mediageek » mediageek status

Blogs still rule

Paul — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 03:54:18 +0000

After publishing my post on Network Awesome I received a nice “thank you” email from the site’s founder, Jason Forrest. Jason is an electronic musician who has also worked under the name “Donna Summer” and has held down an on-air shift at the legendary freeform station WFMU.

He agreed to do an email interview with me and so I sent along my questions. I hope to hear back from him soon so I can share his responses.

Sometimes I forget how blogging can help connect people with similar interests. Sure, I might have heard from Jason if I’d only tweeted about Network Awesome (and I did), or posted on facebook (yep, that too) or posted on a discussion forum (nope, didn’t do that). But a blog post still wields a bit more weight. First off, it’s less ephemeral than a tweet, which is mostly lost after a week or two. Furthermore, a blog is longer-form, so you can more fully develop an idea, with richer examples and links than 140 characters or a facebook status update permit.

Twenty years ago folks into retro TV shows might have been able to meet via zines, but it would certainly take longer, with correspondence happening over snail mail. With a blog someone can find you with a simple Google search. Or if you’re writing about someone else’s website, they might find you by checking their referral logs, which list all the sites that referred readers to a site.

In any event, this nice little happenstance further encourages me to keep up with my blogging resumption here at mediageek.

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What I’ve Been Up To Elsewhere

Paul — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:23:14 +0000

It looks like my challenge for 2010 is to see how many simultaneous writing projects I can keep up. What I’m learning so far is that the projects involving other people seem to gain my attention better than my nine-year-old blog here. Also, I enrolled in distance education certificate program that is also soaking up quite a few hours a week.

However, if you’re interested here’s some of the things I’ve written recently elsewhere.

At Radio Survivor I’ve discussed two of my favorite commercial radio stations, WDHA and WXRT. Yes, despite my undying loyalty to college, community and public radio, there have been a few commercial stations that rise above and make it into my radios once in a while.

Of particular interest to the typical mediageek reader should be my report on the fifty-nine new noncommerical radio licenses the FCC recently issued. Interestingly, five of these licenses went to current low-power FM stations.

I’ve stepped up my output for Streaming Media Magazine and StreamingMedia.com, trying to cover more stories related to video in education. My new biweekly series is called Video.edu. The first first edition I covered UCLA pulling streaming videos after receiving a legal threat and changes to educational technology funding in Obama’s 2011 budget. In the second one I wrote about the library copyright alliance defending educational streaming of copyrighted video and a Yale admissions video that’s gone viral.

My two most recent magazine columns are a 2009 year-in-review of video in education and a rumination on where is the teaching video camera of today.

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New Year, New Geek

Paul — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:14:10 +0000

Zen and the geek of photography.

Happy New Year, one week into the decade.

2009 was a rough year for the mediageek blog. I haven’t done an official count or anything, but I reckon that this year had fewer posts than any previous. I mean, I didn’t post anything new from Oct. 4 through Dec. 28, for Pete’s sake!

2010 brings changes for the mediageek world. The most significant is the end of the mediageek radioshow. The last episode aired live on New Year’s Eve and is online now. The final program was actually more than an hour long as it went to air, assisted with my great friend and frequent guest, John Anderson of DIYmedia.net. A (mostly) unedited version of the whole broadcast will go up on the radioshow website this coming Sunday. Tonight is my first Thursday evening without a radioshow to do (since Sept. 2008 the show was produced live on Thursdays at 9 pm on WNUR-FM).

Ending the radioshow was a difficult decision to make, but one that I feel good in making. After seven years in production I am proud of the shows I was able to produce, the topics I was able to cover and, especially, the fantastically interesting people I has the pleasure to interview. For as long as I am able I will keep the archives online for posterity, history and the benefit of the random googler.

I ended the show for many reasons, as I’ve explained on the program, with the primary one being that the weekly time commitment of 10 – 20 hours has really started to wear me down. On top of that, I feel like I can not keep up on the media policy and reform beat like I once did. Too many other things–including work–compete for my attention, and there is so much more information to keep track of. When I started the blog in 2000 and the radioshow in 2002 there was much less awareness of media policy, in general, and many fewer website, blogs and other outlets covering. I’m quite glad to say that the situation is very different today, even if the amount of radio coverage has grown only a little bit.

With the nearly 20 hours a week I’m reclaiming I want to do more writing. I want to kick things up here at the mediageek blog, and, especially over at the Radio Survivor blog. Radio Survivor was the idea of my co-blogger Matthew Lasar, and it’s dedicated to the passion and tough love for the medium of radio, on the air, on satellite and online. I am so lucky to be in his company along with our third co-blogger, Jennifer Waits, who is the foremost chronicler of college radio at the Spinning Indie blog. Writing for RadioSurvivor this year reminded me how powerful and enjoyable blogging can be. As I enter my second decade of blogging, I needed the kind of kick in the pants that comes from working alongside other super-talented bloggers.

Although I don’t mention it here very much, I also do some freelance writing for Streaming Media magazine. I write there about educational video online. This is a topic I’m quite passionate about, on top of it being my day job. I’m planning to write more about the use of video to enhance, democratize and improve education at Streaming Media and here at mediageek.

But don’t expect mediageek to become all about educational media. I’m still very passionate about media justice and democracy, along with the democratization of media production and access. These interests coincide with education quite well, I think. So the mediageek blog will continue to be a venue for me to write about these aspects of media. That includes posts about gear–like cameras and camcorders–along with posts about our media environment.

So, off we go into a new decade of blogging. Hope you’ll come along for the ride.

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The Past, Present and Future Survival of Radio

Paul — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:07:36 +0000

The mediageek radioshow‘s informal multi-week focus on the medium of radio wraps up this Thursday with guest Jerry Del Colliano. For 28 years he published the radio industry newsletter Inside Radio, was clinical professor of the music industry at the University of Southern California and now publishes the blog Inside Music Media. Del Colliano had a unique vantage point to watch the consolidation and downfall of commercial radio, and he saw it coming. Now on his blog he documents the foundering of Clear Channel and other major broadcasters while forecasting the future of music media, with or without radio.

Tune in this Thursday June 18 at 9 PM CDT to 89.3 FM WNUR in Chicago on your analog radio or listen online at wnur.org. Of course the show will be available for podcast and download by Sunday at midnight at the radioshow site.

Continuing on the radio tip, I would like to now announce that I’ve embarked on a new group blog project focused on radio, along with two other collaborators who are both astute observers of the medium. The new blog is RadioSurvivor.com. My collaborators are the dogged FCC watcher, media historian and Ars Technica writer Matthew Lasar and Jennifer Waits, the woman behind the Spinning Indie blog and an expert on the history and vital role of college radio.

Our goal with the RadioSurvivor is to provide comprehensive coverage of radio from a variety of perspectives, from policy and regulation to technology and programming. We’re fans of radio and believe strongly in its viability as a medium with a future, despite the major commercial owners doing their best to run their stations into the ground.

Taking on RadioSurvivor doesn’t mean I’ll post here less. In fact, I think this will spur me to incorporate some new topics into the mediageek blog while I publish my more radio-centric material at RadioSurvivor.

Being a group blog our plan is to make sure RadioSurvivor has lots of fresh content every week — more than any one of us can do on our own. I hope you’ll check it out. Your comments are welcome!

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Some Great Radioshows Coming Up

Paul — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:42:12 +0000

On Friday I recorded a phone interview with Jerry Del Colliano who is furiously documenting the death throes of commercial radio at his blog, Inside Music Media. However, that’s a shallow characterization of what Jerry is up to. As you’ll hear on the June 11 mediageek radioshow, Jerry has been way ahead of the curve not just on the destructive effects of consolidation, but also in seeing the need for radio to adapt to the new networked world and the generation that grew up taking the ‘net for granted.

I really enjoyed talking with Jerry. The man has a deep love for radio, but such an instinctive bullshit detector that he can’t also help but see that the medium is on the downslide. You should not miss this interview on June 11.

But first we’ll be laying some of the groundwork on June 4 with an interview with Alec Foege, author of Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Decline of Commercial Radio, now out in paperback. I’ve discussed Clear Channel quite a bit here on the blog and on the radioshow over the last seven years, but Alec’s research into the history of this once-little Texas broadcast company really helps illustrate the wrong turn the entire commercial radio industry took.

On this Thursday’s show, May 28, I’m glad that Diane Farsetta from the Center for Media and Democracy will be joining me again. We’ll be talking about some of the recent lowlights perpetrated by the public relations industry, and how the industry is salivating at the opportunities it has to take advantage of the current crisis in journalism.

The mediageek radioshow airs live every Thursday at 9 PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM in Evanston-Chicago, IL, streaming live at wnur.org. The program is available every Monday for streaming and download at radio.mediagek.net and is heard on 13 other affiliate stations across North America.

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Mediageek Radioshow Notes for April 16, 2009

Paul — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:28:58 +0000

On this week’s show we led with Streetwise‘s financial troubles, listening to an excerpt of the Feb. 5 interview with Production and Marketing Director Ben Cook and Editor-in-Chief Suzanne Haney. Streetwise is receiving only about $60,000 of the typical $120,000 it gets in foundation support. We made note of a recent New York Times article that reported on other street newspapers doing comparatively well in this rotten economy.

Most of the rest of the show was dedicated to Time-Warner Cable announcement today (April 16) that it was going to hold off on “testing” bandwidth caps in Austin, San Antonio, Rochester, NY and Greensboro, NC. There’s lots of good reporting on the issue over at Ars Technica.

The podcast will be available this weekend.

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On Thursday’s Radioshow: New LPFM Bill & Journalism Town Hall

Paul — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 05:06:10 +0000

Another new Congress, another new low-power FM bill. In what’s become a tradition since Congress voted to stunt the growth of low-power radio back in 2000, a new Local Community Radio Act has been introduced. But this time around the bill arguably has the best chance of passing yet. We’ll hear from some of the bill’s sponsors and proponents.

Then we’ll hear some excerpts from the Chicago Journalism Town Hall that brought together a diverse panel and audience to discuss the future of local journalism.

The mediageek radioshow airs live Thursday night at 9 PM CST on WNUR 89.3 FM in Chicago, IL, and streaimng live online at wnur.org. The podcast will be posted this weekend.

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On Tonight’s Radio Show: The Value of Retro & Vintage Technology

Paul — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:45:00 +0000

On tonight’s radioshow my guest with be Bohus Blahut, one of the bloggers behind the popular Retro Thing blog which tracks vintage gadgets and technology. It’s a site I’ve been reading for a couple of years not just because I have my own love for vintage tech, but because I think there’s value in holding on to, preserving and finding continual usefulness in the tools and gadgets which the mainstream consumer products industry would have us believe need to be tossed out and replaced.

Bohus lives in Chicago, so he’ll be live in the studio which gives us an opportunity to take some calls in the second half of the show. If you’re in the Chicago area, listen live at 9 PM CST on WNUR 89.3 FM, or tune in online (live stream). The studio line is 847-866-WNUR (9687). If you miss the live airing, catch it online at the radioshow website, or any of the show’s affiliate stations like WRFA, Jamestown, NY and WTND, Macomb, IL.

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Talkin’ Genachowski, FCC Heir Apparent, on Thursday’s radioshow

Paul — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:34:12 +0000

Ace FCC watcher Matthew Lasar will be my guest on this week’s radioshow to talk about the new FCC Chairman apparent, Julius Genachowski. Matthew will lay some knowledge about Genachowski’s past and help us polish the crystal ball to see what communications future this cat will bring us.

Tune in to the show live at 9 PM CST, Thursday, Jan. 15 on WNUR 89.3 FM Evanston-Chicago, IL, live stream at wnur.org. Or you can catch the archive later at radio.mediageek.net or on any of the other 15 stations that carry the program, like KWMD, 90.7 FM Kasilof, AK & 104.5 Anchorage, AK or Radio Free Moscow, KRFP 92.5 FM, Moscow, ID.

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On this week’s radioshow: The Falsies

Paul — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 05:13:17 +0000

There is pollution in the radio environment, and there are polluters. For the last five years the Center for Media Democracy has bestowed a special award on those who pile it high and deep — the Falsies. On tomorrow night’s radioshow][/caption] I’ll be talking with Senior Researcher, Diane Farsetta, who will tell us more about this years lose…. er, winners, including the first ever recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Falsie.

Tune in live at 9 PM CST to WNUR 89.3 FM in Chicago or online at wnur.org (live 128kbps stream). The show will be available at the radioshow page this weekend.

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