These are the news headlines as read on the Nov. 5 edition of the radioshow, now available for download.
The stories are: Free Radio Santa Cruz Back on the Air; Free Press Challenges Sinclair Licenses; Comments on Localism Filed with FCC
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Radio Ink has a rundown of likely changes at the FCC as a result of the election. In summary: Democrat and vocal media reformist Adelstein is out — he won’t be renominated because his chief supporter, Sen Tom Daschle, was not reelected. Kevin Martin is the likely successor to Chairman Powell if he decides to leave, and Republican Kathleen Abernathy is also expected to leave at the end of her term in 2005. A top candidate to replace her is an old Bush crony from Texas, former Texas Public Utility commissioner Rebecca Klein, who also served as policy director of general government for then-Gov. Bush.
The more practical effects are that media reform may be even less of a hot issue at the FCC, and the Commission may feel emboldened to challenge the Third Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to strike down its loosened media ownership rules. Such an appeal would go to the Supreme Court.
Watch the telecom and broadcast industry hop in the saddle and ride like a buckaroo.
This past weekend John from DIYmedia.net and I attended the Radio Access Democracy conference which functioned as the close to the Radio Re-Volt project at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which I mentioned last month. We both participated in two panels: “What’s up at the FCC,” and “Making Alternative Media.”
The highlight of the conference for me was the Friday night keynote address by Tetsuo Kogawa, the father of mini-FM in Japan, which is the precursor to micropower radio in the US. Despite technical difficulties that prevented him from adequately showing all the multimedia elements he had planned for his talk, Tetsuo kept the too-small audience’s rapt attention for nearly two hours. He discussed the history of the mini-FM movement in Japan, starting in the 1970s, and its evolution into a wider phenomenon.
The article “From Mini-FM to Polymorphous Radio” by Kogawa presents a similar overview, without the benefit of the pictures and video he showed during his keynote.
Kogawa’s warmth and informal manner really won people over. Much to our luck, he attended the whole of the conference, including many of the panels, and participated equally with all the attendees. John was very excited when Kogawa approached him after our “Making Alternative Media” session to ask a question.
During midday on Saturday the final transmitter building workshop of the Radio Re-Volt was held, where about 30 participants finished off the last of the transmitter kits, building them into items like purses and 8-track tapes.
On Saturday night there was a performance called Radio 4X4 which featured four radio and sound artists in the center of the room peforming into low-powered transmitters. Radios tuned to their frequencies were placed about the room so that you could hear different mixes of the sound as you walked about. One of the participating artists was Tom Roe of free103point9, a NYC-based radio arts organization that participated in the August Coalition’s no-RNC protest coverage.
Also on Saturday was a screening of the pirate radio documentary Making Waves which covers three stations in the Tuscon, AZ scene. Filmmaker Michael Lahey was our gracious host, allowing John and I to crash at his place. The film succeeds where others have flailed because Lahey brings a strong sense of story, focusing primarily on the drama within station KVRL, run and financed by eccentric Constitutional-rights fanatics who have difficulty getting along with each other, and with the local law.
In Making Waves, Lahey also provides a very clear synopsis of licensed low-power FM and how it was eviscerated by Congress. Animator Steven Stwalley graphically explicates the issue and controversy of how stations are spaced on the radio dial, making this arcane concept crystal clear to non-radio geeks.
Thanks to John, I was lucky enough to view Making Waves before meeting Michael. The screening of the film at the conference was packed with an enthusiastic crowd, and Michael was able to sell several copies of the DVD right there.
John has a feature on the film up at a DIYmedia, including an interview with Lahey and clips from the film. I did an interview with Michael, too, which will likely air on the Nov. 12 radioshow.
Michael is a great guy (and a U of I alum), and I was glad that John and I got a chance to hang out with him, have some beers and talk pirate radio and video production geekery. It’s with total sincerity that I say that Making Waves is the best film on pirate radio that I’ve seen, and is head and shoulders above most indy docs in production values, even though it was shot on basic prosumer DV camcorders.
I was a little disappointed that the conference wasn’t held at the Walker Art Center, which is undergoing renovation. I’ve heard great things about the Walker and was hoping to see more of it. However, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design was also a fine venue, proving plenty of space for both the sessions and for participants to meet and talk.
With a good conference you leave wishing you’d had more time to catch everything and talk with people (with lesser conferences you’re just glad it’s over) — and that’s how I felt on Sunday morning when we left Minneapolis. It was a blast being around a group of people so excited about and committed to micropower and grassroots radio. Even a group of pirates from around Michigan and Iowa showed up, and were very excited to meet John after reading his website all these years.
My best hope is that at least 10% of the 400 or so transmitters built during the Radio Re-Volt project continue to see regular use. The point is to take the airwaves back.
I’ve had my new MZ-NH1 Hi-MD recorder for a couple of months now, and while I’ve been able to record uncompressed CD-quality audio and upload it to my PC, I haven’t been able to edit it because it’s in Sony’s proprietary file format.
Finally, Sony has delivered the software to losslessly convert this format to plain old .wav files: WAV Converter. I haven’t tried it yet, but I hope to do so this week.
It only lets you convert files recorded through the line or microphone input, and only recordings made in Hi-MD mode, but that’s fine with me, since that’s what I want it for. There are far easier ways to pirate pre-recorded music anyway.
There are a bunch of mp3 players and jukeboxes that now have some sort of recording capability built in — the Archos line seems to be most popular for people who are serious about recording, due mostly to their decent price and reasonable quality. However, I went with Hi-MD because Sony MD’s have good microphone and line input preamps that have a wide range of sensitivity, the ability to precisely adjust recording levels, and low noise.
Except for professional-grade solid state field recorders costing $1000+, I don’t think that the memory card/hard drive portable audio recorder is yet a mature enough product to provide both high-quality recordings and a sturdy build quality.
That may change in the next few years, but as long as Sony continues to support Hi-MD, I will be recording away AND be able to have a robust minidisc backup of all those recordings, too.
I have no amazing analysis as to why Bush won, or why the Republicans managed to firm up their domination in both houses of Congress. It sucks, but we’ll live. We may even be able to galvanize more opposition. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that four years of the corrupt Bush administration has been good for oppositional and independent media.
That said, when it comes to issues like low-power FM and media ownership reform it’s the Congress that has much more effect than the Executive, and we can expect any and all progress in Congress to grind to a halt. John McCain, one of the strongest advocates of both these issues and a Republican, is leaving the chairship of the Senate Commerce Committee to be replaced by the much more reliably conservative and industry-friendly Ted Stevens of Alaska. That, combined with even less support in the Senate as a whole will probably put up a big blockade against further motion on media reform issues.
With Denny Hastert at the helm the House has never been cooperative in moving on media reform issues, and I don’t expect that to change.
So, I think it’s safe to say that the expansion of low-power FM is all but a dead issue now, and for the forseeable future. But, there is still unlicensed broadcasting, which I think is only growing, not shrinking.
And while the FCC has stepped up enforcement against prominent stations like Freak Radio Santa Cruz, we have to remember that FCC funding is always under threat. As John at DIYmedia notes, it appears that the FCC office in Denver has run out of travel funds for the year, at least partially due to chasing Boulder Free Radio, and so is very limited to how much it can chase pirates that aren’t in the city proper.
Republicans have always had a mixed relationship with the FCC — they like using regulation to keep the field safe for the NAB, but they love deregulation. They have a history of attacking the FCC’s budget, especially when it looks like the agency is making life tough for the communications industry.
The combination of no more LPFM licenses and a shrinking FCC budget should mean good things for unlicensed radio. No doubt the FCC will continue to go after the most prominent and public broadcasters, but will probably have to conserve resources to do so. That should leave things clearer for more clandestine broadcasters.
I’m not cheering, but, then again, a Kerry administration wouldn’t give me much reason to cheer, either.