Month: June 2002

More on why radio sucks. I stumbled on this article on CNN that takes a quick look at the slide in listener satisfaction with radio and it’s fall from the experimental and artistic heyday of the late 60s and early 70s. At the end it looks to the new satellite services like XM as a…

The webcasting royalty rates as set by the Copyright Office are out, and, as one might suspect, nobody is happy with them. The recording industry says they’re too low, the small webcasters say they’re too high. I haven’t had a chance to investigate this myself yet, but it seems that in general the indie opinion…

Traveling Radio Horror Stories When taking car trips I used to listen mostly to tapes, CDs and minidiscs, since so much radio across the country sounds the same after a few hundred miles. But these days I listen to the radio much more, almost as a challenge to see if I can find something I…

Check-In from the UPC I’m here in Bowling Green at a public access computer in a dorm after a day of sessions and walking around. I went to two sessions today, one on publishing an indpendent newspaper and one on stencil/graffitti art. After the newspaper session folks who publish indy newspapers got together and hammered…

I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire at work, then leaving town for a memorial service and then the UPC in Bowling Green (OH). So that means not much mediageek action for the next five days or so. To tide you over — USA Today reports that, “In a delay that seems to…

The Madison, WI Indymedia Center is up and running in a temporary physical space to cover the U.S. Conference of Mayors in that city. This is the smallest city the conference has ever been held in and protestors, activists and all sorts of other people have shown up to show the mayors what’s on their…

And speaking of About.com, Wired News reports that a class-action lawsuit has been filed against the company by former guides (aka page editors) who claim that the company unfairly reduced the page-view counts based upon which they were paid, and also has kept content up long after guides have resigned, in violation of their copyrights…

John Anderson, formerly of the Pirate Radio Page at About.com, is back on-line with his new site, DIYmedia.net. He’s got some low-power FM news and is working on getting his library of useful information and news archive up at the new site.

Keep Current with Non-commercial Broadcasting — Current Online, the web component of the public radio journal, has added a weblog to their front page (it’s in the right-hand column). I’ve found Current to be a good resource for keeping current with non-comm broadcasting trends and news and I think the weblog is a very useful…

Enormous radio conglomerate Infinity Communications was slapped with an indecency fine by the FCC today for airing completely moronic garbage sexualizing young and teenage girls. I tend to be of two mind regarding indecency regulations, since they can be (ab)used to silence unpopular speech that gets labeled indecent because it offends those in power. But…