Radio
Why college radio still breaks artists first
No playlist algorithm, no corporate gatekeeper — just a rotating staff of students with taste and nothing to lose, charting on their own paper.
Radio: Shows and Broadcast
Radio covers broadcasting as a music medium: community stations, specialist shows, internet streams and the hosts running them. Articles look at how an hour is assembled, what a station's license permits, and which shows are worth setting an alarm for. For listeners, presenters and station volunteers.
Community stations, specialist shows and internet streams: who is broadcasting, what they play, and how a live hour is assembled and held together.
Radio
How does a song get added to college radio rotation?
From a volunteer music director's inbox to a weekly national chart report, here's the actual mechanism behind a college radio add.
Radio
How radio audience measurement actually works
Diaries, portable meters, and surveys — the unglamorous machinery that decides who gets advertisers, who gets a license renewal, and what you hear.
Radio
The strange culture of the late-night radio host
Overnight radio has its own rituals, its own legends, and its own intimacy — a broadcast tradition built for the hours when almost everyone else is asleep.
Radio
Who preserves decades of radio broadcasts, and why it matters
Most of radio history was broadcast once and erased — the institutions racing to save what remains are libraries, national archives, and volunteers.
Radio
How DJs cue vinyl on air, and why the craft endures
Slip mats, cue burn, and the back-cue muscle memory that radio hosts have used since the 1940s — a technical primer on spinning records live.
Radio
The rise of the radio-podcast hybrid show
When a radio show becomes a podcast, the clock changes, the audience changes, and the program itself quietly becomes two different products.
Radio
How community radio stations fund themselves without ads
Pledge drives, underwriting, and volunteer labor keep noncommercial stations alive — here is how the model actually works.
Radio
How a radio program director builds a weekly schedule
Dayparts, clocks, and add meetings: the unglamorous craft that decides what a station sounds like from Monday morning to Sunday night.
Radio
The future of internet simulcasting for terrestrial stations
Almost every FM station now also streams its signal online, and that quiet doubling of the dial has changed the economics, the law, and the sound of radio itself.