white space technology will make the economics of streaming radio cheaper. Right now bandwidth costs are clearly holding PC and mobile radio back.

As WFMU’s Ken Freedman puts it, “The way the Internet is built right now, there’s a catch 22, which is that the more people who use it [online streaming radio], the less well it works . . . The costs of operating an FM transmitter are minute compared to everything we spend for streaming, and we buy bandwidth in bulk.”

But that, I presume, is because Internet streaming radio stations buy their bandwidth from Internet Service Providers, rather than essentially becoming their own ISPs via these white space transmitters. Unlicensed bandwidth devices will allow neighborhoods to create community mesh networks that transmit and receive data through the unused TV bands. These mesh systems could obviously stream radio.

I’m not sure whether this technology will lend itself to big Internet streaming operations at this point. But it could facilitate smaller ones. It all depends on how fast the technology rolls out, and how quickly consumers adopt it.

Anyone out there with big radio-related plans for this stuff? Drop us a line!

The post Could white space devices boost streaming community radio? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

John Bergmayer of Public Knowledge has a great interview with Ken Freedman, station manager of WFMU-FM in Jersey City, New Jersey. WFMU is a trailblazing radio station which was in the forefront of both the free form and dot.com eras. The dialogue is a terrific read, because it encapsulates all the dilemmas facing Internet radio right now.

“The way the Internet is built right now, there’s a catch 22, which is that the more people who use it [online streaming radio], the less well it works,” Freedman says. “And that’s just not the case with FM, or broadcast television, or cable. But, the Internet doesn’t have to be like that, but I don’t see much realistic hope for changing that.”

The economics on broadband streaming are “just terrible,” Freedman adds, “which is very frustrating to me because that’s where all the market is going. And at this point now, my radio station WFMU has twice as many people listening online as we do over FM, whereas it was only two years ago that we had finally crossed that barrier, where we had more people listening on the Internet than we had listening over FM. Now, two years later it’s twice as many.”

Bergmayer asks Freedman about WFMU’s online costs versus FM broadcasting.

“Oh, there’s no comparison,” Freedman explains. “It’s so much more expensive to pay for bandwidth than, you know… The costs of operating an FM transmitter are minute compared to everything we spend for streaming, and we buy bandwidth in bulk. Now, we just buy huge, huge contracts of bandwidth. So, we’re only paying, I don’t know, we’re paying $5 or $10 a meg of throughput because we buy so much of it.”

And the interview continues:

John: Well then, since we’re talking about broadcast versus FM, I do have a few questions on what you think the future of broadcasting is in the Internet environment. I mean, I know a lot of tech geeks. A lot of my friends just essentially see broadcasting as a totally obsolete technology. And in fact, the other day I sort of slagged off FM as being a sort of outdated technology in one of my blog posts, and got heat from some of my friends who work in community radio and similar projects. So, I was wondering if you just had any general thoughts. I mean, do people still want to listen to broadcast?

Ken: Old people do. Young people don’t. I think it is an obsolete technology, but it’s hard to make predictions as to what’s going to happen since the future of media, nobody’s ever been able to really accurately predict it. When television came out, everybody predicted the end of radio and that didn’t happen. Radio just kind of reinvented itself. And when FM took off, people predicted the end of AM, and AM ended up reinventing itself as a talk format.

So, it’s hard to predict, but I do see FM and AM and the radio model in general as being incredibly archaic and out of date now. It’s hard to imagine how it’s going to reinvent itself. The experience that I can get listening to a radio station on an iPhone or an Android with all the interactive features, it’s not just a return to transistor radio. It’s way beyond that.

Read the rest of the discussion here.

I should add that I too gave Bergmayer a little grief for his comments on FM in one of my Ars Technica posts, but I agree that there’s just no comparison between FM and the range of interactive options I get on my Droid X. And that’s why the technological moment we are in is so simultaneously wonderful and frustrating.

Any comments from Radio Survivor readers about how we get out of this bind and onto the next phase? Is there some sustainable way to merge the affordability of FM with the versatility of broadband? Has that already been done?

The post WFMU on the “catch 22” of Internet streaming appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Continuing its series of workshops–which are more informal than hearings–on a variety of important topics, the FCC will hold one on the topic of “Public and Other Noncommercial Media in the Digital Era.” This workshop is part of the Commission’s project on the Future of Media and the Information Needs of Communities. This day-long workshop is happening next Friday, April 30, and will be streamed live online. You can also read a PDF announcement and agenda.

The frame of the workshop is the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which created public radio and television as we know it today in the US. This is the topic of the first presentation ” A 1967 Moment… A Vision for Public Media.” Of course, noncommercial and public service broadcast media existed in the US prior to 1967, from the very beginning of broadcast. Nevertheless, the Act marks a significant moment when the value of public service broadcasting was acknowledged and solidified.

Radio is represented throughout the workshop’s panels. I’m glad to see that there are representatives from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters and Prometheus Radio Project, alongside representation from more mainstream public radio organizations like NPR. Unfortunately I see no representation for college radio, which we Radio Survivors certainly argue stands as a unique service distinct from community and public radio, even if many public stations are owned and operated by higher education institutions.

I think this oversight is notable because college radio continues to be the place where many of tomorrow’s public broadcasters get their start, while simultaneously providing valuable cultural and informational service to communities. At the same time college stations face unique challenges brought on by budget pressures at their home institutions and the desirability of their precious spectrum space that other would-be broadcasters covet. It would certainly be great to see the FCC invite someone who can speak on behalf of college broadcasters.

I will be tuning in to the webcast Friday and will certainly have some thoughts to report here.

The post FCC Workshop To Explore Noncommercial Media in the Digital Era appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Yesterday Edison Research and Arbitron (ARB) released the latest findings from their ongoing series of studies about the convergence of radio and technology. The Infinite Dial 2010: Digital Platforms and the Future of Radio is based on a February, 2010 telephone survey of more than 1700 people in the United States and serves as a point of comparison to studies that Edison Research and Arbitron have been conducting since 1998.

Although radio is still very popular, with 92% of respondents saying that they listen to AM/FM radio; people are less likely to say that they are profoundly impacted by it or use it as a way to discover new music. Only 22% of those surveyed say that AM/FM radio has a “big impact” on their lives. People are much more likely to report that their cell phones (64%), broadband Internet (49%) and even satellite radio (27%) are having a big impact on their lives.

One of the most interesting (and sad) findings to me was that radio is becoming less and less of a tool for music discovery. When asked, “Among internet, television, radio and newspapers, which do you turn to first to learn about new music?”, 39% of respondents said “radio” and 31% said “Internet.” Although more people said radio, this is a huge decline from 2002, when 63% of respondents said that they turned to radio first to learn about new music. Most strikingly, among 12 to 24-year-olds, the Internet (52%) has surpassed radio (32%)  as a the first place to turn when seeking out new music.

Other interesting findings include:

-84% use/own a cell phone

-52% of those surveyed have listened to online radio

-44% of those surveyed own an iPod/digital music player

-12% use/own satellite radio

-31% said they were aware of HD radio and 3% use/own HD radio

-The use of an iPod/MP3 player has the most impact on radio listening for 12 to 34-year-olds, with 23 to 27% reporting that they spend less time listening to terrestrial radio due to the use of a digital music player

On the positive side of this, though, among young people ages 12-24, 40% said they would listen to AM/FM radio “a lot more” or “somewhat more” if they were able to access it through a cell phone radio tuner. Additionally, 51% of all respondents said they would be very disappointed if their favorite AM or FM station was no longer on the air, with 78% of respondents saying they would listen to as much AM/FM radio in the future as they currently do “despite increasing advancements in technology.”

So, although technology is nipping at terrestrial radio’s heels; there’s still room for radio to remain relevant for young people if it continues to reinvent itself and expands its reach to mobile platforms. To get more details on this study, see the full report (PDF) on the Edison website.

The post Radio Still Relevant, Although not Necessarily for Music Discovery according to Infinite Dial Study appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Bertolt Brecht (source: wikipedia commons)

I am rereading portions of German composer Bertold Brecht’s famous 1932 essay “The radio as an apparatus of communications,” and I am confused. Is he really talking about radio?

The medium, Brecht wrote, “is one-sided when it should be two- . . . ”

“It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is a guy who is talking about the Internet, not radio. Or at least that’s what he seems to want. Given how distant the reality of the ‘Net was to 1932, however, he probably meant something along the lines of community radio. Brecht thought little of schools and other institutions where people go to receive an “education” that “leads nowhere and has come from nothing.” He loved the interactivity of the theater—his career at its height with the Weimar era release of his and Kurt Weill’s masterpieces: Three Penny Opera and Mahagonny.

In any event, who or what was going to facilitate this two-way radio reality? The state, Brecht suggested, or at least a future one.

“Only the State can organize this,” Brecht continued. “Its proper application, however, makes it so ‘revolutionary’ that the present-day State has no interest in sponsoring such exercises.”

And the next state (Hitler’s), sure didn’t either, as this subsequent poem suggests:

Radio Poem

You little box, held to me escaping
So that your valves should not break
Carried from house to house to ship from sail to train,
So that my enemies might go on talking to me,
Near my bed, to my pain
The last thing at night, the first thing in the morning,
Of their victories and of my cares,
Promise me not to go silent all of a sudden.

Ah, what would Brecht have thought of Facebook? We’ll never know.

The post Did Brecht want radio or the Internet? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Next Tuesday the Federal Communications Commission will reveal the entirety of its National Broadband Plan, over a year in the making. Required by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which authorized $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus spending, The Plan will weigh in on about a thousand broadband related subjects—how to help more people get it, how to help industries provide it, ways to encourage innovations that the FCC hopes will stimulate more broadband adoption, like IP video.

The chances are, though, that it won’t have much to say about radio

Oh yes, it will talk about “radio” spectrum a whole lot—in the sense of licenses from 500 KHz to 2.5 GHz that licensees use to transmit video, voice, text, audio, and whatever. But unlike every other broadband related medium, from social networking through web video, almost no one has anything to say on a policy level about radio delivered over high speed Internet, either through desktops, laptops, netbooks, or smartphones.

Indirectly, however, the National Broadband Plan will no doubt have an impact on both Internet and broadcast radio. Here are my speculations as to why and how. But nota bene, this is strictly thinking out loud stuff; as the saying goes, ‘I’m just talking.’

The plan will get more low income people online, where they will listen to Internet radio more often

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s latest statistics indicate that about 35 percent of all households have no broadband access at home, and over 30 percent of Americans don’t use the Internet at all. Other surveys suggest that it’s a little more complicated than this, in that lots of low income folks cobble together broadband use via the computers of neighbors and libraries. And a Pew Internet and American Life report notes that lots of minorities get their Internet from their mobile phones.

While the National Broadband Plan isn’t going to suggest a South Korea or Australian massive subsidy solution to the digital divide, it will urge Congress to require all Universal Service Fund phone service providers to offer broadband within a given time frame, it will recommend that the USF’s Lifeline program subsidize low income broadband use, it will recommend that Congress support some kind of free or low cost wireless service, and it will offer a myriad of other ways to boost Internet adoption from the bottom up.

This is going to bring more people into cyberspace on a regular basis, especially low income people who currently make up a huge constituency for broadcast radio (and much of its advertising base). They’ll change the nature of the Internet radio, which currently plays to a more middle class audience.

The plan will boost mobile radio

A big focus of the National Broadband Plan will be about getting more spectrum to the wireless industry, which is facing a huge crunch as smartphone adoption and use goes through the roof. FCC Chair Julius Genachowski has already pledged to get about 500 MHz of license spectrum moved over in various ways to wireless broadband providers. The plan is to create a “Mobile Future Auction,” in Genachowski’s words “an auction permitting existing spectrum licensees, such as television broadcasters in spectrum-starved markets, to voluntarily relinquish spectrum in exchange for a share of auction proceeds, and allow spectrum sharing and other spectrum efficiency measures.”

This is not going to be a smooth transition. The TV broadcasters have already made it very clear that they’re quite leery about this proposal. And even the FCC’s efforts to transition much smaller bands like the Wireless Communications Service region to WiMAX have met with fierce opposition from WCS’s spectrum neighbor, Sirius XM satellite radio.

But as powerful as the National Association of Broadcasters is, if it puts up a full court defense against this trajectory, it’s going to find itself in combat with the wireless industry—without question the most sophisticated communications lobby in Washington, D.C.—and allied with the device manufacturers and to some extent the cable industry, which already regularly does battle with the broadcasters over retransmission consent issues.

Slowly but surely, if only one TV station after another, the spectrum is going to move from the broadcasters to the wireless companies.

What does this mean? It hopefully means faster mobile broadband speeds and lower prices. The wireless industry has a much better record at providing progressively cheaper and better services than cable. That, again, has got to be a boon to Internet radio, which will find itself broadcasting to a progressively larger and more diverse base.

The migration to digital will deconsolidate broadcast radio

It seems likely that traditional over-the-air television broadcasting will fade over the next decade. More and more Americans will watch TV via cable or telco provided optical fiber or IP video. The value of TV licenses will decline and the power of the entities that own them will decline as well. Many of those entities also own conventional broadcast radio stations. Gradually cut loose and allowed to operate on their own or in small networks, these entities could find their rebirth by providing the kind of brick-and-mortal localism that has eluded the Internet so far. It could be that, in the long run, the Internet will be the best thing that could happen to plain old analog broadcast radio.

But again, we’re just talking here. The future is hard to see. One thing I really regret, though, is how little radio fits into policy discussions about broadband. I hope you’ll take a moment to comment on my speculations and ideas.

The post Rough notes: What does the FCC's National Broadband Plan mean for radio? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

There was once a time when a rare breed of radio DJ could scare up controversy and big ratings–not to mention FCC indecency fines–using just his voice, a few on-air cronies and whole lot of bravado, innuendo and hot air. Remember Howard Stern? Arguably the original “shock jock” he was one of the few American radio DJs able to make a nationwide name for himself, including late night talk show appearances and even producing an autobiographical feature film. He made big news in 2004 when he abandoned broadcast for Sirius satellite radio. But once Stern made the transition at the beginning of 2006 he pretty much faded from the mainstream limelight. CBS Radio made attempts to fill the void–such as tapping former Van Halen signer David Lee Roth, who lasted about four months. But no new jock has been found who can replicate Stern’s nationwide morning show dominance.

Chicago-based Mancow Muller was one potential candidate for the King of All Media’s throne. Just as Stern prepared to exit the broadcast airwaves Mancow was experiencing a boost in the number of station’s carrying his “Morning Madhouse” program, and was even beating Stern in the ratings in his home market. Yet only a half-year into Stern’s absence from terrestrial radio Mancow was booted from his home flagship station, Chicago’s Q101. Though the Madhouse continued to air in syndication, Mancow’s candidacy to replace Stern seemed to fade.

Things looked better for Mancow when he was hired on for the morning drive slot on Chicago’s AM talk powerhouse WLS in October of 2008. In the last decade Mancow had tried to de-emphasize his shock jock origins–with minimal success–while playing up his conservative/libertarian political views and Christian faith. That made him not a horrible match for WLS’s mostly conservative talk line-up, although still much more obsessed with potty humor and dick jokes than even ol’ Rushbo.

But the new Mancow show wouldn’t last. Despite the ‘cow scoring good ratings for listeners age 12 and up, the station as a whole was slipping in the more prized 25-54 demographic. So this past week WLS sent Mancow out to pasture. In a memo to station staff, WLS GM Michael Damsky wrote,

While Mancow and Pat consistently put on a highly entertaining and often attention-grabbing two hours, the content and delivery simply did not fit the expectations of the WLS listener.

During this same week Howie decided to get himself some free publicity by quite publicly considering dumping satellite radio to join up as a judge on American Idol. Although there are now reports circulating that Stern was never actually offered anything by the American Idol producers, that doesn’t change the basic fact that Stern is no longer of interest as a morning radio shock jock. He can only get press by threatening to crash media parties where a lot of folks don’t want him invited.

This all leads me to conclude that it’s nearing sunset for the morning radio shock jock.

Now, I’m not arguing that the shock jock morning show is about to disappear altogether. As long as there are rock radio stations looking to pander to young white male listeners aged 18 – 35 there will be some demand for third-rate Stern and Mancow imitators well versed in poop and penis jokes, reactionary politics and thinly-veiled misogyny. But these shows have become mostly local or regional. Increasingly shock jocks are not leading the ratings the way Stern and his brethren once did. Instead they’re contentedly leading their young male demographic, which is also a declining audience.

One can come up with any number of theories for the descent of the shock jock. As someone who listened to Stern regularly back in the 1980s I would argue that the whole genre became overly distilled down to certain titillating elements that were once just a part of the King Of All Media’s shtick. In my opinion Stern was innovator, bringing a novel degree of occasionally smart irreverence, uncomfortable candor and self-deprecation to a genre of radio that had otherwise been dominated by silly characters in between short music sets. Part of Stern’s shtick included strippers and potty talk, and as he got more successful he realized that brand of shock was a sure-fire ratings getter, and it sadly became a bigger part of his program. His imitators mostly left out any intelligence, honesty or true candor, distilling the formula down to toilets and boobs, with a side of jingoism.

Still, what was shocking in 1989 isn’t so shocking in 2010. Just like there’s still an audience for classic rock cover bands, there’s still an audience for shock jocks. But now that it’s mostly aimed at adolescent boys the morning shock jock show is not a growth industry.

If it’s true that Stern fabricated the offer to join American Idol, then I think that will be the strongest proof that the reign of the King of All Media is over, leading to the dissolution of the shock jock empire. It will show that Stern and the shock jock are now just sideshow clowns who are only interesting when they threaten to stomp their big floppy feet into the center ring. Stern may go laughing all the way to the bank with Sirius’ money, but it might be his last laugh.

The post Howard Stern Considers Leaving Sirius for Idol, Mancow Out to Pasture in Chicago (again). Is This Sunset for the Shock Jock? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Paul (a/k/a mediageek) behind the mic

I’ve been a radio broadcaster working in college, community and public radio since 1989, with just one year off from May 1993 to May 1994. And while I’ve had some sporadic work in radio, most recently as a college station adviser, as Matthew emphasizes, my approach is more as a listener and enthusiast rather than an industry insider. Much of what is written about radio is for the industry insider, and is therefore concerned more with profits, ratings and staffing changes than with the place of the medium in our society and everyday lives. Also often missing from insider coverage is critical analysis that challenges the business orthodoxy.

I write for Radio Survivor because I wish to challenge myself and others to consider what radio can be, not just be content or discontented with how it is. We can recognize the damage wrought by consolidation without giving in and leaving the medium for dead. We can highlight the stations and places where innovation is happening and 21st century is in the making. We can encourage new or lost listeners to give radio a new chance.

Radio, as a medium, has a great chance to survive because of the internet, iPods and mobile phones, not in spite of them. Just because Clear Channel and its mostly bankrupt consolidating brethren were too busy buying up stations, firing staff and elminating local service to notice the internet revolution doesn’t mean that the internet has to kill radio. I believe that there is still an audience that pines for local news, information and culture that is still hard to find on the internet, that doesn’t require a monthly broadband bill or data package and is there in the car, in the home or a hundred miles away from the nearest wi-fi hotspot. And as internet access becomes more ubiquitous and less costly radio can still be a complementary part of our information environment.

That’s Radio Surviving.

The post What is a Radio Survivor? Paul’s P.O.V. appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Wrapping up our decade in review.

As I said in my introduction to our subjective and opinionated review of radio in the 2000s, I still think it was darn near impossible to predict how the medium of radio would end up at the beginning of 2010. Sure, the seeds for satellite radio, HD radio, low-power FM, internet radio and MP3s were already planted by the turn of the century. But home broadband–nevermind wireless or mobile–was a relatively exclusive luxury. MP3 players were lucky to sport enough memory to hold about a hundred minutes of music and weren’t integrated into cell phones. Satellites for Sirius and XM were launched, and HD Radio was being experimented with, but no stations were on the air. Clear Channel was flying high for more than $90 a share.

Anyone taking a broad view of the radio industry in 2000 could certainly see a lot of balls being thrust up into to the air, but it would have taken a psychic to predict where they would land. Nevertheless, for all of the churn we can say very safely that audio-focused content is alive and well.

It’s become clear to me that we Radio Survivors do consider radio to be greater than just the traditional electromagnetic broadcast medium. While we included the RF-based college radio, pubic radio, LPFM, HD Radio and satellite radio in our review, we also touched upon internet radio, Pandora and digital downloads. I believe we are first and foremost fans of terrestrial broadcast radio, but that does not cause us to ignore or discount new audio media. Nor does it cause it us to claim that they are not, in essence, radio services.

The homogenization and delocalization of the broadcast dial caused listeners to seek alternative places to hear more interesting and diverse content. At the same time the popularity of MP3 players and Pandora shows that people were also looking for customization.

The thing I want to point out about all of these new options is that, truly, only one is wholly under the listener’s control: MP3s (or other digital music files). With all the other options, including Pandora, the listener still gives up some control over what comes next. With any service that has “radio” in its name, the programming is linear, and you generally don’t know what’s coming up. It doesn’t matter whether there’s a live DJ, a pre-programmed playlist or a library of tunes on random. You might choose an all-Springsteen or all-Mussorgsky station, but the actual song or piece is not under your control. With Pandora or Last.fm you choose an artist to set the tone and style, but all the subsequent plays are up to the algorithm.

What that says to me is that radio listeners–no matter the form of radio–are still looking for a curated experience. With music they may want more control over the genre, sub-genre, style, artist or time-period. With talk and information programming they want to choose the topic, host or political slant. But in both cases the listener wants somebody (or something) else to create the overall experience.

The fact that the major commercial radio companies so degraded this well-crafted experience helped drive away listeners to these other audio forms. Regardless, I believe there would have been erosion of commercial radio’s listenership triggered by these new ways of getting audio entertainment. It just might not have happened so fast and dramatically, and the big radio players might have been able to make the transition to online more smoothly.

As we look forward, the growing availability of wireless high-speed internet is going to make the medium itself less important than the programming that’s on it. I do think that each medium will continue to enjoy its own unique advantages. Whether it’s the low-tech ubiquity of analog broadcast, the nationwide coverage of satellite or the chaotic, but nearly infinite choices on the internet.

After content, the second most important factor will be how much hardware you have to buy. HD and satellite radio are already at a disadvantage because they require specialized equipment that (so far) doesn’t do much else. That makes it harder to compete with a mobile device that checks email and facebook, make phone calls, sends text messages AND receives thousands of online stations. If it were starting today, AM and FM radio would be at a severe disadvantage, too. But they enjoy a first-mover advantage, which means that receivers are so cheap and ubiquitous as to be nearly free.

I’m not sure there has to be any clear winners or losers here. I actually see the potential for coexistence amongst all these forms of radio. Whether or not that can or will happen is up to the companies, consortia and oligopolies who are mostly in control of the commercial, HD and satellite radio.

It should be an interesting listen.

In case you missed them, here’s a rundown of our 14 most important radio trends in the last decade. They’re in no particular order.

• #1: The birth and troubled childhood of satellite radio
• #2: The growth of Internet radio
• #3: I-tunes lures listeners away from terrestrial radio
• #4: Podcasting
• #5: The Age of Pandora
• #6: HD Radio launches, but who listens?
• #7: Internet Radio’s Day of Silence
• #8: The Great Fairness Doctrine Panic
• #9: The FCC authorizes Low Power FM
• #10: Clear Channel goes private equity
• #11: Cash strapped schools turn their backs on college radio
• #12: National Public Radio keeps growing
• #13: College radio tightens its playlist
• #14: Pacifica radio democratizes itself

The post Wrapping up the decade in radio and looking forward to the decade ahead appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Some of my Childhood 45s

I spend a lot of time thinking about how changes in technology are affecting radio.

I worry that the “kids” (college radio DJs as well as everyday folks) are getting lazier and lazier, bypassing physical music for digital, thinking that it’s easier to find and play.

I also worry that the pleasure of enjoying an entire album is being lost; even though there are still albums being created that beg for a complete listen.

In a piece in The Boston Globe, Steve Almond nicely captures some of these fears as he takes a look at his own feelings of nostalgia for physical music as he converts his record collection to digital files. He writes:

The post Losing the Magic of Radio? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

An interesting filing from the National Association of Broadcasters in response to the Federal Communications Commissions’ call for feedback on ways that broadband can help smart grids. The NAB says let FM radio stations lend their subcarrier channels to the cause:

“Smart Grid devices, implanted in home appliances, thermostats, and plug-in hybrid vehicles, could receive data information via an FM data subcarrier channel at anytime, day or night. That data could, for example, tell appliances when to turn off or down or tell thermostats to increase temperatures by a few degrees during peak load times. The resulting decrease in demand could help save billions of dollars each year in energy costs.”

Smart Grids are electrical power sources that use computer networks to monitor their performance and serve energy more efficiently. An FM subcarrier is a signal that sends voice/data about the main FM transmission. These signals can also be used for other purposes. In the early 1980s the Federal Communications Commission deregulated them, allowing radio stations to lease them out for various commercial purposes with a degree of FCC supervision.

NAB proposes tapping into these subcarrier channels via the Radio Data System protocol, which moves bits at about 1,100 per second, not the fastest speed in the world, but “well-matched to the requirements of the Smart Grid load management application, while still allowing ample opportunity for other, simultaneous uses.”

If the idea works, it could put some extra money into the pockets of FM stations, which they certainly need at this point. But hopefully this wouldn’t divert Radio Broadcast Data Systems resources from some of the other purposes to which they are used, such as radio reading services for the blind.

The post Broadcasters: use FM subcarriers for smart grids appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Today’s highly anticipated 9/9/09 Apple product announcement brought the return of the Messiah (Steve Jobs) but not the band bigger than Jesus. Alas, the much hoped-for debut of the Beatles in the iTunes music store did not arrive, despite Yoko telling Sky News to the contrary.

iPod Nano, now with radio!

Apple's making sure the iPod Nano won't kill music like home taping.

I think the radio in the iPod Nano was today’s biggest surprise since Jobs and other Apple spokespeople have scoffed at the idea in the past. Back in 2005, Apple’s iPod division head told the Apple Expo in Paris that,

in Apple’s experience, customers just don’t want radios on their iPods. “Believe it or not, we don’t get a lot of requests from customers” for a radio, he said. “We’re very hesitant to add new features unless we feel a significant portion of the customer base want it.”

It is true that Apple introduced the iPod radio remote back in 2006, although it seems no longer to be available. Perhaps it was killed in anticipation of the new radio Nano.

I’ll be curious to hear reviews and reports from radiophiles who get their hands on the new Nano and evaluate how good the reception is. A truly decent portable headphone radio is actually difficult to find. While $150 is a bit much to pay for one–especially one that only has FM–when combined with an 8 GB iPod and a video camera (!), it’s not a bad deal. I just wish Apple would have put the radio in my iPhone 3G, since listening to internet radio over the 3G data network kills my battery in about an hour. By comparison I have a ten-year-old RCA brand pocket radio that runs over 100 hours on two AAAs.

If we see radios with live-pause show up in the next generation iPhone or iPod Touch. Then we can anoint Mr. Jobs as St. Steve, savior of radio.

The post Apple's cutting edge tech? Radio! appeared first on Radio Survivor.

If you are looking for the bright spot in radio’s future, it’s streaming from a digital platform. The Radio Advertising Bureau’s report for this year’s second fiscal quarter makes this abundantly clear. Local and national over-the-air radio saw a 25% drop in revenue, while digital saw a ten percent boost. Digital radio’s revenue from advertising has grown from $180 million in 2007 to $298 million this year. And the Bureau projects continued growth to $908 million in 2013.

That’s in comparison to over-the-air radio, which lost almost a quarter of a billion in revenue in Q2. The Bureau’s analysis tries to put a brave spin on this, comparing that drop to Q1, when terrestrial truly and spectacularly tanked, revenue wise, declining by over half a billion bucks. “We are most likely past the Q1 low point for Radio revenues and are now on the rebound,” declared Jeff Haley, RAB’s President and CEO.

But the contrast between digital and terrestrial is pretty hard to ignore. “Digital will be an increasingly important sector as Radio continues to evolve into a cross-platform medium,” the report flatly notes. It’s unclear, however, to what degree terrestrial radio will participate in this cross platformness.

Abandoned in large part by the automobile industry, its most faithful remaining advertisers are now cheapo restaurants and fast food joints like Arbys, Dunkin Donuts, Romano’s Macaroni Grill, and Subway. “Even while they’re tightening their belts, Americans still want to reward themselves with a restaurant meal,” the report notes.

Coming in second to this slender reed are advertisers whose products will,  ironically, cause  consumers to listen to less terrestrial radio. AT&T and Verizon are pushing cell phone services hard on radio, RAB says, albeit less than in better times.  “Offsetting cutbacks by the two titans, a number of smaller carriers stepped up their spending to help buoy the category in Q2: Qwest Communications (+57%), Leap Wireless (+44%), Boost Mobile (+34%), US Cellular (+26%), and Metro PCS (+19%).”

All this, of course, will help terrestrial radio listeners discover apps like Slacker, Pandora, Last.fm, and who knows what else at an ever faster rate. It’s difficult to see how terrestrial radio is going to recover from this recession in any condition comparable to its recent past.

The post Digital radio revenues up; terrestrial way down appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Cautious optimism abounds for the economic outlook, with the Federal Reserve predicting that the Great Recession is “leveling out.” Financial markets are improving, the Fed says. Household spending is “stabilizing.” Businesses are realigning inventory with sales. Thus “market forces will contribute to a gradual resumption of sustainable economic growth in a context of price stability.” Hooray!

But the prospects for  big radio continue to look pretty darned grim. Clear Channels’ second quarter report for this year is particularly gnarly. The company says that its revenue has dropped nearly a full twenty five percent from the same time last year. $692.1 million in the second quarter of 2009; 914.8 million in the second quarter of 2008.

The report also discloses that Clear Channel, recently acquired by Bain Capital, has slashed the operating expenses of its advertising company, Clear Channel Outdoor, by twenty percent.

Meanwhile Westwood One posted a revenue drop of 16.7% for the last quarter, which rather neatly translates into an actual loss of $16.7 million. “The decrease in revenue is primarily attributable to the current economic downturn and the continued decline in advertising spending,” the company notes. Network radio revenue fell by $7 million, aka 14.9%. “The decline was principally due to the decline in advertising spending in news, talk and sports programming, particularly from automotive advertisers.”

The press release continues:

The difficult economic environment continues to negatively impact revenue across the advertising industry in general including radio advertising. In early July 2009, Magna, the research and marketplace intelligence arm of Interpublic Group’s Mediabrands, released projections that concluded that the first half of 2009 will likely turn out to be the worst period of the recession for the advertising industry, with an 18% drop in overall advertising revenue versus the first half of 2008. In June, BIA Advisory Services, a subsidiary of BIA Financial Network, Inc., released 2009 radio projections, noting that “[t]he economy has affected the radio industry more this year than originally projected”, and predicting significant revenue declines in 2009 compared to 2008.

The question, of course, is whether this stark free fall is simply a result of the recession, or the decline of terrestrial radio in general. If it is both, does big over-the-air radio have any strategy for reclaiming its share of the media pie after the economic comeback?

The post Corporate radio's future: dim or dimmer? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

So far, I have not found much of that out in Internet radio-land. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy Slacker and Pandora. But they’re not radio. They’re juke box—basically very creative and effective dispensers of discrete individual songs. Beyond that, there is no sense of location. There are no DJs. Sure, there are methods by which members of the audience can communicate with each other, but no “station” to communicate with.

Bottom line: the radio part of Internet radio just isn’t there yet. Or at least I haven’t found it.

That having been said, I’m very much enjoying the new streaming site Future Perfect Radio, which is part of the AccuRadio group. Redesigned in January, the site describes itself as an “indie Internet radio station,” that is, a station that broadcasts the musics of indie labels. “Folk, dance-rock, twee-pop, post-rock . . . it’s all here,” the About page of the site declares. “Whatever your taste, you’ll find it on Future Perfect Radio.”

Here’s what I like about the site.

the music is good; it’s obvious that they’ve given it some thought

I believe that there really is this thing called “good taste.” Admittedly, it’s an amorphous, hard-to-define entity—in the case of radio stations a know-it-when-you-hear-it phenomenon. I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert on indie pop and start rattling off the names of the bands on Future Perfect’s program lists (or the categories, “bleep-pop”??). But I enjoy listening to them. The selections clearly strike a balance between giving you the stuff you won’t hear on commercial AM/FM radio and the stuff that you shouldn’t hear on AM/FM or anywhere else. Creative, lyrical, beautifully performed—I’m having a great time listening to Future Perfect’s tracks.

Equally important, I sense that they’re thinking about what they’re giving me. Slacker and Pandora’s lists often feel stretched pretty thin. And while everybody is raving about how you can program Pandora to meet your individual listening desires, I’m looking for music services that challenge my comfort zone and expand my sense of the possible. Of course, like Pandora, you can ban bands from various Future Perfect stations—at least ban them from your particular computer. And you can suggest stations to Future Perfect in a variety of ways.

the website is attractive; you want to look at it

A lot of streaming music websites are really depressing, at least visually. Live365 looks like one of those visitor traffic suckup sites you get when you spell the domain name you wanted wrong. ElectricFM reminds me of a really cheesy dance joint in New Jersey where if you aren’t friends with the bouncer you should consider leaving soon.

Pandora and Slacker aren’t so bad. Slacker’s site looks like, well, a nice portal that sells people stuff: albums, cell phones, ringtones, Slacker T-shirts and hats, whatever. . . . which is what it is. Pandora has clearly decided to go the bare bones route—your last three selections and some ads, all supported by a Fortress of Solitude light silver background.

Future Perfect is really kind to the eyes. It’s all shades of Ocean Blue with big white type. You feel like you are on the beach on a pleasant, cool day. There’s just a big expansive mood to the design. Plus, there are no ads on the front page. They eventually show up on the broadcast pop-up window, and you can buy the album being played by clicking the link to Amazon. Presumably Future Perfect gets a share of that sale, but the absence of ads up front contributes to the overall attractiveness of the site. It makes me want to stay.

you can listen to music by region

Remember I said that real radio gives you a sense of real place? Future Perfect gives you a choice of real places. As of this writing it has twelve city and region channels: U.K., Austin, New York City, Chicago, Georgia, Great Lakes, Aussies, L.A., Canada, Nordic countries, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco. Since I’m never going to go to a club bar again unless someone pays me, this gives me a chance to check out what the pop music scene actually sounds like here in SF, something I’ll never get in a hundred years from commercial AM/FM radio.

Turns out that it sounds really nice. I recommend “Brand New Sun” by Jason Lytle, “S.F.O” by French Miami, Matmos’ “The Struggle Against Unreality Begins,” Maus Haus’ “Reaction,” and Or, the Whales’ “Call and Response.” Thanks Future Perfect. Listening to your site gives me another reason to feel good about living around here.

So, so far this has been a really good review, right? Mind you, I still don’t think that Future Perfect Radio is really radio. But it comes as close as a DJ-less streaming service gets. You can get AccuRadio’s programming on your iPhone via FlyCast, and Future Perfect’s Michael Schmitt told us the company is working on a Palm Pre app.

As for DJs, that’s a long term project, he said. There are a lot of challenges facing this medium right now: performance royalty rates (still), bandwidth costs, and business models that mostly depend on partner sales and ad clicks. It would sure help if the economy got back on its feet. Given all this, Future Perfect has accomplished a lot. I hope its audience recognizes a good thing when it hears one, and sustains the service through these difficult times.

The post Is Future Perfect Radio the Future of Radio? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Why would anyone want to silence that nice little station, you ask? You know, the non-commercial one that was started by pacifists after World War II, and plays folk music, Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, and operates almost entirely on subscriber donations? Surely this must have been the nefarious work of the FBI, you say, or the CIA, or some local rogue police operation working in cahoots with state government reactionaries.

Nope, the clampdown came from the station’s owner, the Pacifica Foundation, via its Executive Director, Lynn Chadwick, with support from its National Board and its Chair, the celebrated historian Mary Frances Berry, she also then head of the United States Civil Rights Commission. In fact, I think this little failed putsch came from the American Left.

But let’s put the complexities aside for a minute. Here’s how I described the demonstration in my book, Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War.

By the time I got there at about 11 a.m., it was already obvious that the event would be enormous. The plaza had become a forest of placards – “FREE FREE-SPEECH RADIO” and “Free Speech SAVE KPFA.” Dozens of organizations that depended on the station for outreach – Physicians for Social Responsibility, Global Exchange, Berkeley’s La Peña Cultural Center, Earth First! – came with their own banners. “We’ve got no SAY without KPFA,” read one. Dozens of activists came to the Sproul steps to speak. “I will protect KPFA until the day I’m done,” declared Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers Union.

Then Larry Bensky [the station’s senior political reporter] introduced attorney Dan Siegel. Thirty years earlier Siegel, as president of UC Berkeley’s student body, had spoken at a noon rally urging students to take back People’s Park, a piece of land cordoned off by the university administration. Berkeley officials rewarded him with an inciting-to-riot charge, which he beat in court. Now Siegel represented a group Pacifica station local advisory board members who on June 16 filed suit in Alameda County Superior Court, charging that Pacifica had created “a self-perpetuating [National] Board without any accountability to the members and subscribers of the Foundation.” Unless restrained, the complaint continued, “the Board now threatens to utilize its newly created powers to abandon the mission and historic role of the Pacifica radio network and threatens to sell one or more of the Foundation’s five radio stations.”

“Look around,” Siegel told the crowd. “There’s something wrong with this demonstration this morning. And it’s not a lack of diversity. It’s not a lack of commitment. What’s wrong with this demonstration is that it’s not being carried live on KPFA.” The audience roared its approval.

“So here’s my thought for the day,” Siegel concluded. “Let’s go down and take our radio station back!”

And with that the throng, led by a dance/percussion ensemble and veterans of the Berkeley Free Speech movement, marched down Telegraph Avenue. Marching bands played “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” One delegation brought a float depicting a cheerful Lynn Chadwick wielding an axe over handcuffed KPFA listeners. Others manipulated giant puppets – gagged, of course – who hovered above the walkers. A demonstrator in pink tights rode on a unicycle around banners urging justice for Leonard Peletier and Mumia Abu Jamal. Behind them union locals – especially the service unions – carried banners and American flags.

After five blocks, they turned right on a side street corner to the accompaniment of drums, crying, “Shout it out loud . . . free speech now!” and marched down to KPFA. The police were gone. Pacifica had boarded up the station’s front door and windows. Although some suggested occupying the building, it would have been a pointless act of defiance, since Pacifica controlled the transmitter on Grizzly Peak. Demonstrators raised their fists and uttered warwhoops as they passed the structure. Others just gazed sadly at their building and wondered how things had gotten this far. A band played “We Shall Overcome” and “We Shall Not Be Moved” as the protesters slowly made their way toward the park. Staff now led the charge with a huge banner: “FREE SPEECH 1964-1999 . . .? SAVE KPFA!”—1964 a reference to the Free Speech Movement of  that year.

At Martin Luther King, Jr., Park, [Berkeley Mayor] Shirley Dean greeted the demonstrators. “Thank you for being strong,” she declared. “Thank you for being there. Save KPFA!” She was followed by a procession of Bay Area politicians whose offices had been overwhelmed over the previous three weeks by email, voice mail, snail mail, and faxes – among them, San Francisco supervisor Tom Ammiano and San Francisco’s Mayor Willie Brown. Brown called for the resignation of the Pacifica board as some protesters, irate at his housing and homeless policies, stupidly booed him. It was, in fact, a testimony to the strength of this movement that so many political figures ambivalent about the station’s politics came to pay homage.

Equally remarkable declarations of solidarity came from afar, one from an alternative radio station banned in Serbia. Larry Bensky read its communiqué at the rally. “Radio B92 condemns in the strictest terms the repression and exertion of force against the staff of Radio KPFA,” its staff declared. “Long live freedom of speech! And down with media repression which knows no ideological or national boundaries, in either Berkeley or Belgrade.”

The park was packed; the streets beyond overflowed with people. Police estimated that ten thousand demonstrators had come to defend KPFA, the biggest East Bay crowd since the Vietnam antiwar protests, and surely the largest demonstration in American history on behalf of a radio station.

What impressed me then (and still now) about that fight was the extent to which it spilled out into the larger civil society. In the immediate moment a big chunk of the East Bay had no police protection for days because of the number of cops stationed around KPFA to keep its listeners and supporters out. As the crisis spread to varying degrees to all the Pacifica stations and some affiliates, the California state assembly held a hearing on the battle, as did the New York City Council, as did Congress. Dozens of newspapers covered the conflict: just to name a few, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and even overseas newspapers such as Le Monde and United Kingdom’s Guardian and The Economist. Scores of activist groups, non-profits, and alternative media outlets struggled to make sense of the fight and to offer some kind of constructive response to it, most notably The Nation magazine.

Why did Pacifica shut down KPFA? Easy explanations point to corporate intrigue or the machinations of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I think the crisis had its roots in a twenty year effort by progressives to turn Pacifica into a broadcasting network competitive with commercial and mainstream public media. That project, full of centralizations and schedule cleanups, produced some good results, most notably Democracy Now!, but pushed the organization beyond its limits. In the 1990s it threw too many people off the air who had no where else to go to reach a big signal terrestrial radio audience (Pacifica’s five stations have powerful transmitters; well over 100,000 watts in the case of KPFK in Los Angeles). These ejected programmers and their supporters, in turn, availed themselves of the Internet’s then new tools—most notably listserves and websites—to resist those changes. By the late 1990s Pacifica’s managers and directors had simply lost patience with the process and opted for repression.

In the end, Pacifica radio is a bad candidate for centralized makeovers. For better and for worse, its political economy is bottom up. The listener sponsored system, with its emphasis on voluntarism, puts too much power in the hands of volunteer workers and contributors to allow any small group of people to self consciously contour the network in any coherent way. This is good news if your heart palpitates at the sound of words like “grassroots” and “community.” But if your whistle whets at the prospect of a broadcasting organization that can compete with mainstream media to reach a big terrestrial/streaming audience, well, take a look at Pacifica’s resources and its present very complex democratic structure (a result of the settlement of that war). To put it gently, your efforts are best directed elsewhere.

What the Pacifica stations can most effectively offer today, I think, is what is missing from so much broadcast media at present: localism. As the rest of radio automates and newspapers continue to collapse, these signals stand out as unique resources for news/information about the local political process and as venues for local music and other cultural forms. Web 2.0 has yet to really prove whether it can do this. KPFA, KPFK, WBAI in New York City, WPFW in Washington, D.C., and KPFT in Houston already have.

But this blog post is not about working out Pacifica’s future. It’s about celebrating that moment ten years ago when thousands marched in Berkeley, declaring that radio of the people, by the people, and for the people should not vanish from the earth. I am sure that I am not the only person who remembers that amazing day.

The post Remembering Save KPFA Day appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Everybody’s breathing a sigh of relief now that Sound Exchange has released its new and more affordable performance royalty rates for webcasting. And the biggest exhale is blowing in the direction of Pandora “internet radio,” as it calls itself. “Pandora Lives!” is the victory cry du jour.

Pandora is being a bit more circumspect than its fan club. The service’s Tim Westergren says on the company’s blog that the revised rates are still “quite high – higher in fact than any other form of radio.” And so the company is going to make an “adjustment”:

“Specifically, we are going to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the free version of Pandora. In any given month, a listener who hits this limit can then opt for unlimited listening for the remainder of that month for just $0.99. In essence, we’re asking our heaviest users to put a dollar (well, almost a dollar) in the tip jar in any month in which they listen over 40 hours. We hope this is relatively painless and affordable—the same price as a single song download.”

So far the response on the blogosphere has been sympathetic. Epicenter is running a reader poll—”Would You Pay 99 Cents per Month for Unlimited Pandora?” As of this posting the vote has been 437 to 106 in favor.

I voted yes on the poll, but I’m already wondering if I really would. Right now I listen to Pandora a lot. Heck, I listen to it on my Blackberry. But I don’t really experience Pandora as radio. I classify it as juke box. Like a lot of online services, it’s a headless dispenser of music. Don’t get me wrong here. I like juke box. I think that Pandora is a terrific headless dispenser of music.

But I miss DJs—you know, those people who talked to you, kept you company, told stories, were funny and witty, reported the news, read commercials in a sort of cute (“oh well, I gotta read this commercial”) sort of way. Many commercial radio stations have dumped them. There are still some around, but they’re mostly these lame “morning zoo” kind of guys and gals.

As for the Internet, the model is mostly juke box. I mean yes, there’s podcasting, but it’s not live. The dominant model is live365, which, again, calls itself “Internet radio” but is in fact just more juke box.

So somebody with a lot of presence on the Internet has to start setting an example, and slowly but surely bring back the DJ. I say Pandora is the prime candidate. Of course, it’s complicated because the service lets its users choose what they want to hear, rather than on air hosts. But Pandora could experiment with a hybrid model—start with a single pop oriented theme in which the users influence the process by popular demand, and the DJ makes some choices herself.

I’d pay more than 99 cents a month for that.

The post Hey Pandora: I'd pay even more than 99 cents for DJs appeared first on Radio Survivor.

WLS Radio Tower Photo Copyright 2004, Garrett Wollman from The Archives@ BostonRadio.org.

Fandom is an amazing thing and thanks to the Internet it’s easier and easier to find like-minded obsessives who share one’s passion for the most obscure objects, idols, and idiosyncrasies. Radio is no exception. Loads of websites document radio history, with nostalgic archivists collecting ephemera, airchecks, and reminiscences from San Francisco to Boston. Various forums also exist, like those on Radio-Info.com, allowing listeners and industry types to talk shop and share current radio gossip.

And then there’s Garrett Wollman. I recently ran across some of his photographs of radio towers and was fascinated. As part of his work with The Archives @ BostonRadio.org, he’s been traveling around the country meticulously photographing every radio tower that he can find. Sometimes he even ventures into radio and television stations; but for the most part it’s the outside architecture and landscapes that he finds so compelling.

In order to learn more about this project, I contacted Garrett to get the scoop about his love for radio towers and his work to help document the history of radio and television. I was surprised to find out a couple of things: 1) Garrett’s a young guy—a rarity in radio history circles and 2) He’s not a big fan of current radio offerings. After chatting with Garrett, I also was made aware of pursuits like DXing and county counting, making me realize that there’s so much more to the radio scene than I ever realized. On to the interview:

Jennifer: Can you tell me about the background and purpose of BostonRadio.org? And the Archives?

Garrett Wollman: The Archives @ BostonRadio.org (originally The Boston Radio Archives) is, so far as I know, the oldest broadcasting-history Web site on the net.  Scott [Fybush] and I started it in January, 1995, with a simple listing of information about the stations in the Boston market…Scott was already writing his New England RadioWatcher columns (now NorthEast Radio Watch)…and I started to archive them.  I also started creating radio and TV dial pages for other markets in New England, and I think around that same time we started writing histories of all the stations…Eventually, the dial pages became too hard to maintain, and other Web sites (like Chip Kelley’s original 100000watts) were doing it better, so I dropped them, but kept the histories.

My first tower-hunting trip was to Cape Cod, in March, 1994.  A couple years later — this is still before the days of good digital cameras– I started taking video of the tower trips.  Eventually, digital cameras became good enough, and I bought on in late 2000; that’s when I started developing the photo galleries that you see in the Archives. What you see is, by the way, less than half of what I actually have “in the can” — I have several thousand more photos from 2001 through last month that I have not yet published.

Radio Station Park Photo Photo Copyright 2004, Garrett Wollman from The Archives@ BostonRadio.org.

Each photo gallery involves about 20 hours of work to write and edit, even though the images you see are rarely processed in any meaningful way.  Often, when doing a photo gallery about a market, I will do research in the FCC files, in other reference books like /Broadcasting Yearbook/, and in Web resources like mailing-list archives and Wikipedia, to fill in as much as I can about the history of a facility.

I try to identify the correct callsign, community of license, channel, and station class (FM) or antenna mode (AM) for each station at the specific time the photos were taken.  I want to get more semantic tagging into the photo galleries, so that it would be easier to identify, for example, all the photos (across multiple galleries) of a particular station or tower, but thus far this has been stymied by my rather antiquated, homebrew workflow.

Garrett: Well, I’m not sure that I am.  I’m really passionate about geography, history, and some aspects of architecture, and touring the world’s broadcast sites unites a lot of those interests.  I find much of today’s radio unlistenable and television unwatchable.

On the other hand, I grew up in the 1980s — during the second round of CHR [Contemporary Hits Radio] Wars — at a time when radio still meant something to a lot of people.  It still mattered, when I was going school, what station you listened to; those of my classmates who listened to Q-99 or B-100 were looked down upon by the 95 Triple X crowd, and those of us who listened to Triple X were considered hopelessly bereft of taste by the rock snobs who listened to The Wizard.

By the early 1990s, CHR formats had left me behind (at the ripe old age of 20!), and when I moved to Boston I eventually gravitated to AAA…I learned to listen to — if not always like — some great evening talk hosts, like the late Dr. David Brudnoy on WBZ, and I still enjoy (but don’t listen very much) to the meandering, but usually non-political, Steve LeVeille on WBZ overnights.  Most of my listening today is to the BBC (both World Service, heard here on WBUR, and domestic Radio 4 over the Internet), and in the car to WXRV (92.5B Haverhill), WBZ, and the XM decades channels (particularly 80s on 8 and 90s on 9).

On the gripping hand, I have an engineering (specifically computer networking) background, so I have both an appreciation for the behind-the-scenes work that engineers of all kinds do, and the sort of curiosity that makes me want to know how stuff works, and why, and who built it, and where does it come from.  When I’m not doing this stuff, you’ll find me reading planning documents about a local highway project, or writing a Wikipedia article about a recent Supreme Court decision.

I seem to be running out of limbs here…One final factor is that my parents absolutely refused to pay extra for an FM radio in their cars when I was growing up.  For much of that period, we lived well east of Burlington, Vermont, and thus well out of the night patterns of the AM stations there.  In the winter months, as my father was driving my home from a Scout meeting or other evening event, I would tune the radio and listen to all the other things on the radio — and back then, the AM dial wasn’t filled with satellite talk at night — so we might hear something completely different from anything available locally.

I particularly remember hearing Wolfman Jack on W****N****BC on these late nights.  So I became, unintentionally, something of a DXer as well, and that fed into the geography interest, at least until the AM dial became so filled with indistinguishable satellite junk that there was no longer much interest left.  I joined some of the DX clubs, but eventually dropped out when it seemed that they were mostly interested in yammering on forever about how much better it was in the decades before I was born.  (I’m still a member of the Worldwide TV-FM DX Association, which is a bit less prone to this sort of nostalgic excess.)

WCNK Tower Photo Copyright 2001, Garrett Wollman from The Archives@ BostonRadio.org.

Garrett: Never.

Jennifer: How many towers have you photographed? What states have you visited?

Garrett: I have visited all of the lower 48 except North Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Mississippi.  I will fix all of these at some point.  (A friend of mine, George Greene, is a county-counter, so he has actually visited every single *county* — a much more difficult challenge.)  I’ve done five Canadian provinces, all in the east.

On my current camera, I’ve taken about 10,000 shots.  I think I was somewhere close to 3,000 on the old camera.  (What a difference bigger memory makes!)  Of course, many of those pictures are junk, and will never be seen on the Web site.  But given all that, I believe I’ve seen in excess of 3,000 stations, and photographed over two thirds of them.

Garrett: Touring radio stations is something that’s normally arranged by my partner-in-crime, Scott Fybush. As a freelance journalist in the trade press, he goes to trade shows and meetings of industry organizations, and knows a lot of people who can open the doors for us at various station groups.  It can be a lot easier to get a tour when you can start your conversation with “I spoke to [name of CEO] at NAB last year, and he said I really ought to see your stations.”  I can’t do that — it’s strictly a hobby for me — so when I travel alone it’s mostly the outsides of things that I see, unless it’s a business day in a small market and I can just walk in the front door and get an impromptu tour.  (Such things do happen!)

We do try to make maps that show where all the studios and transmitters are, also noting any particularly significant historic studio locations. Currently this is all on paper; some day soon, GPS systems will be good enough to assist us in the navigation, although I will probably still want paper maps for my own reference after the fact.  (I’ve been able to piece together photo galleries from seven-year-old photos because I still had the maps and could figure out what route we had taken through a market.)

WHSD Antenna Photo Copyright 2004, Garrett Wollman from The Archives@ BostonRadio.org.

Jennifer: Have you visited any college radio stations? If so, which ones?

Garrett: I’ve seen a good number of college stations from the outside.  As far as inside tours go — and excluding college-owned public radio — I’ve seen WBRU (95.5B Providence) and WREK (91.1C2 Atlanta) this year.  In the past, I’ve seen WHRB (95.3A Cambridge), WMBR (88.1A Cambridge), and a few others that I can’t readily remember.

Garrett: There was the time, back during “Big Trip 2001“, when we were in Floyd’s Knobs, Indiana — across the river from Louisville — and an elderly local accosted us and insisted that we were government agents who had some control over the radiation in his neighborhood.

There was also one time — I forget which year this was — when we went to see the tower of WHPE-FM (95.5C1 High Point), and had the security manager of the chemical plant across the street call us in to the police as suspicious characters.  Thankfully, the rental car was not in my name that trip….

Garrett: Yes and no.  As a medium, absolutely.  There will always be a place for a medium of information and entertainment that does not demand all of our attention at once.  There’s no substitute for radio when driving or doing any number of other, primarily visual tasks.

As a means of delivering prerecorded music, not so much.  Radio programmers and record companies have so segmented the market that there is no longer a mass audience for musical entertainment any more.  The days when a CHR could pull a 25 share are gone, in every market.  With dozens of choices on the radio today, none of which are precisely what I want, why would I set through the endless commercials (or endless fundraisers) when I can get exactly what I want from Pandora or my iPod?

The specific technologies of over-the-air broadcasting are clearly on their last legs in the developed world — I give them another decade, maybe two if the broadcasting industry succeeds in its drive to put non-broadcast radio at a competitive disadvantage (through, e.g., the “Local Radio Freedom Act”, which preserves in law the subsidy regime whereby analog broadcasters can use recorded music for free, but digital broadcasters have to pay).  In the developing world, probably about twice as long, because the economics of broadcast are much more favorable there (traditional analog receivers are small, light, cheap, and battery-powered, whereas transmitters are big, heavy, expensive, and require an external power source).

All this, of course, is reason to go and see these facilities while they are still around.  I almost certainly won’t get to all 14,000 — and some of them really aren’t worth getting to — but I am making an effort to see all the significant sites in all the significant markets while they are still with us.

Garrett: I like non-comm AAA and Americana formats, particularly WXPN (88.5 Philadelphia) and WNCW (88.7 Spindale) of five to ten years ago.  I think a lot of the NPR news and talk programming is excellent, but it honestly doesn’t do anything for me.  The best spoken-word radio station in the English-speaking world, in my view, is BBC Radio 4 — it’s everything that I wish NPR was but could never be.  (What other English language radio station is still commissioning new drama?)  If this were Britain, that would be making a pretty strong statement of my social class, but thankfully it isn’t, and they provide “Listen Again” worldwide for most shows, so I can get my fix of “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue” or “The News Quiz” or even the Shipping Forecast at a time that fits my leftpondian schedule.

Most of today’s music formats turn me off.  If I’m stuck in a market where there’s nothing else to listen to, I may find a local Hot AC or Modern Rocker, but I’m just as likely to turn the radio off.

KYCA Studios Photo Copyright 2009, Garrett Wollman from The Archives@ BostonRadio.org.

Garrett: Rarely.  There are plenty of college stations around Boston, and some of them even do worthwhile programming at least occasionally, but they’re never dependable enough, and there are lots of other choices here in market #11.  Some of the smaller college stations, and most of the high school stations, show little evidence of understanding what operating a radio station is about; if they have any listeners who aren’t actually in the studio, it would be a surprise.  Many of them seem to look at it as a glorified iPod, and put little or no effort into presentation.  But there are occasional gems.

I remember about 18 months ago, on the little class-D high-school station in Acton, Mass., hearing a student on the air who actually seemed to have some idea of what a jock is supposed to do; I actually sent him an email complimenting him on his presentation and suggesting that he look for colleges that have a student-run station.  (Of course, he then spoiled the impression by dumping carrier without a legal ID when his shift was over — stations with limited schedules like that really ought to get hooked up with a radio reading service.)

The post Garrett Wollman's Radio Tower Quest appeared first on Radio Survivor.

It was there in 1909 that an engineer, Charles “Doc” Herrold, broadcast his first voice transmissions. He began regular broadcasts in 1912, and his station became KQW, which evolved into KCBS…

Herrold, said [San Jose State University Professor Mike] Adams, used a spark cap, and his audio was crude. He was a pioneer in broadcasting entertainment, said Adams, but he had no financial support and was bypassed by inventors of the superior vacuum tube. Herrold’s station lasted until the United States shut down radio stations during World War I. He obtained a license for station KQW in 1921, but lost control of the station, which relocated to San Francisco in 1934 and became KCBS in 1949. Oh. Well, then: Happy 60th Anniversary, KCBS!

Another way that radio honors its history is with groups like the National Radio Hall of Fame. Voting is now open for 2009 nominees, including radio pioneer Dr. Demento.

And, finally, an article on CNNMoney.com posits that services like Pandora (an Internet service that selects music for you based on music that you already like) may be the future of radio. The piece quotes Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren:

“There’s a huge frustration among listeners that radio doesn’t play music they like,” Westergren says. “Once you use personalized radio, why would you go back to a station that is programmed for you and half a million other people?”

Well, yes…you probably wouldn’t. But, if you listen to non-commercial stations with lengthy playlists and DJ-curated shows, you might be disappointed by a random, computer-generated DJ-less playlist. The article continues:

However, not everyone sees it that way. “Traditional radio forces you to listen to new things,” says Bob Lefsetz, author of the influential music industry blog the Lefsetz Letter. “Pandora’s recommendations are ridiculously tame.” The New Yorker’s pop music critic, Sasha Frere-Jones, agrees: “I wish it were more adventurous.”

Agreed. And the future of radio is still TBD…

The post Celebrating Radio's Past and Future appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The Town Hall revealed some tensions between the new and old media camps, with most of the bad feelings on the old media side. The somewhat less well attended Media Future Conference didn’t dwell on this divide, focusing primarily on the online world, including dead tree and television online internet initiatives.

Entirely missing from this weekend’s conference was any mention of radio by any of the panelists or audience. To be fair, I didn’t stand up to speak, and so share some part of the blame for the oversight. What’s even more notable about the omission is that many folks who work for Chicago Public Radio were present in the audience, if not on the panels.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised. Radio went through the big journalism purge nearly a decade ago as the consolidation-frenzy spurred by the 1996 Telecom Act sank in. Indeed it was nearly nine years ago when Chicago went from having two commercial all-news radio stations to just one. WMAQ at 670 AM signed off on August 1, 2000 to become all-sports station WSCR, leaving just 780 AM WBBM holding the all-news mantle. Only recently have newspapers really started to catch up with the carnage.

Even though heavily news-focused public radio has seen its fortunes and audience rise in the last decade–in direct countervalence to commerical radio–it seems like that hasn’t helped restore radio to the front of the public’s mind when it comes to journalism. Despite the rise in ratings, I’d bet the general public doesn’t take much account of public radio, turning instead to TV, internet and newspapers to get news, especially breaking news.

I have to admit this tendency myself. If I’m sitting at home and wonder what’s going on–even with severe weather–I’ll hit the ‘net first. Only on the rare occasions when I’m in my car (which isn’t yet internet-equipped) do I turn to radio for the latest. At least part of the reason for this are the many occasions when I did turn to radio to find breaking news, only to have to slog through endless commercials, voice-tracked DJs or syndicated programming, hearing no indication that a live person was anywhere near the station console ready to jump in with an update, even if just read from wire copy.

It’s too bad, really, since radio journalism still has the potential to cover both breaking news and investigative stories with a style and economy that newspapers, TV and internet are not quite ready for. Though SMS, mobile broadband and twitter show promise for reporting up-to-the-minute news from the field, these still don’t reach a truly mass audience. By contrast a radio reporter just needs a phone link back the studio–cell phone or landline–to file a live report, or a cheap audio recorder to get interviews to bring back via sneakernet.

Perhaps I’m a foolish optimist, but I think the immediacy and frugality of radio gives the medium an opportunity to regain lost ground in the face of the supposed crisis in journalism.  I don’t expect that people will ditch their iPods, smartphones, laptops and cable TV for radio. But when the power goes out, the cell towers are down or you’re simply in one of the many places that still aren’t covered in fiber and wi-fi, radio can still be the conduit of vital news and information. And what are podcasts anyway, but radio programs syndicated over the ‘net instead of the airwaves?

It’s easy to take radio for granted, even for a confirmed radiogeek like me. Yet I think that radio can link up with and complement online journalism and media, as the live, truly wireless sister with better than 99% uptime (no fail whale on the air) and a cost model that makes reaching a mass audience a bargain, even compared to the web.

At the next group meeting for journalists’ therapy, I promise to step forward and reveal my radio addiction and bring the subject to the fore. Radio is part of the media future, wherever you are, unless we all decide to abandon it.

The post Radio, Apparently, Is Not Part of Chicago's Media Future. But It Should Be. appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Everybody knows that the trick to getting Internet radio past the early adopter crowd and into the ears of Ma and Pa Kettle means getting into it into cars. Commercial broadcasting seems ready for that to happen. How do we know? The National Association of Broadcasters sent us a profile of Autonet Mobile.

Autonet calls itself the “first wireless internet service provider designed for your car.” It creates a Wi-Fi “hot spot” that pretty much turns your auto into an Internet cafe via a 3g wireless connection. The company says it runs over the “nation’s largest 3g network,” but doesn’t say which one that is . . . presumably Verizon?

Anyway, the car is the Holy Grail, Internet radio wise. The courageous are hooking up iPhones to their FM receivers . But everybody knows that the true mass audience for streaming radio doesn’t come until Mr. and Mrs. Luddite can do it real easy.

Autonet has still has a big problem. It’s expensive. Almost 500 USD a copy and 29 a month for a 1GB plan. 59 for 5GB. And if it runs like 5GB Verizon does on my Blackberry, it may be kinda slow. I have to wait quite a while before the next tune on my Pandora app fires up.

The other sticky wicket the company faces is that it has partnered with Chrysler, which has been sloughling off auto-dealers almost as fast as California is dumping school teachers. But their search engine indicates that plenty of dealers are selling this thing—a whole boatload of them in Los Angeles, for example. And it looks like the outfit has some Toyota dealers as well.

So we’ll see where this goes. In the short run one can expect the pioneer crowd to drive off bridges while surfing the Web on the freeway. In the long run, as prices come down and the economy comes back up, maybe this is one more step towards bringing streaming audio to drive time.

The post The Holy Grail: getting Internet radio into your car (Part I) appeared first on Radio Survivor.