An interesting article in the Los Angeles Times about the fragile state of an important (analogue) historical radio archive. The carefully preserved original scripts, fragile transcriptions of radio shows and news broadcasts, antique microphones and rare equipment from Southern California’s first stations have been accidentally contaminated by toxic PCBs.

The dangers may be different but the challenges involved in digital preservation are similarly about trying to predict the unexpected, calculate risk and always having a contingency plan.

David Donald has been invited to share his expertise with Northwestern graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism, Sciences Po in Paris.

Sciences Po is an undergraduate and graduate education doctoral school and research centre in Paris with a library and documentation and publishing services.

David will talk with the students about various new media issues including blogging, audio, video, and interactive web applications for journalism. He will concentrate on teaching students how to use blog applications for the first time and outline the digital audio and video work done on the Spoken Word project which will be extremely useful for journalists interested in furthering their knowledge of web based broadcasting.

Photo(c): Courtesy of ‘That Ambitious Girl’

The story focuses on the commercial possibilities of this technology, but the immediacy of legally downloading programmes as they are broadcast could be interesting for education too.

Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) developments (UK) – the Register reports that UK radio broadcaster UBC and radio station Heart FM are set to launch a new technology which enables UK radio listeners to immediately download and purchase tracks being broadcast over the radio. According to the article, tracks will cost about £1.25 each, and will be available as two WMA formats, a 32 kbps version and a higher quality 128 kbps file. The article reports that Virgin Mobile’s Lobster DAB-enabled phone will be the first device to offer the technology. The project will launch in beta version in December 2006 and a full commercial launch is expected in Q1 2007.

Full story from The Register – ‘Mobile ‘impulse downloading’ plays live in the new year‘

Via Rights.com news briefing

A Liberal Radio Group Says It Is Close to Acquiring 5 Stations according to the NYT. Clearly they think that radio has continuing political influence and effects.
We must locate more academics intersted in this secific medium’s political influence?

Broadcast and AudioMedia

I’ve been contacted by Ken Garner, the programme organiser for GCU’s BA Journalism and editor of ‘The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media’. Much like our project, the journal is still in its infancy (only two numbers published so far), but its subject area dovetails very neatly with our objectives. As well as publishing papers on all areas or radio broadcasting, The Radio Journal is interested in papers tackling the pedagogy of teaching radio studies. I’m planning to meet up with Ken when I get back to Blighty: another very useful contact for the Spoken Word project!

I came across this quote from Brecht – would he have appreciated our work?

“I very much wish that this bourgeoisie would add another invention to their invention of radio – one that would… record for all time everything that can be communicated by radio. Later generations would then have the chance of seeing with amazement how a caste, by making it possible to say what they had to say to the whole world, simultaneously made it possible for the whole world to see that they had nothing to say.

A person who has something to say and finds no listeners is in a bad way. But an audience that can find no one who has anything to say to it is even worse off.”

BBC – Radio 4 – Dark House

Radio 4 broadcast its first interactive drama last night: listeners could select from three different characters’ perpectives on the same night in a ‘haunted house’. They’ve posted the play on the above site, and you can build up your own version of the story, by selecting audio chunks from each character.

It’s an interesting idea, and one that has some potential as a teaching activity (remembering Jerry’s flash experiments with Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech).

Another group of people we should know about:

The Radio Academy – Radio Studies Network: “ïFCA
Radio Studies Network
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