Tag Archives: Podcasts

Radio Survivor: “Inside the ‘Little Known’ Voice of America and the U.S. Agency for Global Media”

View of the Capitol Building from the roof of VOA headquarters on Independence Avenue.

(Source: Radio Survivor)

Over the past few months, there’s been a flurry of media attention focused on the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM). Some reports describe it as a “little-known” agency and, in fact, it may seem mysterious to many in the United States, since it oversees international broadcasting programs all over the world, including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

USAGM has been in the news following the appointment of new CEO Michael Pack, subsequent personnel changes, and even a congressional hearing on September 24. This week we explore the history of USAGM and talk about some of the recent changes at the organization. We are joined on the show by Jane Curry (Professor of Political Science at Santa Clara University), Mark Pomar (National Security Fellow at Clements Center for National Security at University of Texas, Austin) and Brandon Burke (Associate Archivist at the Hoover Institution Archives). Jennifer Waits and Eric Klein host this week’s episode.

Click here to read the show notes and listen to this podcast at Radio Survivor.

Click here to subscribe to the Radio Survivor podcast on iTunes.

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Radio Advertising: “A 700-Foot Mountain of Whipped Cream”

I recently discovered a bi-weekly experimental arts-and-culture program called The Organist at KCRW. The latest episode is simply brilliant for those of us who love radio nostalgia.

Here’s the description for Part 1:

This week, we’re sharing a highly subjective journey through one narrow, eccentric, corridor of radio advertising, as heard through the ears of one man. His name is Clive Desmond. Clive is a radio advertising producer, writer, and composer. He’s been doing it for more than thirty years, and he’s won some of the industry’s top awards. Through those years he’s been sort of a zelig figure: you can find his face somewhere in the margins of every one of the medium’s key aesthetic revolutions. He’s rescued beautiful forgotten nuggets of radio history, and he’s delicately arranged them into a glittering associative chain—a constellation of jingles and spots that somehow all add up, to a life: The life of Clive Desmond as heard through the radio.


Click here to visit this episode at KCRW.

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Radio World: Preserving Podcasts

(Source: Radio World via Richard Langley)

Radio World supports efforts to save our radio and audio heritage, including the work of the Radio Preservation Task Force,?a project of the Library of Congress.

Here is one in a series of guest commentaries about the topic.

Jeremy Morris is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In January 2014, Adam Curry sent a quick tweet out to his 40,000-plus followers with a modest request: “Looking for a full archive of ‘Daily Source Code’ mp3s.” Not just your average media user looking for bootlegged files, Adam Curry was one of podcasting’s first breakout stars in the early 2000s. He was trying to track down one of the first widely popular podcasts, the “Daily Source Code.” But his request was certainly odd; after all Curry was actually the host and producer of the “Daily Source Code,” which ran from 2004 to 2013 (over 860 episodes!).

As Curry lamented on his website: “For a number of [stupid and careless] reasons, I am not in posession of most of these.” [sic]

For those familiar with radio history, this story is probably less surprising. Much of radio’s history has been lost to vagaries of time, be it through the willful ignorance of companies looking to “preserve” only that which could be “monetized,” or the unintentional negligence of hosts, producers and engineers without the foresight, budgets or means to realize that the radio they were making and broadcasting would shape culture for decades to come — culture that media historians, scholars and hobbyists would later want to analyze, research, teach and reference.[…]

Click here to read the full article at Radio World.

Thank you–as Richard knows, podcasting is the distribution method behind our Shortwave Radio Audio Archive. It’s an ideal platform for delivery of recorded broadcasts–listeners subscribe and then maintain their own local copy of the entire archive. Podcasting applications can insure that any new episodes are downloaded automatically.

This year, I will represent the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive at the Radio Preservation Task Force meeting at the Library of Congress. I very much look forward to the event and meeting others in the radio archives world.

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George Knudsen (W4GCK): A Life in Apollo

800px-apollo_11_launch2

I’m very proud to note that my good friend, George Knudsen (W4GCK), has been featured on the excellent omega tau podcast.

The interview is absolutely fascinating–here’s a description:

George Knudsen started working in 1958 on the Redstone missile, and moved on to working on the Atlas ICBM. Later he worked on the Saturn 5 launch vehicle, where he was responsible for the fuel tanks. He was on the launch team at Cape Canaveral for various Apollo missions. In this episode [we] talk with George about his work in this fascinating period of science and engineering history.

Click here to listen via the omega tau site.

omega tau, hosted by Markus Völter, covers a wide variety of topics from engineering and science. It’s one of my favorite podcasts, so I would encourage you to not only listen to this episode, but subscribe to the podcast.

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DX Podcast returns

Analog Radio DialColin Newell from DXer.ca has just announced the return of the DX Podcast:

The DXer.ca site has been on the air for over 20 years now! And we are now pleased to announce… the return of the DX Podcast! We ran this little show way back in 2008 and it never got a lot of traction – we are starting small and with our first episode, a conversation with Ian McFarland of Radio Canada International – recorded New Years Eve – December 31st, 2015! Enjoy.

Click here to listen to the podcast on DXer.ca.

I plan to help Colin with the new podcast and wish him the very best producing this new show!

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Shortwave Radio Recordings: Radio Thailand

wiki-800px-Watchaiwattanaram050617Many thanks to Frank, a contributor on the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive, for this recording of Radio Thailand World Service.

This broadcast was recorded in Europe on September, 13 2013 starting at 19:00 UTC on 9,390 kHz.

Click here to download the recording as an MP3, or simply listen via the embedded player below:

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