Episodes

Conventional wisdom says young people don’t listen to the radio. Jennifer Waits talks to two college broadcasters from KUOZ-LP at the University of the Ozarks who bust that myth. She also takes us on a tour of a new community LPFM, KPSQ-LP, located in a hotel in Fayetteville, AR. But first, Paul and Jennifer discuss more troubling news about CMJ, the oldest and most prominent music charting service in noncommercial radio, and Jennifer reviews some newer alternative music charts ready to fill in...

Sally Kane, the CEO of The National Federation of Community Broadcasters, joins the podcast to discuss the threats and opportunities for community radio in the current political environment. In the months, since the election of Trump, the NFCB has received a lot of questions from community radio stations about how to respond and what comes next. First, Sally discusses the concrete impact that the elimination of federal funding via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would have, especially o...

Radio stations hacked to play “F— Donald Trump” over and over. Concerns that Trump declaring himself a candidate for 2020 already might limit non-comms’ ability to criticize him. And with an Entercom / CBS Radio merger on the horizon, what does this all mean for community radio and podcasting? John Anderson, Assistant Professor of Television and Radio at Brooklyn College, joins to help sort it all out. Jennifer Waits is here, too, along with Paul Riismandel–unfortunately Eric Klein was out sick....

Eric and Paul have been thinking a lot about the value of community radio and podcasting, especially wondering if these media we love make a difference and are worth doing, even when audiences seem small by comparison. Ahead of Eric leading a roundtable on community podcasting and Paul giving a guest lecture to a class at the Evergreen State College, they discuss some of the things we’ve learned about community media. In the process they consider the need to define your audience, to think about ...

On Monday the Trump administration announced the appointment of Ajit Pai as the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Last week when we talked to Prof. Christopher Terry from the University of Minnesota he predicted that Pai would be the pick, and now that it’s happened we call him back to help us understand what to expect and what to pay attention to. In particular Prof. Terry explains what the FCC can and cannot do in the near future, and what procedural maneuvers the Republi...

FCC watcher, Christopher Terry joins us to talk about what may be in store for media policy under President Donald Trump and the Republican controlled Congress. Is there a specific looming threat to Community Radio, Public Radio, or Low Power FM? Paul corrects the record on why headlines that scream “Norway Is Shutting Down FM radio” are only telling part of the story. Jennifer Waits brings us a College Radio Watch with a happy ending for the fans of the college station at UNLV in Las Vegas. ...

All hands are on deck for our first show of 2017. First up, Jennifer Waits reports on the planned sale of U Mass-Dartmouth’s WUMD to Rhode Island Public Radio. Then Paul Riismandel shares radio discoveries from his trip to New Zealand, including legal but unlicensed low-power FM stations. Matthew Lasar wraps things up by sharing some great community radio sound nuggets he’s discovered in the Internet Archive, including Australian garage rock, The Meat Puppets and the 1968 DNC. As a bonus we cl...

From the unprecedented build-out of LPFM community stations and the indie internet radio implosion to 100+ radio tours and a recent tragedy, Jennifer, Eric and Paul run down some of the most significant stories in radio for 2016 in our last podcast of the year. But first, they discuss the now-changed title of last week’s podcast, and why Paul lobbied to change it. Finally, they give a preview of what will be covered in 2017. As the year comes to a close we hope you’ll consider supporting Radio ...

Jennifer Waits brings us the voices of three programmers at a mysterious and chaotic community station with deep connections to the Los Angeles art scene. KCHUNG is an unlicensed part 15 AM radio station with about 40 station managers and extremely eclectic programming. Paul Riismandel wrote a series of articles, offering strongly worded advice for struggling community radio stations. He lays out his arguments in detail on the podcast and discusses the ideas and issues with his co-hosts. Read w...

This week we follow up with the subject of one our first episodes, Bainbridge Community Broadcasting. Paul took a day trip on a ferry from Seattle to visit Bainbridge Island and drop in on BCB. Co-founder Barry Peters took a few minutes to give a tour of the BCB studios and provide an update on how their experiment in community podcasting is progressing. Paul also explains how we’re interested in stimulating discussion and debate around issues and practice in community broadcasting. Then he con...

Pete Tridish works as a radio engineer, building low power and full power community radio stations. He initially did this work with Prometheus Radio Project and now with International Media Action. “Back when I was working with Prometheus Radio Project, which was a group that worked to expand the low power radio service and create opportunities for small civil society organizations to have their own radio stations, one of our best partnerships was with a group called PCUN, Pineros y Campesinos ...

Sylvia Thomas spent a year touring and researching community radio stations in South America, Asia and Africa. She learned community radio history that might be surprising to many in the United States, and witnessed first-hand different ways of organizing stations and creating radio that are instructive to stations everywhere. Sylvia explains how growing up listening to the radio in rural Minnesota and taking an actual college course in community radio inspired her to get involved and take her j...

Jennifer, Eric and Paul are back together for a show that spans several continents, from Anaheim to Arkansas, and Ireland to Israel, touching on podcasts, college radio, social media, and more. First Paul has a report from the Now Hear This podcast festival which he worked (and enjoyed) the last weekend of October in Anaheim, California, just blocks from Disneyland. He shares some observations about the development of podcasting as a medium, gleaned from experiencing the fest, as Eric notes that...

A great college radio station can be both a megaphone as well as a portal for the creative campus and college-town community. “It’s more than just playing music,” Lucas Coberly, station manager at KXUA told Jennifer Waits on this episode. “It’s definitely not just for people who want to be on the radio. It’s for people who want to share poetry, to share pictures, to make film…. It’s a lot of different things.” On this episode of the podcast we visit “the eclectic voice of the Ozarks,” KXUA at th...

“Grass Roots Radio Conference has been a giant jump start in my learning process,” said Julia Rose of KPSQ lp in Fayetteville Arkansas. Radio Survivor’s Jennifer Waits attended the GRC and she reports back for us with her own observations as well as with the voices of the people she met there at this year’s host station, KUHS in Hot Springs Arkansas. Also on this episode: Paul has news on Ireland’s last long wave station, which just got a stay of execution, stopping a planned 2017 shutdown. Bi...

Jim Ellinger of Austin Airwaves joins us on the program to share a preview of his talk “Community Radio, A Global View,” which he is giving at this year’s Grass Roots Radio Conference. Jim is recently back from the highlands of Borneo, where he helped with the launch of a new community radio station that broadcasts entirely in the indigenous Kelabit language. The top of this episode features the following news updates: Audience Engine, discussed way back on episode #10 of our podcast, is now r...

The stereotypical college radio station plays a free-form music format and functions as an extra-curricular student club. But the diversity in community and college radio is what we at Radio Survivor are here to celebrate. On this week’s show, Jennifer Waits reports back on two tours of college stations that function as learning labs for students. These stations are specifically connected to academic departments at their schools and are focused on student learning and skill development for profe...

Our intrepid radio tourist Jennifer Waits will be attending two big radio conferences this fall, the 2016 Grassroots Radio Conference and CBI’s National Student Electronic Media Convention. She gives us a preview of what’s in store, what she’s presenting, and let’s us in on some of the stations she’s planning to visit along the way. Paul shares some news from the commercial radio industry. One middle-sized radio owner has a plan to get bigger, while tripling its debt load, while the nation’s la...

“The best way to cultivate a sensibility of what makes for a good [radio] interview is to pre-tape your interviews and set aside large amounts of time to edit them down to half the length they start at. Because it makes you think really critically about where the wasted language is in that interview, when your questions have gone on too long, when your guest has gone off track, what you can fix with editing and what you can’t, and it cultivates the ear you need to start listening critically to o...

Two stations: KVCU Radio 1190 at University of Coloradio, Boulder and The SOCC, The Sounds of Colorado College. One has a professional general manager, the other a student general manager. One is terrestrial, the other is online. They both have very active participation among their student community and a wide variety of programming. Plus, each campus has a long and sometimes hidden history of student radio. “As always it’s just thrilling to get out there and see different radio stations,” Jenni...

The FCC just released its long-awaited revision to media ownership rules. After years of back-and-forth with the Third Circuit Court of Appeals there are very few changes. Prof. Christopher Terry, of the University of Minnesota School of Journalism, argues this represents a monumental failure that places all media ownership rules at grave risk. He joins to explain why. College and community radio folks are starting to wonder what’s happening with CMJ. The longstanding music publication has been...

Becky Meiers is our guest to help us better understand some best practices for fundraising in community radio. She’s the development director for KBOO in Portland, OR. Becky has tips for planning on-air pledge drives and more fundraising advice for stations of all sizes. We also talk about how and why KBOO is building partnerships with new community stations hitting the air in the Portland area. Jennifer Waits brings us College Radio Watch, including a story about a station’s bedbug infestation...

We celebrate National Radio Day, August 20, with this special episode. Jennifer Waits shares her tour of the Chicago Independent Radio Project. Then Paul Riismandel and Eric Klein join her in reflecting on some of their favorite moments as radio listeners and producers. We wrap things up with Radio Survivor’s Sonic ID in honor of National Radio Day, and Jennifer’s band-scan of the left end of the Chicago FM dial. You can support the work that goes into Radio Survivor in two ways: • Make a mont...

Radio Survivor’s Matthew Lasar is fascinated by the news of what is going on at community stations in places outside of the U.S. like India, South East Asia, Mexico, and Africa. He is especially interested in the dramatic and sometimes extreme nature of the “normal” experiences of stations like these. “Community radio in those places find themselves in very fraught relationships, and tense relationships, with larger communities around them,” Matthew Lasar said on this episode of the podcast. Yo...