New Year, New Geek

Zen and the geek of photography.

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.

Mediageek Radioshow Notes for April 9, 2009

I’m going to try and get back in the saddle with posting show notes for each week’s radioshow so that listeners can check out some of the news items and other relevant stuff that comes up during the show. Since the show is produced live, often featuring live guests, I’ll be treating these posts as dynamic documents. This means I’ll add links to stuff that comes up spontaneously during the show after the live broadcast is over, and maybe even after the podcast version is posted.

So, here’s the notes for the April 9, 2009 edition of the radioshow (now online):

Bloomberg – Todd Shields: FCC Head Says Agency Should Reconsider Newspaper Ownership Rule

Huffington Post – Jeff Jarvis To Newspaper Moguls: You Blew It

ArsTechnica – Julian Sanchez: AP launches campaign against Internet “misappropriation”

FCC’s Press Release on National Broadband Plan (PDF).

FCC’s Notice of Inquiry on National Broadband Plan (PDF).

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

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.

On this week’s radioshow: White Spaces Are Go!

On this week’s radioshow I’ll be speaking with Tim Karr, Campaign Director at Free Press and a contributor to the Huffington Post. We discuss the Tuesday vote at the FCC approving the use of white spaces for wireless broadband, along with a brief look at what an Obama White House means for media reform.

The show airs live tonight, Thursdays, 9 – 10 PM Central time on WNUR 89.3 FM Evanston-Chicago, IL and online at WNUR.org. You can catch it on Friday at 5:30 PM on Community Radio WEFT 90.1 FM in Champaign-Urbana, IL, which also has a live stream.

If you can’t catch the live streams, the show will be available at the radioshow website this weekend, and airs on thirteen other community stations next week.

Post-First-WNUR-Show Recap

Just finished my first hour-long mediageek on the mighty WNUR. We had some phone system troubles during the first 10 minutes or so. First I couldn’t hear my guest, John, then he couldn’t hear me. But the very able producer/engineer Andrew figured out the glitch and got us up and working for the balance of the hour.

This is the first live show I’ve done since March and it reminds me how much I love live radio. I’m not a perfectionist, so I can roll with the little tech glitches. In fact, I think they remind the listeners that there’s a real human being working in real time behind the mic. Not a patchwork of pre-recorded segments with the occasional live break to give the time, traffic and weather on the eights.

For April through last week I’ve been recording the show podcast style in my home office on my MacBook. And while that provides a little more control, in that environment I find it hard to be inspired, nevermind focused and concise. It’s a matter of personality and preference I’m sure. But I started with live radio in college back in 1989 and that’s pretty much all I’ve ever done since. Certainly many of my interviews are pre-recorded because a lot of guests aren’t easily available during the live show time. But at least with another person on the line it’s a lot more spontaneous and lively.

So while the rise of podcasting and the easy access to high quality recording tools has leveled the playing field for people to produce their own radio-like programming, I am still convinced there is no substitute for a live multi-kilowatt transmitter. Perhaps live webcasting comes close–especially in terms of spontaneity–but the reach of a WNUR in terms of broadcast listenership could bankrupt someone with bandwidth bills on the ‘net.

Despite the minor glitches the WNUR studios are the nicest I’ve had the opportunity to work in and truly blow away most commercial stations aside from the major market leaders. And the staff at WNUR are a great bunch, and I’m having a great time getting to know them. It’s a true student run station–a dying breed, as we discussed on tonight’s show–and the students proudly put on an independent, challenging, independent and interesting set of programming.

And a big thanks must go out to Andrew Gothelf who stepped up and volunteered to assist with mediageek as soon as the show got scheduled one week ago. I’m looking forward to his contributions to the program.

Catching Up

It seems like all of my available mediageek energy has been poured into the radioshow lately, the result of having a firm weekly commitment to dozen stations. Were the radioshow a non-broadcast podcast I’m not so certain I would be so diligent.

At least I can say that I’ve had a couple of great guests recently that you really should check out if you haven’t already listened to the shows.

Faythe Levine was my guest on August 22 where we talked about her upcoming documentary film and book, both named Handmade Nation. The project’s nice new website just went online. Faythe was also featured in today’s New York Times Home section in an article looking at the DIY craft phenomenon and connecting it to her own home design. She scanned in the print article to her Flickr site.

One of the hardest working folks in the media reform, Gigi Sohn, was last week’s guest. Gigi is the executive director of Public Knowledge, a public interest group that does great work on issues like spectrum use and preservation, intellectual property and broadcast ownership. On this show we talked about the FCC’s recent sanctions against Comcast, and why that decision deserves recognition as an historical moment in the modern media reform movement.

I have another interesting interview slated for this week’s radioshow, too. My friend Sarah Kanouse will tell us about Voices of America, a participatory radio remix project she put together along with Lee Azzarello of free103point9. You can listen live to the show when it first airs on community radio WEFT 90.1 FM in Champaign, IL on Friday at 5:30 PM CDT, either over the airwaves or over the internet. It will be available online at the radioshow page shortly thereafter.

May 2 Radioshow Notes & Links

Links and notes related to the May 2 mediageek radioshow:

• FCC Proceeding on localism: http://www.fcc.gov/localism
• Public Knowledge’s Orphan Works Act page: http://www.publicknowledge.org/issues/ow
• Matthew Lasar’s Ars Technica article: NPR’s war on Low Power FM: the laws of physics vs. politics

You can read the full test of the show’s news headlines after the jump.
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