mediageek » radio

Dr. Laura lived by the market, died by the market

Paul — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 05:01:24 +0000

Please stop all the censoring!

As most radio enthusiasts have probably already heard, veteran talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger appeared on the Larry King Live program Tuesday night and announced that she would leave her show at the end of the contract. Schlessinger made the decision in response to growing flack over her repeated use of the so-called “n-word” with a black caller on the Aug. 10 edition of her program. The liberal media watchdog group Media Matters organized a swift and effective campaign calling attention to Dr. Laura’s remarks and joined with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Women’s Media Center, and UNITY Journalists of Color to “hold [the program's] advertisers accountable and find out exactly where they stand.”

In announcing her departure from the airwaves Dr. Laura put forth a curious interpretation of the Bill of Rights when she told King, “I don’t have the right to say what I need to say. My first amendment rights have been usurped.” Lest anyone be confused, the current state of US law and policy makes it perfectly legal for Dr. Laura to use the “n-word” and most other words in the English language on the radio. The only exceptions to this are in cases of indecency, which only pertains to discussing matters of sexual and excretory functions; racial, gender and other types of epithets are not policed by the FCC in any fashion.

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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Life Inc., Publishing and Radio

Paul — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 03:34:14 +0000

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.

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Happy 5th Birthday to Podcasting!

Paul — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:33:16 +0000

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.

Daily Source Code with Adam Curry

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 A-Infos Radio Project went online in 1996

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.

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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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KRXQ Loses National Advertisers For Broadcast Defaming Transgendered Children

Paul — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:21:16 +0000

Two days of contacting Sacramento rock station KRXQ’s advertisers regarding the station’s May 28 broadcast defaming and advocating abuse of transgendered children has gotten results. Chipotle Grill, Snapple and Sonic Drive-In have all pulled their ads from the station in response to the broadcast.

KRXQ general manager Jim Fox acknowledged to the Sacramento Bee that there have been some ad accounts canceled, but he wouldn’t say what the station would be doing in response. Well, one thing the station did was pull the list of advertisers that was on their website just a day ago. In this case, it’s Google Cache to the rescue (in case the cache expires, see the list after the jump).

I do have to thank Chipotle, Snapple and Sonic for doing the right thing by not ignoring this disgusting example of homophobia. But there are more advertisers who are still bankrolling this kind of defamation on KRXQ and elsewhere. And while these three companies decided to do the right thing, there is an economic element, too. My guess is that these three companies wisely realized that they would benefit by doing the right thing, earning or retaining more loyal customers. Perhaps more companies can be made to realize that continuing to fund hateful racist, misogynistic and homophobic programming on the radio will lose them customers and money.

While this broadcast of the Rob, Arnie & Dawn in the Morning stands out as particularly egregious because the target for the abuse was children, how many of the same advertisers sponsor Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and Glenn Beck, to name just a few? How uncomfortable can their advertisers be made?

It’s fundamentally a commercial system. But when we demonstrate that we won’t buy what the commercials are selling when they sponsor the continuation of on-air bigotry, maybe it won’t be so profitable.

These are KRXQ’s major advertisers as of June 3:

The New Chrysler
Griffin & Reed Eyecare
Pro City Mortgage
Attorney Debt Reset
Tobacco Republic
Delimex
State Farm Insurance
Albertson’s
Carl’s Jr.
Flex Your Power
Jared
Kragen Auto Parts
Nissan
Wells Fargo Bank
Orchard Supply Hardware
Guitar Center
Mc Donalds
Mervyn’s
Red Bull
Roseville Automall
Hot Tamales ICE
Breathe California – Emigrant Trails
Atlantis
Sacramento Stormwater
Quality Partnership
Bank of America
WyoTech
The Sleep Train
Purina
California Sun Centers
at&t
Black Bear Outdoors
Verizon Wireless
MMAFanShop.com
Harley Davidson of Amador County
Harley Davidson of Rocklin
Harley Davidon of Folsom
Smart & Final
UC Davis Health Care System
Tava
Scranton Law Firm
Washington Mutual
D.R. Horton
Cost-U-Less Insurance
Lennar Homes
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
Office of Problem Gambling
Roseville Hyundai

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On This Week’s Radioshow: German Experimental Radio

Paul — Wed, 20 May 2009 22:26:24 +0000

I’m excited this week to have as my guest Daniel Gilfillan, an associate professor of German studies and information literacy at Arizona State University, and author of the new book Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio. What’s interesting about this topic is how early German radio enthusiasts, scholars and producers sought to make that medium something more than a means for broadcasting light entertainment and, eventually, propaganda. In his book Gilfillan makes crucial connections between these early experiments and our contemporary multi-media world where we still stand in that disputed territory between producer and receiver.

This interview airs live on the mediageek radioshow this Thursday, May 21, at 9 PM Central Time on WNUR 89.FM in Chicago. You can tune in live online at wnur.org.

Before and during the program please send me your questions and comments via email (mediageek(at)gmail.com) or via Twitter, and I’ll read them on air.

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Indy Cops Promise No More Piracy

Paul — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 04:31:39 +0000

Last month I reported on news that Indianapolis cops were illegally using amateur radio transceivers in order to engage in communications with each other outside the normal police radio bands. The misuse came to light when the department took away their cops’ illicit radios.

Now, according to the amateur radio group ARRL, the Indianapolis PD assures the FCC that it has taken action to ensure that its officers will engage in radio piracy no more. The ARRL also reports that, “as part of its inquiry, the FCC reminded the IMPD of the large number of tactical channels available on a secondary basis to police departments from the public safety pool of frequency allocations.”

Yeah, but the FCC probably didn’t remind the offending officers that those additional “tactical channels” can be overheard by their commanders and probably aren’t so good for the private conversations full of naughty words they transmitted on the ham bands.

Maybe the Indy cops should just start Twittering.

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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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