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!

Spinning Indie, a College Radio Blog

Paul — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 05:38:43 +0000

Once in a while I get comments here on the mediageek blog, and it’s especially great when they aren’t grammatically disastrous ads for v1agrA. So imagine how glad I was to receive a comment on my post about college radio from Jennifer Waits, who writes the Spinning Indie blog which is all about college radio.

Jennifer is on a mission to visit or do virtual visits and interviews with college stations in all 50 states, and it makes for great reading. Apparently she made an in-person visit to my backyard at WNUR last month, interviewing the general manager, Taylor Dearr. I’m sorry I wasn’t around for her visit.

Thanks to Jennifer’s virtual tours I’m learning about lots of stations I’d really never heard of that are bringing great radio to places like Fargo, Fairbanks and Stony Brook. It’s helpful to be reminded of the common challenges that college and noncommercial stations face, whether it’s managing music libraries or the vagaries of streaming, and possibly picking up some new approaches.

I hope Jennifer keeps up the posting.

mediageek » spinning indie

The Past, Present and Future Survival of Radio

Spinning Indie, a College Radio Blog