17 years ago(!), I left a budding career in radio journalism out of disgust with the trajectory the industry was taking. The break-point came when the National Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio teamed up in Congress to conduct a disinformation campaign designed to eviscerate the FCC’s then-newly proposed LPFM radio service.
However, A few months before I actually quit my job, I acquired all the components necessary to start an unlicensed microbroadcast station. “System P” was a 40-watt frequency-agile FM rig that used a portable military surplus antenna mast to conduct tactical broadcasts from a wide variety of locations. You could often hear the station in Madison, Wisconsin, primarily on evenings and weekends; but since the station was mobile much fun was had taking it to peoples’ homes and public events around the country to give the public a more substantive appreciation of the ease by which it could make “the public airwaves” very real.
Another key element of System P was to provide a last-mile node for what was then quite an experiemental webcast-activism scene (today commonly known as “livestreaming”). These often manifested in Independent Media Centers during times of protest, most notably against corporate global trade deals. Activists would converge on a city to fill the streets in order to disrupt the negotiation of these agreements, and the media coverage would invariably skew toward painting the activists as violent thugs and police/other security forces as the guardians of order. But when activists gained the ability to counteract this narrative – oftentimes by live reports from the streets directly – the discursive dynamic around these events changed. Continue reading “Nodes of Resistance: Sampling the Haitian Diaspora via FM+Internet”
Tag: radio preservation task force
Radio Preservation Task Force Convenes in D.C.
Two years ago, the Library of Congress’ National Recording Preservation Board founded the Radio Preservation Task Force. Initially a collection of about 100 radio history scholars and archivists, the RPTF now counts more than 150 members and 300 member-archives.
In 2015 the Task Force conducted a multi-phase survey of existing radio recording archives and identified caches heretofore lost to history, particularly as they related to noncommercial and educational broadcast stations. Enriched by this metadata, where do we go from here? Continue reading “Radio Preservation Task Force Convenes in D.C.”
Professional Miscellany
It’s been a busy academic year, and we’re only two months in! Here are some things going on in my professional life that might be of interest to you:
Radio’s Digital Dilemma will be released in paperback next year, somewhere in the January/February timeframe. This came as a pleasant surprise, and signifies that Routledge thinks there’s a larger readership beyond the few hundred that can afford the exorbitantly-priced hardcover.
RDD will be available via Routledge Paperbacks Direct, a publish-on-demand system which absolves the need for bulk print-runs. Continue reading “Professional Miscellany”
Next Steps for Radio Preservation Task Force
Just received a comprehensive update on the work of the Radio Preservation Task Force, an initiative announced last year by the Library of Congress to digitally preserve local radio history. About 100 scholars spent last fall scouring libraries, museums, historical societies, and stations around the country looking for recordings large and small. More than 100,000 were discovered, and that impressed the LoC’s National Recording Preservation Board enough to move on to “phase two,” which (in part) will involve more detailed examination of our finds.
The Task Force is also lining up some specific preservation programs in conjunction with other media preservationists. Continue reading “Next Steps for Radio Preservation Task Force”
Library of Congress Launches Local Radio Preservation Project
I mentioned this initiative a few months ago when I first heard about it, but the details have only recently been released. Can you help us assemble a national archive of local radio broadcasts?
The official name of this project is the Radio Preservation Task Force, being conducted under the auspices of the LoC’s National Recording Preservation Board. For many years, the NRPB has pursued various study-strategies to get a sense of just how much of our nation’s broadcast history has actually been preserved.
Turns out, it’s not much: sure, you can easily find and watch pretty much any of the “Big Three” national TV newscasts of the last 40+ years, but radio has no such archive, and local radio is especially unremembered. The Radio Preservation Task Force hopes to change that, with special focus on radio broadcasts from 1922-1980, and especially those from the noncommercial, educational side of the medium. Continue reading “Library of Congress Launches Local Radio Preservation Project”