radio
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March Madness and Radio’s Future
March Madness for me this year was a double treat. First, my team, the Duke Blue Devils, won the championship. (Though my heart went out to Butler, which came within inches of winning at the buzzer on a half-court shot.) Second, I got to follow the Devils, and North Carolina Basketball in general, on WDNC.… Continue reading
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Radio gets personal
The great Larry Josephson — to me the best radio host ever (he was real and honest and funny and groundbreaking and smart long before Howard Stern was the same, and I am a serious Howard fan too) — once explained his radio philosophy to me in two words: It’s personal. From the beginning we… Continue reading
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A modest revenue proposal to the BBC
I love BBC domestic programming (such as Radio 4, which I have to dig to find on the BBC website if I’m coming in from a non-UK IP address, as I am now), and would like to pay as much for it as any UK citizen does through taxes. Let’s say we come up with… Continue reading
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The Past and Future of Radio
It’s so odd to look at the list of radio station ratings for Raleigh-Durham. When I left in ’85 I was out of radio, but still deeply into it, and I could tell you something about every signal you could pick up there. Now I know squat. So many of the stations have changed owners,… Continue reading
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Looking up for noncommercial radio
For most of radio’s history, at least in the U.S., ratings “books” ignored noncommercial stations. Commercial radio shares never added up to 100%. Usually the total was around 87%, give or take. In the market where I spent the most years caring about this stuff — Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, back in the late ’70s and early… Continue reading
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What’s right with Wikipedia?
“I make my living off the Evening News Just give me something: something I can use People love it when you lose They love dirty laundry. — Don Henley, “Dirty Laundry” Look up “Wikipedia loses” (with the quotes) and you get 20,800 results. Look up “Wikipedia has lost” and you get 56,900. (Or at least… Continue reading
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WGBH and public radio’s future
@robpatrob (Robert Paterson) asks (responding to this tweet and this post) “Why would GBH line up against BUR? Why have a war between 2 Pub stations in same city?” (In this tweet and this one, Dan Kennedy asks pretty much the same thing.) The short answer is, Because it wouldn’t be a war. Boston is… Continue reading
Art, Berkman, Business, Future, Ideas, infrastructure, Journalism, Live Web, music, News, Past, problems, radio“Robert Paterson”, AM, Berkman Center, BUR, Cambridge, channel 2, Chris Lydon, Dan Kennedy, FM, GBH, iphone, ipods, Morning Edition, music, Open Source, PRX, public radio, radio, The Takeaway, traffic, uhf, WBUR, WGBH -
WGBH/WCRB go the way of WNYC/WQXR
The longest thread in the history of this blog belongs to Why WQXR is better off as a public radio station, which I posted on July 26, and still has comments this month. The post followed a complex deal by which the New York Times divested its legacy classical music station, WQXR — and by… Continue reading
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Cluetrainings
Had a great time mixing it up with the BlogTalkRadio folks a couple nights ago, talking Cluetrain after 10 years. Here’s the show. Big thanks to Allan Hoving for lining up and co-hosting it with Janet Fouts and Jim Love. Janet tweeted it live. Afterwards Jim put up a very interesting follow-up post, in the… Continue reading
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Will LPFMs go mostly to evangelical christian broadcasters?
Looks like legislation opening up the FM band to more LPFM (low power FM) stations is moving through Congress. While Prometheus Radio celebrates, I gotta wonder if Calvary Chapel of Everywhere isn’t going to gobble a lot of those new licenses up. Since I can’t link directly to results (they’re from a database search, and… Continue reading
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Urban radio moves into white space
There’s something new on the FM dial in Boston. You might think of it as a kind of urban renewal. Grass roots, up through the pavement. (There’s a pun in there, but you need to read on to get it.) You might say that fresh radio moved in where stale TV moved out. Here’s some… Continue reading
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Good broadcasting sports
I like sports, and I enjoy sports talk radio. That’s one reason I have five car radio buttons set on stations carrying games or sports talk: four on AM (WRKO/680, WEEI/850, WAMG/890, WZZN/1510) and one on FM (WBZ-FM/98.5). The other is that sports talk is about 50% advertising, so I like to punch around. But… Continue reading
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Los Angeles Wildfire Links and Coverage
Just arrived at my house in Santa Barbara after a long drive down from Monterey. Most of the way I listened to live coverage of the Station Fire on KNX/1070, both through the car radio (KNX has a huge signal that covers the whole southwest at night) and online over my iPhone, which was plugged… Continue reading
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A Jean Shepherd podcast?
Imagine a “News from Lake Wobegon” without the homespun prairie jive, lasting for more than an hour every weeknight, and packed with great stories, mostly of being a normal kid from greater blue-collar Chicago. That was Jean Shepherd, who was Required Listening in New York — and the whole Northeast — from the ’50s to… Continue reading
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Geology vs. Weather
I love this: … and I hope the good (or evil, depending on your perspective) folks at Despair.com don’t mind my promoting their best t-shirt yet. (If it helps, I just ordered one.) You’ll notice that blogging isn’t in the diagram (though Despair does feature it in four other purchasable forms). I bring that up… Continue reading
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Tuning time and place
In Curation, meta-curation, and live Net radio, Jon Udell begins, “I’ve long been dissatisfied with how we discover and tune into Net radio”, but doesn’t complain about it. He hacks some solutions. First he swaps time for place: I’ve just created a new mode for the elmcity calendar aggregator. Now instead of creating a geographical… Continue reading
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Why WQXR is better off as a public radio station
In his comment to my last post about the sale of WQXR to WNYC (and in his own blog post here), Sean Reiser makes an important point: One of the unique things about the QXR was it’s relationship with the Times. The Times owned QXR before the FCC regulations prohibiting newspapers ownership of a radio… Continue reading
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More on WNYC(s) + WQXR(s)
Edward Rosten and I have been having an interesting dialog in the comment section of my last post, which was mostly about WNYC buying WQXR from the New York Times (which has owned it forever) for $11.5 million — and moving QXR’s classical programming up New York’s FM dial from 96.3 to 105.9, where the… Continue reading
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WQXR goes to WNYC, WBCN leaves FM dial
Heard this morning on WNYC that the New York Times has unloaded its remaining broadcasting asset, which consists of the channel and facilities of WQXR, which has been a classical music landmark for as long as it’s been around. (One way or another, since 1929. Wikipedia tells the long story well.) The story on WNYC’s… Continue reading
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Grounds for talking radio
Day 3 of our drive from Santa Barbara to Boston, pausing at a motel outside St. Louis… Between our Sirius satellite radio receiver, the MP3 player, breaks for public radio and talking to each other, I didn’t have much time to indulge my interest in exploring the high soil conductivities that make AM radio so… Continue reading