radio
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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
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Building a Relationship Economy
In faith that nothing lasts forever, and that an institution that’s been around since 1636 is more likely to keep something published online for longer than one that was born in 1994 and isn’t quite dead yet (and with full appreciation to the latter for its continued existence), I’ve decided to re-publish some of my… Continue reading
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My podcasts of choice
As a follow-up to what I wrote earlier today, here are my own favorite podcasts, in the order they currently appear in my phone’s podcast apps: Radio Open Source (from itself) Bill Simmons (on The Ringer) Fresh Air (from WHYY via NPR) JJ Reddick & Tommy Alter (from ThreeFourTwo) The Mismatch (on The Ringer) The New… Continue reading
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A half-century of NPR
NPR, which turned 50 yesterday, used to mean National Public Radio. It still does, at least legally; but they quit calling it that in 2010. The reason given was “…most of our audience — more than 27 million listeners to NPR member stations and millions more who experience our content on NPR.org and through mobile… Continue reading
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On the persistence of KPIG
On Quora, William Moser asked, Would the KPIG radio format of Americana—Folk, Blugrass, Delta to modern Blues, Blues-rock, trad. & modern C&W, country & Southern Rock, jam-bands, singer/songwriters, some jazz, big-band & jazz-singers sell across markets in America? I answered, I’ve liked KPIG since its prior incarnation as KFAT.I’ve liked KPIG since its prior incarnation as… Continue reading
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A toast to the fools standing high on broadcasting’s hill
In Winter, the cap of dark on half the Earth is cocked to the north. So, as the planet spins, places farther north get more night in the winter. In McGrath, Alaska, at close to sixty-three degrees north, most of the day is dark. This would be discouraging to most people, but to Paul B.… Continue reading
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Radio 2.x
On Quora, somebody asks, How can the radio industry stay relevant in the age of streaming music and podcasts? Here’s my answer: It already is, if you consider streaming music and podcasting evolutionary forms of radio. But if you limit the meaning of radio to over-the-air broadcasting, the relevance will be a subordinate one to what’s happening… Continue reading