Episodes

A different media world is possible. What if the FCC truly regulated in the public interest, creating policies and services that promoted community voices and civic values? It does happen occasionally, but not often enough. It’s easy to assume our media system turned out this way because it was inevitable, but in truth it was the result of hundreds, even thousands of decisions, at all levels of government, influenced by multitudes of actors, from major corporations to community media activists....

Radio Survivor celebrates 10 years on the internet and four years podcasting with our 200th episode. Matthew Lasar joins Jennifer Waits, Eric Klein and Paul Riismandel for this review of the last decade in radio that matters. Matthew tells the Radio Survivor origin story that sprang forth from his I.F. Stone inspired research deep into the digital catacombs of the FCC database, unearthing comments that broadcast execs never imagined would be public – such as one who accused prominent media refo...

The FCC was back in front of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals again, defending its failure to address declines in minority- and women-owned broadcast stations, amongst other failures. In fact, as our guest, University of Minnesota Prof. Christopher Terry, explains, the Commission claims it’s too hard to assess the change in ownership between 1996 and today. Prof. Terry notes that the Court expressed skepticism of that claim. It’s just another chapter in the agency’s “legacy of failure,” as he c...

In June 2009 a coup d’etat overthrew Honduras’ democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya. Since the coup, human rights conditions in that country have deteriorated. Radio has become a vital organizing tool for defending the rights of indigenous people and fighting environmental destruction, while providing needed information and education to people in rural areas. In April of this year Meredith Beeson and Ellen Knutson traveled to Honduras with a delegation from the Witness for Peace Solid...

Alaska’s unique geography and way-of-life leads to unique radio. Raven Radio is a public and community station serving the city of Sitka, along with seven other small towns in Southeast Alaska. The station is not just a source of news, music and culture, but also a lifeline for people living in remote communities where there may not even be cell service. Becky Meiers moved from Portland, Oregon and community station KBOO to become general manager of KCAW in fall of 2018. Paul made Sitka the las...

Can US radio survive even more consolidation? The National Association of Broadcasters is asking the FCC to raise local radio ownership caps in the 75 biggest radio markets, and to get rid of limits entirely in the remaining 194. The prospect of even less diversity on the airwaves has motivated a broad coalition of music industry organizations to create the Keep Local Radio Local campaign, to help listeners tell the FCC not to further deregulate radio. Kevin Erickson is director of the Future ...

Pamela Klassen, Professor of the Study of Religion, Faculty of Arts & Science, University of Toronto joins us on the podcast to chat about her book The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land. She shares the tale of Anglican Archbishop Frederick Du Vernet, who claims to have invented “radio mind,” in which thoughts were said to have been telepathically transmitted via radio waves. Operating out of western Canada in the early 1920s in the early days of radio, Du Vernet is a...

First conceived in the 1930s, there is a type of tiny radio station that anyone can operate legally, without a license. Bill DeFelice of HobbyBroadcaster.net joins the show to tell us about how you can get on the air today, to broadcast around your house, or even your neighborhood with a so-called ‘Part 15’ radio station. Radio Survivor is a listener-supported podcast. Help us sustain and grow this show by contributing as little as $1 every month. With four episodes every month, that’s just 25...

Wave Farm Executive Director Galen Joseph-Hunter joins us to talk about transmission arts at Wave Farm and beyond. We discuss Wave Farm’s recently co-presented Reveil, SoundCamp’s live 24-hour broadcast of the sounds of daybreak, sourced from open microphones from around the world. Additionally, Joseph-Hunter gives us the scoop on the new Radio Artist Fellowship at Wave Farm for which applications are being accepted until May 31, 2019. She details this new opportunity and also outlines Wave Far...

Radio Preservation Task Force’s Director Josh Shepperd and Conference Director Neil Verma are our guests for a discussion about the work of the Library of Congress initiative. They explain the significance of 2020 for radio history, share some of the accomplishments of the Task Force, and preview the next Radio Preservation Conference Task Force Conference, which will be held in Washington, D.C. in October, 2020. Shepperd is Assistant Professor, Media & Communication Studies at Catholic Univers...

Every weekday an all-volunteer reporting staff produces an hour of original, hyper-local news for WOOC-LP’s “Hudson Mohawk Magazine,” serving the Troy, NY area. A focus on mission and a concentration of resources on journalism helps the station accomplish this daily feat. Steve Pierce is the Executive Director of Media Alliance, which operates WOOC inside the Sanctuary for Independent Media. Steve tells us how that organization grew out of the Independent Media Center movement of the 2000s, add...

Amanda Dawn Christie is an artist enamored with radios and radio waves. The Assistant Professor, Studio Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) joins us on the show to discuss her most recent transmission art project, Ghosts in the Airglow, in which she created work at the HAARP facility in Alaska. Christie also shares with us the backstory of how she starting working with radio and radio waves, describing her fascination with radio towers and shortwave and recounting her numerous radio...

Jennifer, Eric and Paul sit down to review the latest research on podcasts from the Infinite Dial and Podcast Consumer reports, which leads to consideration of the transition between analog and digital media, inspired by Vinylthon. From 78s to CDs, and music memories to smooth jazz, just how great is this episode? Ask Dr. Science. The 20th anniversary of the birth of Indymedia at the Battle of Seattle is coming this November. Underlying this is a nearly forgotten history of independent media t...

The Hip-Hop Radio Archive aims to digitize, preserve, share, and contextualize recordings of hip-hop radio from the 1980s and 1990s from commercial, college, community, and pirate stations of all sizes, telling the stories of the shows and the people that made them. Our guest is founder of the archive, Ryan MacMichael. This is a rebroadcast from last year of one of our favorite episodes. This episode lead directly to a follow up episode on the longest running hip-hop radio show in Boulder Color...

This week our guest is Brian DeShazor, an independent radio researcher and founder of the Queer Radio Research Project. Formerly the Director of the Pacifica Radio Archives, DeShazor has taken a special interest in uncovering and highlighting the LGBTQ voices that have graced the community radio airwaves. On the episode, we discuss the history of queer radio programming as well as DeShazor’s work to bring some of the hidden LGBTQ stories to light. Show Notes: Queer Radio History: Pacifica Rad...

On this week’s episode, scholar Lerone Martin shares with us the fascinating history of African-American preachers who distributed their sermons on 78rpm records during a time when they had limited access to the radio in the 1920s-1940s. Martin, Associate Professor in Religion and Politics at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, is the author of Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Making of Modern African American Religion. Show Notes:...

A change in Ontario university funding rules threatens more than a dozen campus community stations in Canada. Barry Rooke, executive director of the National Campus and Community Radio Association is our guest to help explain the situation. He explains how the structure of Canadian community and college radio stations differs from those in the U.S. and elsewhere, and why these differences make some stations north of the border vulnerable to changes in the way student fees are allocated. Barry a...

We celebrated International Women’s Day by recording a fascinating interview about women’s radio history with University of Louisville Professor of History Christine Ehrick. Author of Radio and the Gendered Soundscape: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay, 1930-1950, Ehrick schools us on the hidden history of a pioneering women’s radio station in Uruguay. Founded in 1935, Radio Femenina quickly became a hotbed for feminist and activist programming, beaming its signal from Montevideo ...

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the “Preventing Illegal Radio Abuse Through Enforcement Act,” but does it actually have a chance at putting a dent in unlicensed broadcasting? We review the provisions of the the bill – called the PIRATE Act for short – and wonder if an uptick in the war on pirates can be any more successful than the war on drugs. Then Eric and Paul note the major push into podcasting by the nation’s largest radio broadcaster, leading down a garden path that end...

Inspired by an episode of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, we travel all the way to Antarctica to learn about mysterious community radio station, Ice Radio. Sadly, we learned of Anthony Bourdain’s death on the day that we recorded this episode. Ice Radio is the latest iteration of a radio station that began more than 50 years ago at McMurdo Station. Our guest Elizabeth Delaquess is a Broadcast Engineer at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, working at both the radio and television stations there. Sh...

Julia Thomas visited over a dozen community radio stations over the course of a year. Stations in Nepal, India, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Ecuador “Often times by talking to community media makers,” Julia Thomas told Radio Survivor, “you’re meeting some of the most passionate, involved community members who have seen so much, who are so knowledgeable and connected. I always loved seeing, and I was really lucky to be welcomed into, those spaces. The culture around community radio is just beautifu...

The Federal Communications Commission was back in court on Feb. 1, called on to defend its decision to overturn the 2015 Open Internet Order in December 2017. It seems like the FCC lawyers didn’t have the best day in front of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, and Prof. Christopher Terry from the University of Minnesota joins the show to explain why. He also lays out how this very same court essentially gave the Commission the road map for a key element of that 2015 Open Internet Order, and how t...

This episode is dedicated to the compact disc. Paul recently published an article outlining 10 reasons why CDs are awesome, and it seems to have hit a nerve, turning out to be one of our most popular. So we dive into these reasons, and even talk to a Millennial, Jacob Choplin, who also loves CDs (though not as much as vinyl). We’re not arguing against LPs, downloads or streaming music, just advocating for the lowly compact disc. They still sound great. We hope to inspire you to dig out your col...

For about a decade, ending in 1988, pirate stations dominated the Irish radio bands, exploiting a loophole in the law that made punishments for unlicensed broadcasting on par with a speeding ticket. Now the sounds and artifacts of this cultural movement are being preserved online in the Irish Pirate Radio Archive. Archive co-founders Brian Greene and John Walsh tell us about this rich history, in which some of the biggest stations broadcast with multi kilowatts of power, with listeners as far a...