Category Archives: Radio

“My Very Own Radio Station”

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Michael Bazeley, writing in the Mercury News (My Very Own Radio Station), does the best job of ‘splaining the podcasting thing I’ve come across:

“Thanks to a new technology called podcasting, I’ve turned my iPod into a personalized radio station, loading it with talk shows and cutting edge music that I’d never be able hear on traditional radio stations. It’s transformed my listening habits overnight. Although it’s new, I’m convinced podcasting will transform the way many people consume media, just as blogging and TiVo have. When you can program your own radio station, carry it with you anywhere and pause and restart it at will, who needs mainstream, advertising-supported broadcast radio?”

His piece quotes Doc Searls who believes:

“Podcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well.”

Hey, I’m just posting this shit so I can say I told you so.

“Radio, as we’ve known it, is dead”

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Won’t someone please point me to a positive story about (what we’ve started calling) “terrestrial” radio? Mabye it’s just media dog-piling but everytime I click my mouse, someone is predicting (or declaring) the death of radio. Alyce Lomax (The Motley Fool) is pissed and sad at the passing of (Thursday) of Washington D.C. radio station WHFS.

“Radio, as we’ve known it, is dead. The news about HFS obviously struck a chord with me, but with satellite radio, Internet radio, and things like Apple’s iTunes (or even the iPod Shuffle!) revolutionizing music and giving listeners more options than ever before, chances are it won’t be missed.”

Okay, Alyce is entitled to her opinion. Now, where are those positive stories about radio?

Clear Channel’s Internet plan

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“Radio analysts say Clear Channel, along with other broadcast radio stations, is being pushed online and toward new technologies by a fragmentation of its own market and by growing competition from satellite radio. Mix the power of Internet radio with those new delivery tools, and terrestrial radio begins to look increasingly fragile, unless it’s online too, some observers worry.” — CNET

Local News

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The news director at the station in my home town called this morning to ask about my brother. Lots of folks in Kennett know he is in Indonesia and have been asking about him. I told him what little I knew. Just a little human interest story. Very local. A big city station or a “nothing but the hits” station wouldn’t consider this remotely newsworthy. I’m really glad to know they’ve started doing this kind of local news again (maybe they never stopped).

At about the same time, I received a pointer (from XM Ben) to an interesting article on the state of radio in 2004 (Radio in 2004: An Overview, by Lawrence Stoler):

“One of radio’s strong points that can not necessarily be achieved to the fullest extent on satellite radio is localism. In other words, being out and active in the community. Being at the scene of an important event at a moment’s notice and providing necessary information to the residents of where a station is licensed to broadcast. The industry has to resume this practice of being community active. Radio has to go back to providing information after 8:30 AM during the week or in the evening after #7 and on weekends too. Not every area of the country has a 24 hour all news station within hearable range.”

I honestly don’t see how radio stations (or TV stations, for that matter) will survive without a strong, serious commitment to local news.

National Association of Broadcasters

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The cover story (by Scott Woolley) in the September issue of Forbes is really more about the National Association of Broadcasters than XM Radio.

“For decades the radio industry has crushed incipient competitors by wielding raw political muscle and arguments that are at once apocalyptic and apocryphal. Radio station owners, who formed the National Association of Broadcasters in 1923, have won laws and regulations that have banned, crippled or massively delayed every major new competitive technology since the first threat emerged in 1934: FM radio.”

What would radio be like if broadcasters put this much energy into doing better radio?