The Past, Present and Future Survival of Radio

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!

Some Great Radioshows Coming Up

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.