Radio Survivor Podcast

This week, we are joined by the hosts of the podcast Rice and Shine. Led by four Seattle-area teenagers, the chat-style program provides a glimpse into the lives of 9th graders beginning high school from a distance during a pandemic. Rice and Shine is an incredible time capsule of the current school year, as hosts […] The post Podcast #295 – High School Podcasting with the Hosts of Ric...

The PIRATE Act was signed into law more than a year ago, but the rules governing increased fines for unlicensed broadcasting are about to go into effect on April 26. The Act is intended to give the FCC additional tools for tamping down pirate radio activity in hot beds like Boston and Brooklyn, NY, but […] The post Podcast #294 – Reading the PIRATE Act / FCC & the Supremes Pt. 2 a...

What is radio art? What is transmission art? We discuss the experimental side of radio and artistic uses of radio transmissions on our show this week, looking at historical and contemporary examples. Artist and scholar Anna Friz joins us to chat about these concepts, sharing how her college/community radio past in Canada inspired her to […] The post Podcast #293 – Exploring Radio Art a...

What is sound art? And what do we know about its origin story? We explore this question and more with our guest this week, artist and educator Judy Dunaway. An adjunct professor in the History of Art Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Dunaway’s recent article, “The Forgotten 1979 MoMA Sound Art Exhibition,” […] The post Podcast #292 – The History o...

A super hero comic is at the heart of The New Adventures of Super Indian, a forthcoming audio drama from Native Voices at the Autry. Our guests on the show include Super Indian’s creator, playwright and director, Arigon Starr (an enrolled member of the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma) and artistic director DeLanna Studi (an enrolled […] The post Podcast #291 – The New Adventures of Super In...

One of the biggest celebrities in Los Angeles in the early part of the 20th century was Aimee Semple McPherson. She inspired scandalous headlines and fictional depictions, including the character Sister Molly on the Showtime series, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels and Sister Alice McKeegan on the 2020 HBO reboot of Perry Mason. Yet the […] The post Podcast #290 – Aimee Semple McPherson...

In honor of Women’s History Month, this week’s episode focuses on women in sound. Our guests, Jennifer Hyland Wang and Jenny Stoever, return to the show to discuss sound studies, the cultural politics of listening, the history of women’s voices on the airwaves and on podcasts, as well as broader issues of representation. Jennifer Hyland […] The post Podcast #289 – Cel...

This week we share more evidence of how broadest radio is an important informational lifeline and human connection for so many people. As most of the country enters year two of the pandemic, we catch up again with Becky Meiers, General Manager of community radio station KCAW-FM in Sitka, Alaska. We last spoke with Becky […] The post Podcast #288 – Eagle vs. Transmitter appeared first o...

Jennifer, Eric and Paul join together to review what’s news as we kick off the month of March. Top of the list is an upcoming FCC radio license auction. Originally planned for April 2020, but delayed by the first coronavirus lockdowns, the auction will see 140 commercial radio construction permits up for bid. We discuss […] The post Podcast #287 – New Station Opportunity, Women&#...

On this week’s show we take a look at the ways that Native Americans used sound technology during radio’s earliest days and how that inspired and led to the flourishing Native media landscape, including tribal radio stations. Our guest, Josh Garrett-Davis, is Associate Curator at the Autry Museum and author of a recently completed dissertation: […] The post Podcast #286 – N...

Nathan Moore is the General Manager at WTJU and the Staff Advisor of WXTJ at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He is also the current President of the Board of the NFCB, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. We invited Nathan Moore onto the show to ask about running community and college radio stations […] The post Podcast #285 – Running a Big Community Media...

On this week’s show we learn about SpokenWeb, a Canadian project focused on the preservation of literary sound recordings. Partly inspired by the energetic poetry scene of the 1960s, SpokenWeb works to preserve recordings of these live events and also describe and share this material. Our guest, Hannah McGregor, leads the SpokenWeb Podcast Task Force […] The post Podcast #284 – S...

On Radio Survivor we are interested in not only audio, but also its history as well as preservation efforts. Along those lines, we have done numerous episodes about archives. We additionally have a strong passion for student-produced media, like high school and college radio. On this episode, we discuss an interesting intersection of the two, […] The post Podcast #283 – Project STAND i...

What a difference a week makes. President Biden has appointed Jessica Rosenworcel as acting chair of the Federal Communications Commission, only the second time a woman has held the post. This signals the beginning of a new agenda at the Commission – though currently evenly split down party lines – and Prof. Christopher Terry from […] The post Podcast #282 – New FCC, Who Dis? appeared...

There are a few stories we were watching closely at the end of 2020, and we wanted to bring listeners up to date. First up is Section 230, the law that provides a degree of immunity to online platforms – from social media to community radio stations – for consequences resulting from what their users […] The post Podcast #281 – Wrapping Up Section 230 & the VOA appeared first on Ra...

Radio history is close to our hearts at Radio Survivor and on this week’s episode we explore the story of student radio in Australia. Our guest, Rafal Alumairy, is working on book about this little-told history. She shares with us details not only about the timeline of student radio in Australia, but also some intriguing […] The post Podcast #280 – Student Radio History in Austra...

Zach Poff put a radio station inside a pond. Poff is a media artist, educator and maker-of-things, and he explains that project and talks about making art with radio technology and listening to sound art. This is a re-broadcast of our episode from April, 2018. Show Notes Zach Poff’s Pond Station is broadcasting live during […] The post Podcast #279 – Zach Poff Built a Radio Stati...

Radios in the trees, a transmitter in the pond, and a weather-driven synth. These are just some of what you’ll find on The Wave Farm, a 29-acre property in New York’s Hudson Valley dedicated to radio and transmission arts. It’s anchored by community radio station WGXC, accompanied by a cornucopia of additional tiny terrestrial and […] The post Podcast #278 – The Wave...

Even though Trump is leaving the White House on January 19, he’s set up the FCC to carry on his idiosyncratic policy goals well into the Biden administration, especially if a Republican-led Senate resists the new president’s nomination for a new chairman. At the last minute, Trump decided not to renominate FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly […] The post Podcast #277 –...

Though there are many good reasons why one might not want to look back at the year that was, we still see some aspects worth noting. In particular, radio and podcasting proved to be resilient media, with broadcasters and podcasters rallying to meet the challenges of quarantines and social distancing brought on by the COVID-19 […] The post Podcast #276 – 2020 the Year in Radio and Sound...

Podcasting is increasingly being taken up by people in academia, for myriad reasons. Some professors are looking for ways to share their work, others use it as a research tool, some include it as part of their teaching practice, while others seek to include podcasting as an official part of their scholarly output. We dig […] The post Podcast #275: Making Scholarly Podcasts Count appeared fir...

Poet Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb in 1996 as an online repository for obscure avant-garde art that, by virtue of having little commercial potential, was hard to find. Audio was an early component of the archive, owing to Kenneth’s interest in sound poetry, an even more obscure art form. Since then he’s served as the chief, […] The post Podcast #274 – UbuWeb is a Hand Co...

On this most unusual of Thanksgiving weeks, we are honored to speak with Alice Brock, the woman who provided much inspiration for Arlo Guthrie’s inadvertent Thanksgiving Day radio staple, “Alice’s Restaurant.” Brock shares with us not only some insight into the 18-minute anti-war epic; but also stories about her life and holiday traditions. For 2020, […] The post Podc...

Carl Malamud is credited with having one of the very first streaming internet talk radio shows, “Geek of the Week,” beginning in 1993. And because it was available for download, too, it’s considered a proto-podcast. Carl joins us this week to dig into this early history of internet radio, recounting how his efforts quickly snowballed […] The post Podcast #272 – &#8216...

Eric, Jennifer and Paul reconvene to catch up on all that is news to us in the worlds of radio and sound. The FCC just unanimously approved all-digital operation on the AM band, while commercial radio – born on the AM band – celebrates its centennial. But keep in mind that broadcast radio is older […] The post Podcast #271: AM Radio Goes Digital as It Celebrates a Centennial appeared first o...