Month: January 2001

Community Radio WEFT is holding a special meeting and teach-in on the ongoing travails at Pacifica this Thursday, Feb. 1, at 7:00 PM at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, at the Northwest corner of Springfield and Wright in Champaign (IL). The meeting is sponsored by the WEFT Associates, which is the democratic body of the station’s…

My e-mail has been all a-flutter today with details of the news that Juan Gonzalez, co-host of Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now, has resigned in protest of the crackdown by Pacifica management on free speech at the network’s program and forced management changes at Pacifica’s NYC station WBAI, where Democracy Now originates. Gonzalez tendered his resignation…

A story that is representative of the massive consolidation and homogenization that is ongoing in the radio industry: the NY Times reports on the sale of commercial classical music station WNIB in Chicago to Bonneville Communications for $167million. Largely run as a labor of love, the station is likely to be changed to pop music…

To get an industry-centric view on the Time Warner/AOL merger, check out the Industry Standard’s in-depth reporting they call “AOL TW’s New World Order”. I’ll comment on it after I get a chance to digest it.

Salon has an absolutely hysterical interview with the strangely astutely observant Lloyd Kauffman, founder and president of Troma Films, the last of the real independent low-budget movie studios. I include this link because no matter what you think of Troma’s films (and I think they’re usually pretty funny and occasionally brilliant) I think you have…

The January issue of Toward Freedom magazine features highlights and excerpts from the Building Independent Media conference, apparently held last year in Burlington, VT. Unfortunately, somehow I never even heard about this conference or knew it existed. It’s too bad, ’cause it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d like to go to.

I didn’t want this mention to get lost in the mini-essay below — The Media Alliance’s Media-File that features Andrea Buffa’s article also features a special section that asks the question: “What does media democracy look like?” This is a critical question for our time, both because of the problems in national civic democracy, but…

Contemplating the Progressive and Alternative Media: Andrea Buffa, of the Media Alliance, has written a nice article attempting to formulate a way to assess the progressive media, entitled “National Progressive Media: Who’s Left?” She explores the important point that the traditional media assessment tool of audience size is not necessarily useful or consistent for evaluating…

Yet more on new FCC head Michael Powell: Wired News has an article examining Powell’s desire to limit the FCC’s power. The article quotes Andrew Schwartzman, president of Media Access Project, who raises concerns with Powell’s approach to mergers, in addition to his opposition to low-power FM. Schwartzman says that Powell “has a very crimped…

It’s official, Michael Powell, son of Gen. Colin, is the new head of the FCC. (Click here for News.com article, Click here for NY Times article.) Powell is very much a free marketeer, and has generally opposed low-power FM. Yet, I’m hard pressed to see how opposing having more radio stations and creating more opportunity…