Episodes

As the year and semester draws to a close, we get real on this week’s episode and talk about work, burnout, volunteer labor, and how podcasting is not immune to the everyday stressors and challenges that we are all feeling right about now! Two of our favorite scholars, Jennifer Lynn Stoever and Hannah McGregor, join us to lend their perspectives on the work of podcasting and sound studies. We touch on the often-under acknowledged labor behind this work, discuss ways to create personal boundaries...

On the show this week, we explore one of our favorite topics: college radio history. Our guest, Andreas Preuss, just completed a multi-faceted project about student radio station WRAS at Georgia State University in Atlanta for his master’s thesis: Left of the Dial: Right on the Music: 50 Years of Georgia State FM Radio. We dig into various aspects of the station’s past, as well as Preuss’ interesting path to this project, having worked in college radio in the past as well as in commercial media ...

Few topics create as much anxiety at college and community radio stations – not to mention many a commercial radio morning show – than broadcast indecency. Since the dawn of broadcast regulation in the US there have been legal restrictions on the kind of speech that may be broadcast on the public airwaves, with a particular focus on the topics of sexual and excretory functions. Yet, for all the worrying and fretting, for much of history there hasn’t been much action by the FCC. And even when the...

On this week’s show, we return to the topic of hip-hop on the radio. While on Radio Survivor, we typically focus on non-commercial radio, like college and community stations; in this episode we look at why certain types of commercial radio stations were important to the growth in popularity of hip-hop music. Our guest, Amy Coddington, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Amherst College and is writing a book about the history of hip-hop on commercial radio. Show Notes: Amy Codd...

The Fairness Doctrine – a Federal Communications Commission rule that’s been out of commission since the 20th century – just doesn’t seem to die, at least in the minds of politicians, the press and much of the public. Politicos of many political stripes trot out its specter as a bogeyman any time its convenient, while efforts to regulate online speech draw inevitable comparisons. According to Prof. Christopher Terry from the University of Minnesota, that’s because people fundamentally misunders...

A year-and-a-half ago high school, college and community radio stations shut their studio doors in response to safety measures to prevent the spread of COVID. They quickly scrambled to find ways to stay on air, broadcasting archived programming, allowing DJs to pre-record or even broadcast live from home. We’ve dedicated several episodes to learning how different kinds of stations in a variety of regions confronted the emergency. Whatever methods were employed, today – with the pandemic still o...

Musician, DJ and radio artist Don Joyce passed away nearly six years ago, leaving behind a voluminous archive of his unparalelled collage radio program “Over the Edge.” The documentary “How Radio Isn’t Done” sheds light on this member of Negativland, his life and his work in recontextualizing the never-ending flow of media messages that flood everyday life. Director Ryan Worsley joins to talk about Joyce, his hyper-focused artistic process and what she learned creating this affectionate and hon...

Mitch Jeserich has been working as a host, producer and reporter for Pacifica Radio and KPFA for two decades. His career in radio was just getting started as a volunteer when 9-11-2001 changed everything. Host Eric Klein and guest Mitch Jeserich are friends and former co-workers at Free Speech Radio News in 2003, where Mitch was covering the capital in Washington D.C. and Eric was working on the tech-team in Berkeley. Letters and Politics on KPFA Letters and Politics on Youtube FSRN’s websit...

On the show this week we explore a pivotal period for radio news in the 1930s and learn why the Lindbergh kidnapping changed everything. Travel back in time with us. It’s March 1932 and a horrible crime has just occurred, the kidnapping of the 20-month-old son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Imagine that you were living in the United States in 1932 and wanted to follow breaking news about this story. If it were 2021, the answer might be Twitter or the inter...

On this week’s show, we revisit a topic that is near and dear to us, the preservation of sound. This time around the emphasis is on podcasts. Our guest Jeremy Morris is the founder of PodcastRE (which is short for Podcast Research), a searchable, researchable archive of podcasting culture. Morris is Associate Professor, Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and that’s where PodcastRE was launched. We dig into the functionality o...

Portrayals of radio in popular culture provide an interesting glimpse at radio’s role in society. At Radio Survivor, we’ve long been fascinated by radio depictions on both the small and large screen; so it is a treat to dive into this topic with Hemrani Vyas, Programming Coordinator at Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Vyas curated an entire day of radio-themed films for the cable network, focusing on the era of 1930 to 1950. This week we talk about some of the featured films and also dig into a broa...

Today on the show we rebroadcast one of our favorite episodes from one year ago, which was described this way: On August 27, 2020, nomadic online radio station Radioee.net is presenting a live, translingual 24-hour broadcast, Wireless, featuring 24 radio stations from all over the world. Taking place on the 100th anniversary of the first radio broadcast in Argentina and the first mass public entertainment broadcast in the world; Wireless launches at midnight Buenos Aires time on August 27, 2020...

What do home made short wave radios, flexi discs, and cyanotype photography have in common? Kirk Pearson is a composer and founder of Dogbotic, a full service music and sound studio, a radical multimedia arts workshop, and open source creative technology lab. Kirk joins us today to share the planning and thinking behind their next community workshop, Ear Re-Training, Media Manipulation for the Musical Mind. Show Notes: Dogbotic Workshops including Ear Re-training Some of the episodes of Radio...

Shortly after its 26th birthday, we revisit this interview celebrating a quarter-century of the MP3. On July 14, 1995 the file extension .MP3 was chosen and set in place for an audio format that would go on to change music. Artist, scholar and curator John Kannenberg marks the 25th anniversary of this event with an online exhibit, “MP3 @ 25: The Anniversary Exhibition” at his Museum of Portable Sound. John joins this episode to explain why it’s important to observe this anniversary, and to reco...

On this week’s show, we take a trip back in time to look at radio in the 1940s and 1950s. During this post-war period, women’s roles were shifting in the workplace and in popular media. Television arrived on the scene, bringing with it some, but not all, of the programming that people knew and loved from radio. Battles were also brewing over radio content, including violence, sex, and portrayals of family life. Our guest, scholar Catherine Martin, has been poring over FCC complaint letters from ...

What are the odds that a popular television series would feature your college radio station as a backdrop for two episodes? That’s exactly what Jennifer found, when HBO’s “Mare of Easttown” employed a set that accurately recreates Haverford College’s station as a location for the limited-run drama. Jennifer talked with the show’s production designer to get the behind-the-scenes scoop. Paul recently experienced his own radio coincidence when he by chance discovered a storefront radio museum in t...

Border radio is one of our favorite topics at Radio Survivor and on this week’s episode we dig into the history of radio broadcasting on the northern border of Mexico. Scholar Sonia Robles shares the stories of some of the lesser-known, small broadcasters whose histories are often overshadowed by the wild tales of higher power border blaster stations. Robles is the author of Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting along Mexico’s Northern Border, 1930-1950 and Assistant Professor of History at Universi...

As we wrap up Pride Month, our podcast discussion turns to queer spaces and queer community on the radio and in podcasting, specifically lesbian broadcasters in Canada. Our guest, Stacey Copeland is a media producer and Ph.D. candidate at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication in Vancouver, Canada. Stacey has been researching the history of lesbian radio shows, including The Lesbian Show and Dykes on Mics. Community radio played an important role in welcoming gay and lesbian programmi...

Just when we thought the Franken FM era might be over for good, the FCC grants “Special Temporary Authority” to a LPTV channel 6 in San Jose, California to keep its analog signal – heard on the FM dial – on the air while transitioning its video signal to digital. We review this news, along with a proposal in front of the FCC to boost low-power FM stations to 250 watts. We also take a look at the most recent issue of The Wire magazine, dedicated to radio in both broadcast and internet forms. Ded...

This week, we take a close look at the history of an influential Spanish language community radio station: KDNA. Located in Washington State, the station launched in 1979 and serves a rural community which includes farm workers and immigrants. Our guest, Monica De La Torre, is Assistant Professor at the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University and is the author of a forthcoming book about KDNA called Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley. ...

From 1961 to 1976 WRVR-FM broadcast a progressive slate of social justice and jazz programming from the Riverside Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Beginning in 2018 those archives are being digitized and transcribed by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, and on June 17 they’re asking volunteers to help correct those transcriptions in a “Transcript-A-Thon” event. We welcome guests Vincent Kelley, Archivist at The Riverside Church Archives, and Ryn Marchese, Engagement and Use Mana...

The Federal Communications Commission recently announced that November 2, 2021 will mark the opening of the next licensing window for full-power non-commercial / educational (NCE) FM radio stations. The Commission first hinted at this chance back in fall of 2020. Given how often our listeners ask how and when they can get a radio license, we immediately dedicated an episode to that topic. Now that more is known we decided to revisit it. Even though the application window dates have not yet been...

It seems like physical media continues to have a hold on humans, even while most of us in the West engage with online, streaming and virtual media for much, if not most, of our time. Audiocassettes are like radio, in that they have been declared dead multiple times in the last three decades, yet continue to be found, employed and enjoyed by new generations who insist on keeping them alive. Eric just completed a weekend-long cassette hacking workshop, joined by a diverse group of musicians and so...

Colleges and high schools are finishing up their first – and, with hope, last – full academic COVID year, and all indicators are that student radio remained on the air, as students adjusted to online classes and socially distant campuses. Jennifer Waits reports back from the Intercollegiate Broadcast System annual conference, held virtually this year, where she gauged the temperature of student broadcasters and the radio professionals who shared their advice with conference attendees. She and Pa...