Author: Paul

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…

The Lip Magazine Collective has an article up by my friend Ron Sakolsky, a scholar of music, revolution and radio, called “The LPFM Fiasco: Micropower Radio & the FCC’s Low Power Trojan Horse.” Ron is also a member of the Springfield, IL Media Activist Coalition (MAC), which is working with others in Springfield to start…

Thanks to Slashdot, I found this informal essay on “What’s Wrong With Content Protection” by John Gilmore of the Electronic Freedom Foundation. Beyond the clear problems, like the fact that content protection disallows legal copying of media that you own, Gilmore points out that content protections, like SDMI have a chilling effect on the creation…

The Urbana Independent Media Center Open House last night went amazingly well. Random spot check head counts indicated that at several points in the evening we had around 70-80 people on the premises, and since lots of people just filtered through (though many stayed for quite some time), the total attendance was surely close to…

On Sunday’s show (1/21), I’ll have highlights from the Washington D.C. IMC’s live streaming radio coverage of the inauguration and anti-inauguration protests on Saturday.