Environmental Encroachment on the mediageek radioshow – sound, pictures and video

In a change of pace from the otherwise talk-dominated radioshow, my guests this week were the magic circus band Environmental Encroachment. They played several songs in WNUR’s multi-use studio number 105, in addition to our interview. The show is now available for listening and download at the radioshow site.

Because the EE marching band is also a visual presence I took some photos and video [YouTube Vimeo] of the performance to give you a sense of what it’s like when the band plays out.

Big thanks go to my old friend and EE trombonist Dan Merlo for suggesting the idea, along with everyone in Environmental Encroachment for coming out to the show. Also, big thanks go to WNUR Airplay team members Lori Crasnic–for making all the arrangements to have the band in–and Lucas Seagall–for engineering the music portion of the show.

On Thursday’s Radioshow: Environmental Encroachment the Magic Circus Band

Independent media comes in all forms, next to ‘zines, podcasts and blogs there are trombones, drums and batons. In parades, clubs and gatherings of all types across the US, and across the world a fresh wave of marching bands are bringing musical chaos to the streets.

Insurgent marching bands from around the globe are soon gathering in Boston for the Honk! Festival. One of those bands will be Chicago-based Environmental Encroachment. But before they head to Beantown EE is making a stop into the WNUR studios for an appearance on the mediageek radioshow.

As a Magic Circus Band, EE uses circus acrobatics, live music and costumes to create unique entertainment environments. At the same time they bring incredible marching band interpretations of classic and modern rock that you’ll never hear on a high school football field.

It’s going to be a fun and unique episode of the radioshow. You can hear it live this Thursday, Oct. 1 at 9 PM CT on WNUR 89.3 FM in Chicago and online at www.wnur.org. Afterward listen to the podcast at the mediageek radioshow website.

Life Inc., Publishing and Radio

I really enjoyed my conversation with Douglas Rushkoff, discussing his new book Life, Inc; How the World Became a Corporation and How To Take It Back. The first part of this interview is on this week’s edition of the mediageek radioshow.

I find that Doug is articulating very clearly a lot of ideas that have also been rattling around my ahead for the last decade or so, but he’s made the effort to research them and flesh them out in print both in his book and in a growing series of columns and essays. What I like about his analytical approach is his willingness to attempt to get outside our contemporary assumptions about daily life and try to figure out when and how something, like the corporation, was brought into existence. I also appreciate that he’s willing to continue prodding at a question even when the answers are murky, showing a willingness to accept there are some apparent conflicts in the messy reality of daily life.

He recently wrote a piece for Publisher’s Weekly arguing that the publishing business is very ill-suited to corporate consolidation. He notes that book publishing is a sustainable business, but not a source of tremendous year-over-year growth of the sort a large corporation needs. But he remains sanguine about the future of publishing because the expert editors, publishers and writers haven’t gone away and are ready to rebuild the industry, perhaps with new independent houses.

I see some parallel with the radio business, although radio has been far more decimated than publishing. The root problem is the same: the large consolidating companies treated radio as a commodities business, seeking unreasonable profit growth that the business could not sustain. Radio differs from publishing in the fact that stations must be licensed and are therefore inherently limited in number, whereas publishing houses can be more easily started with less capital and require no licensing of any sort.

If new independents could start radio stations without having to try and pry licenses away from the likes of Clear Channel and Cumulus, I think we’d already be seeing some innovative rebooting of the industry. Unfortunately, radio is more like a neighborhood where the landowners have all let their properties get run down but refuse to sell them because scarcity still keeps the going rate artificially high.

In some sporadic cases we see innovation happening in public and community radio, where license holders can keep their stations sustainable but don’t have to rake in enormous profits. I just keep hoping that Clear Channel will finally bite the bullet and need to start shedding stations left and right, giving an opportunity for smaller, local and independent owners to get back into the game. Admittedly, it’s a more distant hope than the reinvigoration of the publishing industry, since another smaller consolidator, like CBS Radio, might choose to pack its stables, outbidding smaller players.

That’s the problem with licensing, and, to an extent, why the founding fathers organized against the Stamp Act of 1765. As it was designed, radio pretty much needs to be licensed because it was premised on scarcity partially imposed by the technological limits of 1927. But it’s not necessarily an inherent fact about radio. Perhaps the future of wireless communications will render this period of licensing a short historical anomaly. It’s an open question and no better than a 50/50 proposition right now.

Doug has his own relatively new radio show, The Media Squat, on the great noncommercial station, WFMU. In the interview we talked about his program and our shared challenged of trying to do an original weekly program on a completely volunteer, non-profit basis. That part of the interview will air on the next edition of mediageek. You can listen to it live on Thursday, Sept. 10, at 9 PM Central time on WNUR 89.3 FM in Chicago and online at http://www.wnur.org. Of course, the program will be archived online next week.

San Antonio’s Local 782 Organizes for Media Empowerment

Anne Elizabeth Moore reports on independent musicians and media makers organizing right in Clear Channel’s own backyard:

“People in San Antonio have been doing media justice organizing for over 30 years,” the outspoken Latina activist and director of the Texas Media Empowerment Project DeAnne Cuellar explains. It makes perfect sense. One of the most renowned radio conglomerates in the world is spitting distance from your doorstep, and “you are nowhere on the radio at all,” as Cuellar puts it. This, plus the hour’s drive away from Austin, the so-called live music capital of the world, fosters a keen awareness of what locally consumed media could look like. …

Local 782’s approach is upfront and very clear. The group aims to organize local musicians, improve working conditions and the local music economy with socio-economic strategies, archive the diversity and history of music in San Antonio, and strive for solidarity throughout the music industry—especially among the working class.

Local music is local culture, and serves as a glue that ties people and communities together. Seems to me that musicians and artists in a lot of towns and cities could take a page from Local 782’s playbook, joining with existing truly local media, or working to create new local media opportunities.

Chicago Reader Goes the Way of Clear Channel and Leverage Is the Culprit

Private equity seems all the rage for financially troubled media properties, though I contend that is a bad thing. As I report on this week’s radioshow, all of the alternative weeklies owned by Atlanta-based Creative Loafing Inc. became the property of New York-based Atalaya Capital Management, which won a bankruptcy auction buying the company for $5 million. That seems like a bargain until you realize that Atalaya was already owed $30 million which it loaned Creative Loafing when the publisher acquired the Chicago Reader and Washington City Paper in 2007.

Alas, the economic downturn, a depressed ad market and a mountain of debt pushed Creative Loafing into bankruptcy just a year into owning these two additional papers, and a bankruptcy auction was set to resolve its problems. Former Creative Loafing CEO Ben Eason attempted to convince the bankruptcy judge that his $2.3 million bid to retain control of the company should be preferred because he and his partners were more experienced to shepherd the future of the firm’s papers. The judge rejected this argument, siding with Atalaya’s larger $5 million bid.

In addition to the Reader and Washington City paper Creative Loafing owns alternative weeklies in Charlotte, NC, Sarasota and Tampa Florida. The company got its start with the Atlanta-based namesake paper Creative Loafing, founded by former-CEO Eason’s parents in 1972.

Eason told the Reader’s media columnist Michael Miner that the Reader is a profitable paper, claiming that’s due to measures his management team took to reduce costs. He also told Miner that he doesn’t regret buying the Reader and the Washington City Paper, saying “Creative Loafing with the Reader and the City Paper is far stronger than Creative Loafing alone.”

Miner, who has an obvious stake in the situation, has been keeping a close eye on the transfer of ownership on his News Bites blog. On Thursday he summed up the quick devolution of the Creative Loafing relationship in a post titled, “That Didn’t Work Out So Well, Did It?” He notes that,

Life at the Reader was just wonderful for a long time. Lots of stories, lots of listings, lots of ads, lots of classifieds — plus memorable staff parties and a Christmas bonus that was roughly a month’s salary.

And although the Reader’s former owners appeared to be taking care in choosing a buyer, Miner reports that

Eason, as he negotiated the purchase of the Reader and City Paper, was being advised by his board that the deal was a terrible idea. That’s a possibility that apparently didn’t occur to the sellers. “It’s like, I guess we thought — he had the money so he could afford it,” [former editor and co-owner] Lenehan said.

It’s true the Reader has it’s own troubles prior to the Creative Loafing deal, not the least of which was a rift amongst the owners with the largest stakes in the paper. Nevertheless adding $40 million of debt to the mix is what really screwed things up.

For all the talk of the death of print journalism and print in general, when you look at the individual cases of newspapers in peril the single most common source of problem is not ad revenue by itself. Rather, the root cause is consolidation and the enormous debt that companies take on in order to drive their acquisitions. That’s what drove the Tribune Company, the Sun-Times and Clear Channel into bankruptcy, and that’s why the Chicago Reader is now owned by private equity firm, rather than an actual newspaper company.

I can only imagine how different the world of print publishing would be right now without all of the useless debt sandbagging the industry brought on by the roller-derby race to the bottom that is consolidation. This isn’t the failure of publishing or journalism, it’s just really bad business that very few had a say in, but that affects us all.

On Thursday’s Radioshow: Uncertain Futures – Tim Hwang Analyzes the New FCC

“Uncertain Futures” is a new report that reviews the background of the new and returning FCC Commissioners, making educated guesses about what lies ahead for our communications environment. Co-author Tim Hwang will be on this week’s mediageek radioshow to discuss what’s in store for important issues like network neutrality and media consolidation. Hwang is a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and authored the report along with Erikk Hokenso, based at the University of St Andrews in St Andrews, Scotland.

The mediageek radioshow airs live this Thursday, August 20 at 9 PM Central time on WNUR 89.3 FM in Evanston-Chicago, IL and online at www.wnur.org. If you have questions or comments for Tim Hwang send them to me by email – paul(at)mediageek(dot)net – or by twitter. The syndicated podcast will be posted Sunday night, or you can listen to the show on any of the thirteen other affiliates listed at the radioshow site.

Happy 5th Birthday to Podcasting!

With the word “podcasting” firmly entrenched in the English language it’s a bit hard to believe that the medium is only five years old. Wired’s This Day in Tech marked yesterday, Aug. 13 as the fifth anniversary of the start of Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, the first widely popular podcast.

This Day in Tech dutifully notes that the first actual podcast came one day earlier in the form of RSS pioneer Dave Winer’s Morning Coffee Notes, but that it was Curry’s podcast that quickly popularized the idea.

And what was that idea in the first place? The notion of having a regular radio program online was not remotely new by 2004. It was no problem listening to popular public radio programs like This American Life online. Even my little old radioshow was posted for download before Curry and Winer coined the term “podcast.”

The key innovation of podcasting was to make it easy to subscribe to a feed so that the programs would be downloaded to your computer automatically. No more checking a site over and over to see if a new show was posted. Simple, but effective.

The interesting thing about podcasting is that this little bit of tech has become so ingrained in our culture already that “podcast” has become pretty much synonymous with “online radio program.” When podcasting became a hot trend in educational media, ’round about 2005 and 2006, I presented several workshops on the topic. My first order of business was always to point out the simplicity of the concept and also clarify the fact that a podcast, by definition, refers to a series of audio programs that one can subscribe to, not just an audio program posted online.

The reason I felt the need to clarify so strongly is that as an educational media producer I started having many clients come asking for us to podcast a lecture. I would always ask if they were planning to have a series of lectures or other programs. And more than half the time, the answer was “no, we’re just having this one.” My response would be, “so what you really want is to record this lecture and make it available on a webpage?” And the typical answer would be, “Yes, that’s right, we want a podcast.”

Ugh.

Of course, it was no problem to record the lecture and post the MP3 online (nevermind the clients who didn’t want their “podcast” to be downloaded–just streamed). But there was no reason anyone would subscribe to this “podcast” since there would never be episode #2. It was also a little frustrating because clients would act as if it had never been possible to post audio programs online before, despite the fact that my department had been offering it as a service for at least five years by that point.

Eventually I gave up on explaining the difference because it became obvious that nobody cared, and the difference didn’t really cause any problems.

The very positive legacy of podcasting is that the idea greatly revitalized and popularized online radio, spawning thousands, if not millions, of new audio programs created by amateurs, professionals and creative people of all types. But make no mistake, radio producers had been posting their audio online since the invention of the web. In fact, one the pioneering archives of online community radio content, the A-Info Radio Project, started in 1996–eight years before podcasting–and continues to go strong today.

So, Happy Birthday to the podcast, and may a million more be born and syndicated.

Should There Be True Freedom for Our Mobile Devices?

Last week the FCC started an inquiry into why Apple rejected the new Google Voice app from its iPhone app store, sending letters to both companies and AT&T, the exclusive cell carrier of the iPhone in the US. Google Voice is a service that allows a user to receive all of her calls and text messages at a single number, and then have them routed intelligently to wherever she is. Speculation abounds that Apple rejected the app because it poses a threat to AT&T’s voice network, where users pay for a certain number of minutes or text messages, because it routes calls over the data network, where users pay a flat rate for unlimited usage.

A screen shot of an online chat with an Apple rep purports to show that Apple blames AT&T for the Google Voice block. For its part AT&T says it “does not manage or approve applications for the App Store.”

It’s a tangled web at the moment, but still one thing is clear: while Blackberry and Android phone users can get Google Voice, iPhone users are blocked.

But it’s not just about Google Voice, though this instance appears to have come at the right time, with a newly confirmed and tech-savvy FCC Chairman, along with a full slate of commissioners for the first time since 2008. There are other apps you can’t get in the iPhone store, and those that are crippled–like Skype and the Sling Player–presumably to protect AT&T’s cellular voice and cable TV services from competition.

While it’s true one can still go shopping for a different phone or a different carrier to avoid some of these restrictions, it’s also true that not every carrier or phone is available everywhere. There are places where you can’t get an iPhone, and places where you can only get a smartphone by using AT&T, Verizon or Sprint. Increasingly it’s looking like the worst fears of Net Neutrality advocates have come to mobile devices first.

Veteran FCC watchers are actually amazed at how fast Chairman Genachowski responded to the Google Voice iPhone story, since the agency isn’t known for quick action. Such responsiveness may be an indicator as to how critical the potential threat is to free and open communications, given the likelihood that soon more people will access the ‘net via a mobile device than with a PC.

We’ll be discussing this topic on Thursday’s mediageek radioshow with guest Tim Karr who recently blogged about the topic for Free press.

I want to know what you think: should the FCC or Congress step in to regulate mobile cellular and broadband networks and devices? Should the government act to limit handset exclusivity and curtail the power of Apple and AT&T to reject applications that might promote competition?

I’ll be reading your responses live on the radioshow. Send them to me three ways: comment on this post, send me an email (paul[at]mediageek[dot]net), or respond via twitter.

The radioshow airs live this Thursday at 9 PM Central time on WNUR 89.3 FM in Chicago and online at WNUR.org. If you’re listening live we’ll also be taking your calls at 847-866-9687. The following week you can listen to the podcast archive online or on any of the 13 other mediageek affiliate stations.

Making the HD Camcorder Leap with Sanyo’s Xacti VPC-CG10

Over the last three years I have not been shy about airing criticism of the newest wave of low-cost flash memory camcorders shooting alleged high-definition video. My critique has largely rested upon video quality being lower than established tape-based HDV camcorders and the difficulty of editing footage shot in the highly compressed AVCHD format.

The last time I posted on the topic was about a year ago when I took on Kodak’s entry into the field with the first HD camcorder priced under $200 the Zi6. I started to warm to the concept based upon the low price which then also makes higher quality videography more widely accessible. I never had a chance to get my hands on a Zi6 until very recently when I was in a store to check out a different model of inexpensive HD camcorder, which I’ll get to in a moment. The Zi6 takes on the Flip camcorder style form factor. That is, it’s shaped like a bar-style cellphone, with a lens on one side and a screen on the other. The controls are largely limited to record, stop and play with the intent to keep operation simple and easy.

Finally this year I began seriously to consider taking the plunge with one of these small HD camcorders. There were two motivations. First, I realized that I barely used my miniDV camcorder any more, bogged down by its relatively large size and the hassle of having to capture tapes in real-time. Second, I tried to make some videos using my digital camera. While the camera’s specs say it shoots video in a resolution equivalent to full standard definition DV (640×480) I found the resulting footage to be really lacking in quality. On top of that, the video files were recorded in a relatively inefficient and obsolete format.

Although the simplicity of the Flip-style camcorders hold some appeal for me, I’m really not sure I can be satisfied with their lack of manual adjustments, zoom and other basic camcorder settings. I recognize how the average user probably doesn’t care and doesn’t miss them, and that the Flip brand camcorders have succeeded because they deliver good video with absolute operational simplicity. But I’m a bit more of a power user than that.

Then I got wind of Sanyo’s newest and least expensive camcorder in their Xacti line, the VPC-CG10. I was enticed by both the price, under $200, and the fact that it has a real optical 5x zoom. Sanyo advertises the model as a “Dual Camera” because it is both a 10 megapixel still camera in addition to shooting 720p HD video. I learned that the Radio Shack near work had the Xacti and a few other low-cost HD cams in stock and stopped in on my way home to check them out.
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Cassettes Are a Weird Way to Distribute Music?

My, oh my, where has the time gone. Sure, cassettes might be nearly obsolete and decidedly retro. But weird?

Wired’s Epicenter blog recently compiled “10 Weird Ways to Distribute Music.” But, really, the list might be more accurately characterized as “10 Unique Ways,” rather than weird. Seems that some popular indie bands like Dirty Projectors are now releasing some albums on cassette again, making the format #8 on Wired’s list. At least blogger Eliot Van Buskirk had the good taste of linking to my somewhat tongue-in-cheek 2007 post titled, “Next Big Retro Thing: The Cassette Revival.”

Of course, distributing new music on cassettes stands out only because the format’s been largely abandoned by the mainstream. I emphasize new music because I’ve certainly seen cheap cassette compilations of country classics and oldies still turn up at truck stops and dollar stores. Cassette-only labels were an underground music fixture in the 80s and 90s due to both the low cost of doing limited edition releases and the relative ubiquity of cassette players.

While mostly overtaken by CD-Rs and downloadable MP3s, cassette labels have survived. Plustapes is a Chicago-based label putting out new independent music on cassette each in limited editions of a hundred or so. Earlier this year the music blog Expressway to My Skull compiled a list of active cassette-only labels and places to find them.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of releasing music on cassette is that it’s possible to record and duplicate albums entirely in the analog domain easily and cheaply without a computer. If you want to get fancy you can find a cassette four-track at a thrift or pawn shop so you have more recording and editing flexibility. Then get a dubbing deck and you’re set. It doesn’t have to be about analog fetishism — it can simply be about being cheap.

Perhaps the enduring charm of the cassette has to do with its fundamental nature as a recording medium that is very accessible, but imposes real practical limits on its duplication. It’s easy for nearly anyone to duplicate several dozen cassettes using inexpensive dubbing decks, but quantities of much more than that require commercial duplicating services. Like ‘zines, cassettes can be a near-mass medium, where you can reach hundreds with a work that the creator still fashioned and touched with her own hands.

Now that we can take for granted the ability to reach a nearly unlimited audience with a perfectly-duplicable MP3 file, there’s something to be said for a sound medium that can’t be had by anyone with a ‘net connection, that didn’t roll off an assembly line. It doesn’t have to be a case of internet vs. cassette; I think there’s room for both to coexist, even in symbiosis.