radio
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On the frontier of caring
Adopt a Station is a way to compensate for the funding lost to US public radio stations when the CPB shut down. No state is more dependent on public radio, or hurt by lost CPB funding, than Alaska. Here is a table of all the stations there, with graphs showing how much lost funding they… Continue reading
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New Life for LIVE
Colbert’s cancellation looks political, but it’s not. The show was a ratings winner, but a money loser. And the ratings for all of late night, like all of live TV, have been in decline for decades, along with the question, “What’s on?” We live in the Age of Optionality now. Watch or listen to whatever… Continue reading
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The Eagle in the Coal Mine
Public broadcasting is the strongest form of broadcasting that’s still left. One reason is that it’s the only form of broadcasting for which its consumers are also its customers. Yes, not all those customers pay, but the market is there. If you donate to public radio or television stations, or to public radio programs and… Continue reading
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Thursday, 17 July 2025
An incomplete waste of time. New colors without shooting lasers into your eyes. No shit. Machine Bullshit: Characterizing the Emergent Disregard for Truth in Large Language Models is a scientific paper by four authors from Princeton and two from UC Berkeley. A pull-quote: "While previous work has explored large language model (LLM) hallucination and sycophancy, we… Continue reading
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Wednesday, 16 July 2025
Want a weather show? Look at this: Bet it’s about liability and arbitration. T-Mobile just texted me this: T-Mobile: We’ve updated our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Notices. Get the details and learn about your options in the Privacy Dashboard at secure.t-mobile.com/terms I can’t log on, and doing the password reset thing is a PITA, so I… Continue reading
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Wednesday , 9 July 2025
Not that you'll listen. Thank this guy for keeping AM radios in new Ford cars. Another small step away from the open Web. On a radio show sponsored by a podcast of another show, the announcement said the sponsoring show was available on "your favorite podcast app," rather than the usual "wherever you get your… Continue reading
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Tuesday, 8 July, 2025
Book burning in our time. Two places to look for what's happened to science and other do-gooding programs since government research programs that smelled woke got defunded: Columbia Law School's Silencing Science Tracker, and this piece by RealKM. Some clues. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, The Cluetrain Manifesto says. (In its 7th of 85 theses.) A corollary might… Continue reading
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Tuesday, 1 July, 2025
I was overheard to have said… Doc Searls on Reloading the Intention Economy: Your Data, Your AI, Your Terms, by Nico Fara, of The Immergence podcast. Just some perspective. I just removed this from a post I’ve been writing: Walt Whitman put the profundity of human life in a kind of perspective when he said, “and I… Continue reading
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Saturday, June 28, 2025
Obsession persists. I’ll never stop being a radio guy, no matter how much listening “what’s on” goes down, and radio itself becomes as anachronistic as steam engines. This is why, five years ago, I wrote on Quora how cars saved radio when TV got huge in the 1950s. And now I have just learned, from… Continue reading
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The Offing of What’s On
For the final seven decades of the last millennium, most people in the developed world scheduled their evenings by answering a simple question: What’s on? For the first two of those decades, the question was “What’s on the radio?” For the next five, it was “What’s on TV?” Guidance toward answers were provided on newspaper… Continue reading
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Re-reading Material
On our new digital age:Some New Ways to Look at Infrastructure was the first draft ofWhat does the Internet make of us?, but is worth reading because the stuff about infrastructure mattered and was dropped in the second piece. (2017)Will Our Digital Lives Leave a Fossil Record? (2020)How early is Digital Life? (2020) On the decline… Continue reading
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TGI-Fi
Whole Lotta Badshit Going On. The latest 404 has a weekend worth of it. Surprised this one didn't come sooner. Want the feds to stop funding public broadcasting? Fine. There's an argument for that. (I made one, way back in 2008.) But bias, which is everywhere (because the voice from nowhere is insincere and boring),… Continue reading
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It’s Over
The Voice of America is silent. To Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Kari Lake (who now runs its corpse), the VOA was corrupt, biased, unnecessary, and needed to go. To nearly everyone else who cares, it was America’s voice on radio, and mattered enormously to an audience in the hundreds of millions, listening in forty-eight… Continue reading
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Radio’s Death Knells
The radio station known since 1935 as KSFO, “The Sound of the City,” was a landmark at 560 on the Bay Area radio dial for most of the last century. Other AM landmarks were KGO/810, KCBS/740, KFRC/610, and KNBR/680. KFRC went away in 2005, as religious programming moved to 610 AM from 106.9 FM, and… Continue reading
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Don’t Buy This
Every so often a product shows up that is so bad somebody needs to sound a warning. So I’m sounding one for the Ion Retro Glow. For the last month or so, it’s been on display and selling at the Sams Club here in Bloomington, Indiana. That’s where I shot the photo above. At first I… Continue reading
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Los Angeles Fires and Aftermath
Nineteenth in the News Commons series Third on the #LAfires 6:50am Friday, January 10, 2025—I will now shift my blogging about the #LAFires from the kind of continuous coverage I’ve done for the last three days to what we might call coverage of coverage. Or something beyond that: shifting to a new kind of news… Continue reading
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When Radio Delivers
Helene was Western North Carolina‘s Katrina—especially for the counties surrounding Asheville: Buncombe, Mitchell, Henderson, McDowell, Rutherford, Haywood, Yancey, Burke, and some adjacent ones in North Carolina and Tennessee. As with Katrina, the issue wasn’t wind. It was flooding, especially along creeks and rivers. Most notably destructive were the Swannanoa River and French Broad River, which… Continue reading
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The End of What’s On
But not of who, how, and why. Start by looking here: That’s a page of TV Guide, a required resource in every home with a TV, through most of the last half of the 20th century. Every program was on only at its scheduled times. Sources were called stations, which broadcast over the air on… Continue reading
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Ripples
The song “Ripple,” by the Grateful Dead, never fails to move me. Here’s a live performance by the Dead, in 1980, on YouTube. My favorite version, however, is this one by KPIG’s Fine Swine Orchestra, recorded by Santa Cruz musicians sheltering in place during the pandemic. That’s a screen grab, above. I am pretty sure… Continue reading
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A look at broadcast history happening
When I was a kid in the 1950s and early 1960s, AM was the ruling form of radio, and its transmitters were beyond obvious, taking the form of towers hundreds of feet high, sometimes in collections arranged to produce signals favoring some directions over others. These were landmarks out on the edges of town, or… Continue reading